Illegal immigration

The Rev. Oscar Carrasco and Elvira Arellano

Illegal immigration is when people without legal permission from a country cross the border and proceed to dwell there. Therefore, illegal immigration is the act of immigrating to a country without having the right to do so. A person who migrates without the legal right to do so is known as an illegal alien.

U.S.

Illegal immigration has become a major issue in the United States in the 1980s, and continues to be a highly visible issue. Illegal immigrants pay sales taxes and gasoline taxes; most are too poor to pay income taxes. Many use fake Social Security numbers and pay Social Security taxes but are not eligible for any benefits. Many use tax-payer funded services such as health care and schools. Pew estimates about 12 million illegal immigrants lived in the U.S. in 2004. However, many are afraid to use available services, such as domestic violence shelters, out of fear of deportation. Many illegals cannot speak English.

Illegal immigrations is defended, saying that they are simply coming to rake unskilled jobs that better educated Americans avoid, such as picking fruit and lettuce, making hotel beds and working in slaughter houses. A small percentage come illegally to escape political oppression, as legal channels are not open to them. Marriage to a U.S. citizen does not automatically gain one citizenship. When Army Spc. Alex Jimenez was captured by terrorists in Iraq, his wife was almost deported by the government. Strong public opinion allowed her to stay.

Mexico is the source of the about half of the recent illegal immigrants to the United States. Most arrive legally and over-stay their visas. Others cross the border mostly through the desert southwest or less often by swimming across the Rio Grande. The United States receives constant criticism from the Mexican government for its efforts to curb illegal immigration. And United States officials criticize Mexican officials for passing out handbooks on how to cross the border, saying Mexico is trying to avoid political and governmental reforms at home by encouraging its citizens to leave.

Illegal entry is a misdemeanor in U.S. law, at the level of speeding. Those who are caught are promptly sent back without penalty. Multiple illegal entries can lead to felony convictions. Ironically, one of Mexico's harshest criticisms was a plan by the United States to make illegal immigration a felony offense, which would impose harsher penalties on illegal Mexican immigrants. Mexico's own laws make illegal immigration a felony offense in that country.[2][3]

Many Mexicans have to come to the United States to work because for many years the Mexican government was under the control of the socialist Institutional Revolutionary Party (called PRI from its initials in Spanish), which limited economic opportunity and growth. Before 2001 there was frequent movement across the border. It was common to work in summer jobs in the U.S. and spend the winter in Mexico. Border security has become much stricter and it is far more difficult to cross repeatedly. Therefore the tendency was to remain in the U.S. -- an unintended consequence of the tighter border security is that millions stayed in the U.S. and did not return. Most Mexicans who come are religious and culturally conservative. They communities do not encourage homosexuality, abortion or teenage promiscuity.

Like all immigrant groups many illegals send money to their families remaining in the old country. In Mexico this funding is the second largest source of foreign income, after crude oil sales. It represents as much as 2.5 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product

Amnesty

The Reagan Administration gave amnesty to all the illegals present in the country in 1986. The "Illigration Control and Reform Act" of 1986 legalized the status of about 3 million immigrants. Other laws legalized the status of immigrants from Cuba and Haiti. In 2006 President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain proposed legislation to legalize the status of most of the illegals. The business and religious communities supported the idea, but grass roots opposition blocked passage in Congress and denounced the notion of "amnesty."

Moral issues

As the Bible exhorts people to be compassionate towards illegal immigrants (Exodus 23:9 and Leviticus 19:34), and as more Americans are Christian than any other religion, many Americans feel compelled by their religion to show compassion and caring for illegal immigrants, many of whom are trying to escape tyranny or poverty in their homelands.

Some conservatives oppose illegal immigration because it allows for immigrants to fall between the cracks of society thus making them more likely to commit crime or experience poverty. Other conservatives view illegal immigration as an exercise in a basic individual human right to pursue happiness. Illegal immigration is also economically damaging to countries because illegal immigrants will often work illegally for below minimum wage, resulting in job loss for legal citizens.

Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the U.S.

Among many others:

• 2005 - Raul Garcia-Gomez, an illegal immigrant, shot two Denver police officers in the back, killing one. He fled to Mexico and was captured. However, the Mexcian government sheltered Gomez until the American prosecutor agreed to not seek the death penalty against him.

• 2008 - Diego Pillco, a 20-year-old illegal immigrant from Ecuador, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter of actress Adrienne Shelly. Pillco was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Pillco admitted strangling Shelly and then hanging her body to make it look like a suicide. The judge said Pillco would be subject to immediate deportation upon release from prison.

• 2008 - Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant, killed three people on their way home from a family picnic. Ramos had been arrested multiple times before the killings (once for mugging a pregnant woman), but the city of San Francisco shielded him from deportation.

Statistics

The amount of people immigrating to the United States illegally has declined since 2001. People who formerly moved back and forth across the border (working the agricultural fields in the US in the summer and wintering in a village in the winter) has declined, and instead they tremain in the U.S. The estimated number of illegal immigrants in the United States in 2005 was about 12 million.

$397 billion dollars have been paid to families containing illegal immigrants through social services since 1996. Most of the money goes to schooling for U.S. citizens and for children.

The number of illegal aliens who are in prison is over 300,000, about 3% of the total.

Sex offenders comprised 2% of illegals who have been arrested. Nearly one million sex crimes were committed by illegal immigrants in the United States, in the seven years 1999-2006. Each sex offender averaged 4 victims.

Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household. Most of the costs were incurred by U.S. citizens, however, not by the illegals. On average, the costs that illegal households impose are less than half that of other households. In terms of welfare use, receipt of cash assistance programs by illegals tends to be very low, while Medicaid use, though significant, is still less than for other households.

California spent more than 11 billion dollars per year on illegal immigrants. California is seeking the federal government to bail them out of their financial deficit.

See also

• Latino
• Xenophobia
• Lozano v. Hazleton
• Elvira Arellano
• Reno v. Flores

Bibliography

• David W. Haines, Karen E. Rosenblum. Illegal Immigration in America: A Reference Handbook (Greenwood Press, 1999) online edition
• Pierre Hauser, Illegal Aliens (1990)
• Jeffrey S. Passel, "Unauthorized Migrants: Numbers and Characteristics," Pew Hispanic Center Reports and fact Sheets. (June 14, 2005), online
• Claudia Sadowski-Smith. "Unskilled Labor Migration and the Illegality Spiral: Chinese, European, and Mexican Indocumentados in the United States, 1882–2007," American Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 3, September 2008, pp. 779-804 in Project Muse
• Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (2006)

External Links

• Answering 13 Frequently Asked Questions About Illegal Immigration, Right Wing News