In 1880, the United States made revisions to the US-China Burlingame Treaty of 1868 in which President Chester A. Arthur introduced a new piece of legislation to the treaty known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited almost all Chinese immigration to the United States. Signed into effect in 1882, and later made permanent in 1902, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which only affected a small percentage of immigrants, essentially established a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants while robbing western states of the cheap labor they depended on. In addition, between the 1880s-1920s, nearly 26 million eastern and southern European immigrants landed on Ellis Island where they obtained a legal status from the U.S. government and settled
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Ben Carson “a renowned neurosurgeon running for the Republican presidential nomination — said he would not rule out military drone strikes to keep immigrants from crossing illegally into the United States” (qtd. in Sakuma) — as they believe that the growing number of illegal immigrants are displacing American workers and therefore hurting the economy. Although this may have been the case in the late 1800s, this logic can’t be applied to our current situation, as conservatives and nativists haven’t explained how illegal immigrants are negatively impacting the economy, when they’re the ones working the jobs that Americans can’t, and won’t, do. In June 2011, Alabama lawmakers signed into law the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (also known as HB 56) which was regarded as the nation's strictest anti-illegal immigration law that worked as immigrants fled from the state. However, “the result has not been a wave of grateful unemployed teachers and skilled workers, eager to be underpaid for difficult manual labor” (Milligan), instead the San Francisco Chronicle …show more content…
In 2014, even with the 11.3 million illegal immigrants supposedly ruining our economy, the United States experienced its best period of job growth since 1999, with “the U.S. adding over 200,000 jobs every month in 2014 except two” (Egan and Long). The last two months of 2014 were especially strong with the addition of “321,000 jobs in November, a number far greater than the 230,000 economists were predicting” (Sharf), and 252,000 jobs added in December. This surge in employment has continued its momentum in 2015 cutting the unemployment rate to 5.1%, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lowest it has been in seven years. Conservative politicians, and their followers, are always quick to blame the deterioration of the American economy on the illegal immigrants, who essentially allowed us to add 2.95 million jobs last year (Egan & Long); this has led to lawmakers demanding a mass deportation policy, an action that would do more harm to our economy, rather than an integration policy that would be economically beneficial for
Ben Carson “a renowned neurosurgeon running for the Republican presidential nomination — said he would not rule out military drone strikes to keep immigrants from crossing illegally into the United States” (qtd. in Sakuma) — as they believe that the growing number of illegal immigrants are displacing American workers and therefore hurting the economy. Although this may have been the case in the late 1800s, this logic can’t be applied to our current situation, as conservatives and nativists haven’t explained how illegal immigrants are negatively impacting the economy, when they’re the ones working the jobs that Americans can’t, and won’t, do. In June 2011, Alabama lawmakers signed into law the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (also known as HB 56) which was regarded as the nation's strictest anti-illegal immigration law that worked as immigrants fled from the state. However, “the result has not been a wave of grateful unemployed teachers and skilled workers, eager to be underpaid for difficult manual labor” (Milligan), instead the San Francisco Chronicle …show more content…
In 2014, even with the 11.3 million illegal immigrants supposedly ruining our economy, the United States experienced its best period of job growth since 1999, with “the U.S. adding over 200,000 jobs every month in 2014 except two” (Egan and Long). The last two months of 2014 were especially strong with the addition of “321,000 jobs in November, a number far greater than the 230,000 economists were predicting” (Sharf), and 252,000 jobs added in December. This surge in employment has continued its momentum in 2015 cutting the unemployment rate to 5.1%, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lowest it has been in seven years. Conservative politicians, and their followers, are always quick to blame the deterioration of the American economy on the illegal immigrants, who essentially allowed us to add 2.95 million jobs last year (Egan & Long); this has led to lawmakers demanding a mass deportation policy, an action that would do more harm to our economy, rather than an integration policy that would be economically beneficial for