Hardil Joshi
ENC 1102
Prof. Cross
25 February 2018
Illegal Immigrants Illegal immigration to the United States has always been a subject of heated discussions, especially among politicians. Specifically, George W. Bush once stated that illegal immigrants usually fill the positions that Americans reject, which only benefits the economy (Lynch &
Woodyard, 2006). The number of illegal immigrants, mostly arriving from Mexico, peaked in
2007, which prompted the then-president to call for endorsement of the guest worker program that would allow to issue temporary work permits to foreign citizens without them having a future opportunity to apply for permanent residency (Passel & Cohn, 2010; Lynch & Woodyard, 2006). Economists, on their part,
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The most popular claims refer to the illegal immigrants’ low wages, which attracts employers, and the money failing to stay within the U.S. economy.
With their reduced wages, the undocumented immigrants take jobs meant for the unskilled American workers and thus are viewed as jeopardizing the employment rate in the country. This is perhaps the biggest legitimate objection to the illegal immigration, with studies suggesting that such illegal workers have overcrowded the low wage jobs accounting for more than half of the 11 percentage-point drop in wages for unskilled Americans in high-school dropouts over the past few decades (Davidson, 2013). Many experts believe that the issue is significant enough and thus worth revisiting as the unskilled legal American citizens are disadvantaged from the below average wages paid to the illegal immigrants (Borjas, 1986). However, the economists on their part disagree on the point of deporting such undocumented immigrants as the U.S. citizens are not likely to fill all their job positions. According to the American Action Forum’s analysis, even if the undocumented workers were driven away and