Immigration amnesty provides many different advantages to solving the problem of illegal immigration. Firstly, it helps the US economy by recognizing the illegal aliens as legal statuses. By enabling these immigrants to act like citizens, their income is considered legal and forces them to pay taxes (“6 Remarkable”). With less immigrants needing to go back to their home country, the number of deportations decrease. This can allow the government save money and use it on providing more amnesty to other immigrants (“Amnesty”). Additionally, without providing a simpler process to legal statuses, illegal immigrants will always be hiding from the public afraid of being caught (The current process of legalization take a long time, lots of money, and …show more content…
The most important fact is that amnesty does not stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the country. It simply just converts these people into legal status. To ultimately stop the migration of illegal immigrants, there has to be a way to stop them from entering the country (Messerli). Another disadvantage just as impactful is the cost of the amnesty. Granting amnesty for every illegal immigrant as of today requires over 6 trillion dollars. This means that the government would be paying approximately half a million dollars more than the amount of taxes each immigrant pays (Clark). Not only that, but amnesty erases the crime of breaking immigration laws. No matter how many laws immigrants break, all theirs violations will be forgotten. Essentially, these people are being rewarded for breaking laws. Furthermore, having this misinterpretation of getting away with breaking laws may lead to more violation of laws in the future. Such behaviors may also engender a chain migration of more illegal immigrants because as immigrants from other countries see that coming into America illegally is fine, it will encourage them more to come and not go through the legal immigration process (“6 Remarkable”). Through this, another problem that may arise is overpopulation. Overpopulation is complete possibility if illegal immigrants continue pouring in (“Pros”). Moreover, illegal immigrants who went through amnesty have a great advantage compared to that of a normal citizen or immigrant who is in the process of becoming a legal status. It is unfair to those other immigrants who went through the legal immigration process with lots of time and money. Amnesty reward these illegal immigrants and provide them with a shortcut to immigrate legally. Through this huge advantage of amnesty, it is bound that someone is going to abuse this opportunity such as terrorists and drug dealers which then can ruin the entire United States (Hawkins).