“Immigrants, we get the job done.” a song from Hamilton, a Broadway show that tackles the issue of immigration on the shores and borders of the United States. American Poet Emma Lazarus wrote in The New Colossus “Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Is engraved inside the Statue of Liberty, an icon of freedom and a statement of the United States of America. It is ironic that we are currently facing problems with immigration when we are a nation built of immigrates. Immigration is the action of coming to live permanently in a country that is not your own. Immigration is the foundation of the US, we are all immigrants in a land that we have taken away from the hands of the Native Americans. This paper …show more content…
immigration policy over the past two decades has pursued an increasingly contradictory set of policies with respect to Mexico. NAFTA is a “free trade agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico modeled after the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA). NAFTA is an agreement which is a combination of new corporate protections, tariff reductions, and complex trade regulations. Between the US and Mexico, this agreement is a move toward greater integration in their markets for capital, goods, services, commodities, and information while insisting on separation in labor markets Mexico currently has some of the lowest labor costs, wage, and benefits of any country in the developing world. Cheap labor and poor enforcement of environmental standards and labor rights have been part of Mexico's "comparative advantage" and there is no reason to assume that this will change with NAFTA (Bernard). Under NAFTA, the United States has moved forcefully to fuse all markets save one. In addition to continuing the expansion of the Border Patrol, the newly established Department of Homeland Security increased internal enforcement, using officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct sweeping raids looking for immigrants under deportation orders or otherwise out of status. Few in Washington have stopped to consider the contradiction involved in the growing militarization of a border separating the United States from a country that poses no strategic threat and is, in fact, an ally and major trading