Illegal Immigrants: Marquis De Lafayette

Superior Essays
“Immigrants: we get the job done,” This is one of the most loved and perhaps the most hated line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s broadway hit Hamilton. While the song titled Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down), is talking about the emotions faced by key founding members of our country, they specifically highlight Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette was a French citizen however, several individuals, (including the state of Maryland) considered him to be a United States citizen, as he shared many of the common values our founding fathers did. While this specifically relates to Marquis de Lafayette, we can see the same debate being applied to illegal immigrants today. This is especially true in Mark Krioriakain’s essay “DREAM on”, where he highlights …show more content…
In his essay, he talks about key issues such as identity, fraud, and chain migration. However, Mark Krikorian’s claim about immigrant’s identity and massive fraud is inaccurate, because contrary to his arguments, immigrants identify as American, there is severe bias in his claims about fraud, and he exaggerates claims made about chain migration. In his first point of analysis, Mark Krioriakain discusses how DREAM members can not be American. He focuses out how individuals who support the DREAM Act only use examples of individuals who came to the United States as babies, and uses English Common Law and the logic of The Roman Catholic Church to form his argument. What Mark Krioriakain fails to recognize is that our nation is built by immigrants. Individuals can look towards history and see prime examples of individuals who came to the United States as teenagers who were American, such as Alexander Hamilton. The sources he uses are another issue. While our legal system is based upon English Common Law, it is not the law of the land, and is actually derived from the United Kingdom, hardly “American.” Meanwhile individuals can look towards founding documents such as, the United States Constitution which states that, …show more content…
To form the basis of his claims he uses the IRCA, or Immigration Reform and Control Act. He states that the DREAM Act follows the same path, and therefore has the same pitfalls, that the IRCA does and therefore will contribute to massive fraud. The issues with this claim however, is that the IRCA did not have a massive fraud issue. This is seen directly in research done by the Migration Policy Institute, as they state, “None of these studies found significant levels of fraud in IRCA’s general legalization program” (9). What makes the Migration Policy Institute even more credible is they recognized both positive and negative aspects of the IRCA, because while fraud was not a problem it did face other issues. This damages the credibility of Krikorian, but most importantly it shows how important it is where readers get their information from. Immigration is a sensitive topic, however the DREAM Act does not contribute to massive fraud. Members who are appling are not the corrupt individuals Krikorian would have the reader believe. Even if they did commit fraud, the main reason why they cannot be prosecuted is so that others do not become persecuted. The United States has a long history of taking private information and punishing individuals because of uncontrollable factors such as race or immigration status. This can be seen especially in World War

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