Argumentative Essay About Immigration

Crossing the border to live the American Dream

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists” once spoken by Franklin Roosevelt (GoodReads). Immigration is a hot trending topic for debate across the entire United States. Especially during this past presidential election and the campaign process. It became more of an issue… as you can recall President Donald Trump spewed "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people"(Newsday).

During these peaks of immigration period, it created fundamentals to transform the economy of the United States. It allowed the change from colonial to an agricultural economy than to the industrial revolution to a manufacturing economy. “Today’s large-scale immigration has coincided with the globalization and the last stages of transformation from manufacturing to a 21st-century knowledge-based economy” (migration policy).

Prior to 1880s, immigration to the United States was primarily Europeans then transitioned to Chinese immigrants migrating in large numbers in the 1850s after gold was discovered in California in 1848. In 1882, Congress passed the Immigration Act. It allowed for the U.S. to collect fees from the each noncitizens arriving at the U.S. port to regulate immigration. “Arriving immigrants were screened for the first time under this act, and entry by anyone deemed a "convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge" was prohibited” (migration

In 2014 there was an estimated 11.1 million undocumented immigrants accounting for 3.5% of the population decreasing from 2007 when there was 12.2 million undocumented and accounted for 4% of the population. Mexicans made up 52% of all unauthorized immigrants, though their numbers had begun to decline in recent years. In 2009, there were an estimated 6.4 million undocumented Mexican immigrants which declined in 2014 to 5.8 million living in the U.S. Meanwhile other undocumented immigrants from other countries increased by 325,000 since 2009; it estimated to be 3.5 million in 2014. The population started to increase for undocumented immigrants from Asia and Central America, but the number also ticked up