Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Government & Politics The Negative Effects of mass legal and illegal Immigration The Negative Effects of mass legal and illegal Immigration The Negative Effects of Mass Legal and Illegal Immigration For decades immigrants to America were sure of two things. They came for the opportunity to build a better life for their families and they would not seek nor would they accept a handout. The drive and attitude of immigrants who came to America during the nineteen twenties through the nineteen sixties built strong work ethics that created our now famous American melting pot. But for the past thirty years a runaway welfare state has poisoned our good intentions. Well meaning but misguided entitlement programs gave billions of dollars in free handouts to a deluge of new immigrants as the floodgates opened and annual immigration levels more than tripled. The effects of this mass migration has taken its toll on America by putting a strain on the welfare system harming the poor and weakening the education system whereas this is just another form yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyuy As our welfare rolls skyrocketed millions of legal and millions of illegal immigrants ignored the foundation that built our proud nation of immigrants and crossed the borders demanding cash entitlements like food stamps free health care and other goodies at the expense of American taxpayers. Many refuse to learn our language and become united states citizens and virtually all of the welfare programs America has to offer have been systematically abused in recent years by legal immigrants. Since 1990 legal immigrants who are not united states citizens have been taking welfare at a far greater degree than American citizens have. The generous welfare system has become an easy target for immigrants. Overall immigrant use of welfare is forty-seven percent higher than citizen use. And immigrant participagion in the supplemental security income program which provides cash benefits for the blind disabled and low income elderly is a staggering seventy six percent higher than our own citizens. There are even foreign language books available in other countries mocking our welfare system and advertising schemes that explain how to bring over elderly parents and others and have them supported by our taxpayers. One Chinese publication sold in Taiwan and Hong Kong includes a thirty six page pull out guide on how to qualify for supplemental security income an do ther benefits. It works like this first immigrants import their relatives to America under our loose immigration laws. Second these elderly aliens immediately become eligible to collect supplemental security income and live with their working children. Non working and non tax paying family members collect welfare benefits while living under the same roof as the rest of their family who are often employed with good incomes. The average family income of immigrants who collect supplemental security income is over forty thousand dollars a year. A full twenty five percent of them have a family income of over sixty four thousand a year. The number of immigrants collecting supplemental security income skyrocketed from one hundred twenty seven thousand and nine hundred in nineteen eithty-two to almost seven hundred thirty eight thousand in nineteen innety four. This is a whopping five hundred eighty percent increase in just twelve years. The general accounting office has testified that the supplemental security income program is riddled with fraud and abuse. One social security administration employee reported that they even process claims for illegal aliens some who have been in America for only thirty one days and have paid a penny in taxes. They collect as much as four hundred eighty four dollars a month tax free. Immigrants are overwhelming our nations schools. Schools are over crowded and there are six million more children in school now than ten years ago. With the current trends by the year two thousand and two the school population will grow from forty nine million to fifty five million because of immigration. Without school age immigrants about two hundred and fifty thousand a year an the children of immigrants about seven hundred and twenty five thousand a year school enrollment would not be rising at all. In Miami in nineteen ninety-five foreign students streamed into the public school system at a rate of one hundred twenty a day. In nineteen ninety-five New York City had to create a special high school in Queens just for the children of immigrants. In San Francisco where one in every three public school students is in a limited English program a separate high school had to be created in order to accommodate Nationwide the number of students with limited English has doubled to three and a half million according to the United States department of education. According to Kenji Hakuta a Stanford education professor “it’s a sad situation for schools right now. We have extremely scarce resources. We have people fighting over breadcrumbs. We have groups with equally strong and important needs for which society isn’t willing to provide. When the stakes are like this the fight only gets more and more vicious”. California’s funding for limited English students has steadily increased to three hundred and nineteen million today from one hundred and eighty million in nineteen eighty-six. Funding for low-income students decreased to sixty four million from ninety three million while the number of low-income students grew to almost two million from one million. Much of our scarce education resources are being used to educate immigrants and with immigration reform and lower levels of immigration we would have more resources to devote to the education of American children. Immigration and education has become a heated policy issue because of the proposal to deny taxpayer-financed education to illegal alien children. This provision first surfaced in California’s proposition one eighty-seven which passed in nineteen ninety-four by a strong majority. A federal judge has frozen implementation of the provision. Opponents of the measure argue that it is unconstitutional citing the nineteen eighty-two plyler