Immigration Reform and the Economic Benefits

Immigration Reform and the Economic Benefits

Table of Contents:

Introduction----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3

Importance of Immigration Reform------------------------------------------------------------------------4

Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform---------------------------------------------------------------5

Conclusion-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------8

References-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------9

Introduction:

        The immigration reform is the most commonly used term in political discussions now and then, which is related to the issues in changing the current immigration policy that already America is having now (Anderson, 2010). But in reality the term “reform” means to change something to a proper way usually by modifying or even removing any mistakes. From a politics view, immigration reform includes expanding, and even opening immigration to large immigrant population and also reducing or even eliminating immigration (Ashenfelter, Layard, & Card, 2012).

The immigration reform objective is to help increase the legal immigration while at the same time decrease the unwanted immigrants who work at U.S illegally. This proposal was supported by former president George W. Bush (Lowell, 2005). Illegal immigration is the real contentious issue in USA. The proponents of the immigration reform argue that the illegals usually deprive our image towards the immigrants and this in the end does cost the taxpayers more than $338.4 billion. In addition, this biased view threatens the safety of how state officials enforce the laws and the citizens, mainly on the sides of the Mexican border (Anderson, 2010).  However, the opponents view immigration as a threat to American economy as this introduces cheap labor into the country and results into job loss to several citizens. I believe that a comprehensive immigration reform, especially at the federal level, is needed to address this issues.

Importance of Immigration Reform:

The immigration reform creates a stronger, successful and cohesive unified nation (Laing, 2011). As US is a nation of immigrants, welcoming the immigrants reflect the key values which this country is based on - that is taking on challenges, hard work, demonstrating individuality and also showing compassion to others (Aguila, Akhmedjonov, Davila, Kumar, kups, & shatz, 2012).

Lack of proper immigration policies has resulted in several issues in the US. The US currently has over 11 million illegal immigrants that are denied basic services including access to social security. It is important for the US to put a path for the 11million unauthorized immigrants who are now livings in the US into full citizenship (Laing, 2011). According to the America commission, which deals with immigration reform, naturalization is really the best thing that a genuine immigrants can follow if they want to become an American citizen (Aguila et al., 2012). This allows equal rights and responsibilities of civic and the political participation to immigrants in United States. So by having any sort of legal status that precludes the rights for immigrant to become American citizens this would make them being permanently separate and unequal, especially to problems they face and also society of US as whole (Lowell, 2005). Also the research has shown that majority of American citizens do support the path to citizenship (Lowell, 2005).

In 2012, Supreme Court enforced new state immigration-control laws to strike down provision of Arizona SB 1070. This enforcement has laid a big legal challenge to future laws of the immigration (Horsfall, 2014). Supreme court laws conformed that states cannot enact their own immigration laws and cannot enact their enforcement officers to make immigration arrests unless they specifically get authority from the congress (Horsfall, 2014).This made state immigration- laws ineffective. Moreover, Supreme Court stated that only the federal government is in a position of reform the U.S immigration laws (Horsfall, 2014).

Immigration reform promotes equal rights to all the groups. Immigration advocacy groups seek to increase effectiveness in the immigration courts (Voss & Bloemraad, 2013). They argue for incremental steps in which state officials eliminate the assembly line method to deportation proceedings (Wasem, 2013). So far they have identified various several issues which seem to endanger rights for the immigrants, which include the reliance on the low quality video conferencing to in order to conduct the hearings, inadequate services of interpreting language for those who don’t speak English, and probability of limited access to the court records (Wasem, 2013).

Several problems arise due to current increase in enforcing immigration laws which don’t have a commensurate boost in the required resources for adjudication (Lowell, 2005). In addition, immigration judges and the DHS trial attorneys are really overworked and have not been able to meet their demand for the representation. We need increased transparency especially on the board which deal with issues of appealing cases of immigration and also more emphasis on diversity among immigration judges since majority of them had previously held positions as adversarial to immigrants (Horsfall, 2014).