No One Should Be Treated Like a Second Class Citizen

Immigration politics encompass a variety of issues that the undocumented community faces, reform is needed to resolve the issues of injustice. The main issue to focus on the broken immigration laws, which are causing family separation, injustice, and fear. There are 12 million undocumented people who do not receive the same benefits that citizens do. It takes a lot of money and time for some to become a citizen. That is why many people cannot take the route to citizenship that the United States. There are families being separated and minors being sent to a country that they know nothing of. President Obama claims that only criminals convicted of serious crimes are being deported, but that is not true. Families are being separated as a result of parents being deported.

This is an example of a local family torn

 apart by the broken immigration system. 

More undocumented immigrants have been deported under Obama’s term than any other president before him. These rates are alarming. The reasons for many of these deportations are alarming. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) set a budget and they felt a need to fill a quota of 400,000 immigrants to be deported to maintain its budget at a good standing. According to the Immigration Policy Center, “Children account for 1.8 million (or 15%) of the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants now living in the United States. About 56% of all undocumented immigrants are from Mexico, 22% from other nations in Latin America, 13% from Asia, 6% from Europe and Canada, and 3% from Africa and other regions of the world” (http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/dreams-deferred-costs-ignoring-undocumented-students). After seeing a documentary on PBS about Willacy detention center I found that crimes involving abuse did happen. Reporters interviewed a mental health counselor and revealed that people who were incarcerated there were being abused by the guards. There were more than 900 complaints made by the people detained at the detention center. They were all ignored. The counselor even mentioned that a man got beat up by guards for making a report of physical abuse.

The problem arises when workers are paid below the minimum wage and employers prefer the worker they can pay less. But, the reason they do this is because undocumented immigrants take any job they can get. Their number one goal is to earn money to provide for their families in the U.S, in their native country, or both. It is viewed at a respectable act for men from foreign countries to risk their lives to immigrate and work difficult, low-paying jobs in the U.S. Many immigrants come to the U.S. to work, and to chase the American dream like everyone else in this country. The solutions to these problems is to reform the immigration laws that exist today. The first is to make the process to citizenship an option for immigrants entering the U.S. The second is to grant amnesty under certain conditions for those who have been in the U.S. for a certain time. By granting these requests, society would be more tolerant of other people and stop blaming them for their own economic problems.