v. doe Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas law that denied education to illegal alien children. The United States is currently experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history. Each year the United States admits between seven to nine hundred thousand legal immigrants. The immigration and naturalization service estimates that five million illegal aliens now live in this country. There is a negative effect of immigration on unskilled workers and taxpayers in high immigration states. The national research council a part of the national academy of sciences did a study concluding that the negative effect of immigrants takes the form of wage losses for workers who lack a high school diploma. This is the only educational group adversely affected by immigration because such a large percentage of recent immigrants lack a high school diploma. It is only in this skill category that the proportion of immigrants is large enough to put a downward pressure on wages. The huge volume of goods and services exchanged between cities across the country creates pressure toward equalization in the price of labor. Newly arrived immigrants who take jobs in light manufacturing in a high immigrant city like Los Angeles come into direct competition with citizens doing the same work in a low immigrant city like Pittsburgh. African Americans in the work force are thirty-three percent more likely to lack a high school diploma than whites are much more affected by mass immigration. There is some evidence that indicates many employers see immigrants as more reliable and hard working than African Americans. A recent study of the Harlem labor market by Katherine Newman and Chauncy Lennon of Harvard fond that “forty one percent of the immigrants in their sample of low wage workers were able to find jobs within one year while only fourteen percent of African Americans were able to do so” (Camarota et al. 26). The authors conclude that immigrants fare better in the low wage labor market because employers see them as better workers. Another group harmed by competition from immigrants is the long-term welfare population. Because two thirds of this population lacks high school diploma immigration is likely to make it more difficult for them to find jobs that pay enough to support themselves properly. Immigration contributes to a growing disparity in the United States between the wealthy and the poor. African Americans in California felt the sting of illegal immigration fifteen years ago but did not know what to make of its effects. As a result they are now damaged with respect to low skilled or entry-level positions. A government accounting office study found that decades of heavy immigration to Los Angeles had changed the janitorial industry from a mostly African American unionized work force to a non-unionized Latino work force with many illegal immigrants. According to the census bureau the employment of African Americans as hotel workers garment workers restaurant workers hospital workers and public service workers in California had dropped 30 percent by the nineteen eighties while illegal immigrants with such jobs rose one hundred and sixty-six percent. The bureau of labor statistics found that nationally immigrants both legal and illegal account for fifty percent of the decline in real wages for the lowest skilled American workers most of whom are black. When undocumented workers work for less African Americans are forced to work for less or not work at all. Since illegals are not entitled to cost of living increases African Americans must expect not to receive salary increases. Many call this competition but when undocumented workers continue to take positions traditionally held by low-skilled Americans such jobs as trash collectors, janitors, maids, cook, waiters, and waitresses, butlers, food handlers, slaughter house workers and countless other positions, this cheap labor is threatening to make a major segment of America unemployable. Sometimes the employer intentionally replaces citizens with non-citizens in order to have a cheaper and more easily exploited workforce. Sometimes the job displacement comes through an intermediary in these cases work is let out to subcontractors. The firms that use immigrants and pay them low wages underbid the firms that use native. In some cases the ultimate employer may not even be aware that native workers have been displaced. The effects on Americans are real as the immigration and naturalization service put it. ‘The critical potential negative impacts of immigrants are displacement of incumbent worker groups from their jobs and wage depression for those who remain in the affected sector” another clear case of displacement happened in the tomato industry in the 1980’s. A group of unionized legal immigrants picked the tomato crop for many years in San Diego County and were making four dollars an hour in 1980. In the 1980s growers switched to a crew of illegal aliens and lowered the wage to three thirty five. Almost all the veteran workers who were unwilling to work at the reduced rate disappeared from the tomato fields. We as Americans deserve decent jobs at decent wages not unfair competition from foreign workers who are exploited to the point of modern slavery. We need immigration reform to stop the massive influx of foreign workers from doing further harm to the living standards of our low skilled fellow citizens and legal resident workers. It simply is not right to put America at risk by giving the money our citizens paid into the system away to non-citizens who came here for a handout. The level of immigration is so massive; it's choking the urban schools. Its bad enough when you have desperate kids with United States backgrounds who require massive resources. Then come kids with totally different needs, and with it comes crushing burdens on urban schools. America is the land of opportunity not the land of the free lunch and that is the immigrants pledge to support themselves and their families that creates the desire and necessity to work hard and realize the huge opportunities America has to offer. Bibliography: Word Count: 1959
Copyright © 1998-2008 College Term Papers, INC All Rights Reserved. DMCA Notifications and Requests