Mrs. Kennedy
Honors English Period 5
23 December 2015
Immigration Laws
The government has been making immigration laws throughout the years, but they have failed to fully enforce the laws that they have made. Immigrants have had a bad reputation of violence and terrorism, but these have occurred on very few occasions. The immigrant community has been frightened from the laws being put in place, though the government should not be making the life of immigrants harder. Illegal immigration laws have been becoming more strict over the past century even though immigrants do not cause violence and crime, immigration laws need to be enforced, but not more strict, and immigrants help the economy.
Background
There are four main goals to …show more content…
First, it is used to bring families back together by allowing immigrants that have family members currently living in the U.S. to also live in the United States. Second, the policy strives to bring workers to the United States that have skills in certain jobs or in hard-to-fill occupations. Third, the policy exists to give refuge to people who are facing persecution in their country. Last, it tries to give people the opportunity of immigrating to the United States if that country has not emigrated many people in past history (Caldera). The United States is a country of immigrants. Everyone who lives in the U.S., that is not a Native American, is an immigrant or a descendant of an immigrant. Even though this is true, America began making immigration laws shortly after the country formed. Congress has enacted several important laws in the last 50 years. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments created a preference system. The system gives preference to people that are coming to the United States with useful …show more content…
A 2010 poll showed that 62 percent of Americans say that illegal immigrants are definitely or probably responsible for a "disproportionate amount of crime (Bailey)." However, research says that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans (Guo). A report in 2010 done by the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice saw that from 1991 to 2008, when 3.7 million foreign-born people came to California, one third of whom were illegal immigrants, the rate of violent crimes dropped by about 55 percent (Bailey). According to the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), “Immigrants were particularly less likely than native-born to engage in behaviors that could hurt others, truancy, staying out late without permission, quitting a job without options, shoplifting, or doing something for which they could get arrested.” The NESARC study found that African and Asian immigrants were four times less likely than native-born Americans to have violent behavior and Latin American immigrants were three times less likely