Immigration

Immigration is a big problem in the United States today. Many people think that immigrants are taking jobs that rightfully belong to Americans and that illegal aliens are abusing American rights. Others think that illegal aliens are not getting enough rights in this country. Immigration has become a big issue because of the opposing sides. The illegal aliens are taking jobs that Americans want which is causing tension between the two groups. Immigration goes back to the 1600s when the first documented aliens came to Ellis Island. Since then migrants from around the world started to arrive into the United States of America. There are some positive aspects of immigration. For, example immigrants both illegal and legal pay taxes but use fewer social services (Medicare, Social security, Income tax, etc…) which gives the country more money to support other Americans who use these services. They use less of these services listed before because of their lack of knowledge of them. But to every good thing there is bad. Most of reported cases of voting fraud are done by illegal aliens, which is, of course, bad. This is what my paper about, the positive and negative aspects of immigration.

“Throughout much of the American history even though the foreign born have never been more than 15% of the population since about 1675” (Wikipedia, history). The first documented immigration was in 1607 when an English settlement arrived in Jamestown. In 1626 Dutch settlements were established along the Hudson River. This adds to the earlier settlements by English puritans which arrived in Boston, Massachusetts earlier. Then in the 1760s the main immigrants were Irish Men from Ireland according to the 1790 census. Also Frenchmen started to come into this country during the same time as the Irishmen. Over 5 million Germans fled to this country between 1850 and 1930. But when the Great Depression hit the United States of America immigration almost came to a screeching halt. The amount of immigration went from 279,678 (last recorded prosperous year, 1929) to about 23,068 in 1933(Wikipedia, history). During World War 2 an act, Displaced Persons (DP) Act of 1948, this let people that were displaced because of the war to migrate to the United States. In 1954 the INS started a project called “OPERATION WETBACK” which forced thousands of Mexicans and Latin Americans to return to their former countries. Between 1944 and 1954, “the decade of the wetback,” the number of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent (Wikipedia, history). In 2000, two new groups of immigrants showed up, the Chinese and Indians. Together they made up 2.3 million of that year’s immigration record. The reasons for immigration from the original colonies, 1607-1830, were simple religious freedom and political freedom. In 1890-1924, the main reason is that America had jobs and also Jews came for freedom of religion. 1986-present, “The main reason why everybody wants to go to US is because if they would go somewhere like France of Japan although they would get higher wages, there is a much greater chance of getting harassed, arrested or deported in those countries as opposed to US”.