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Why do immigrants come to the US?

Of all people legally immigrating to the US in 2021, about 42% came for work, 32% for school, and 23% for family.

Updated on Thu, August 1, 2024 by the USAFacts Team

People immigrate to the US to work, reunite with family, study, or seek personal safety. In 2021, 42% of the 1.5 million people who immigrated to the US came for work.

What reasons for immigration does the government track?

The US government generally allows legal immigration for five broad reasons : work , school , family, safety, and encouraging diversity.

People immigrating for work or school are often granted temporary entry rather than permanent residency. Immigration for family generally means the immigrant has a relative who is already in the US as a citizen, green card holder, or temporary visa holder with whom they want to be reunited with. Those who immigrate for safety are refugees or asylum-seekers. And finally, up to 50,000 immigrants obtain green cards annually through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program lottery that grants entry to individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the US.

How many immigrants came for each reason in 2021?

Of the 1.5 million people who immigrated to the US in 2021, about 42% came for work, 32% for school, and 23% for family. Nearly 2% were seeking safety, and about 0.9% were admitted on Diversity Immigrant Visas.

How have reasons for immigration evolved over the past 15 years?

Since 2006, work has consistently been the top reason people immigrate to the US, with the exception of 2013–2015 when immigration for work was equal to or slightly lower than for school.

School is usually the second most common reason for immigration except for 2018, when a higher percentage of people began immigrating for family reunification than education. In 2021 school again became the second most common reason.

Safety and diversity have consistently been the fourth and fifth most common reasons for immigration, respectively.

How do the reasons for immigration change depending on where people are immigrating from?

Of the 638,551 immigrants who came to the US for work in 2021, 61% came from North America. Immigrants from Asia represent the largest geographic cohort among the other four primary reasons for immigration: school (58%), family (45%), safety (34%), and encouraging diversity (33%).

In 2021, 74% of all immigrants came from Asia and North/Central America. Roughly 53% of Asian immigrants came from China and India, while nearly 80% of immigrants from North/Central America were from Mexico.

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Why do Chinese people immigrate to America?

School was the top reason Chinese people immigrated between 2006–2021; 19% of people who came to the US for school were from China, the highest percentage of any other country. The number of Chinese immigrants coming to the US for school peaked in 2015, growing 680% from 40,477 people in 2006 to 315,628 people in 2015.

Despite a sharp decrease after 2016, most Chinese immigrants continue to come to the US for school. Fewer than 57,000 Chinese immigrants have come to the US per year for work or family reasons since 2006, and those numbers hit record lows of 5,323 and 13,412 in 2021.

Why do Indian people immigrate to America?

The largest share of immigrants who came to be with family were from India, at 18% . But in 2021, more Indians immigrated for school than for family reunification. Work was the third most common reason.

Prior to 2021, most Indian immigrants came to the US for family and work, but those numbers have been decreasing. Fewer people came to the US from India for work (54,032 people) and family in 2021 (62,407) than in 2006 (117,189 and 81,045 people, respectively).

Meanwhile, the number of Indians immigrating for school increased by over 300% between 2020 and 2021, from 20,629 to 85,385.

Why do Mexican people immigrate to America?

In 2021, people from Mexico comprised the largest share of immigrants coming for work — 55% of all immigrants, or 351,586 people. Work has consistently been the top reason Mexican people immigrate to the US. Family and school have consistently been the second and third reasons.

More than double the number of people immigrated to the US for work from Mexico in 2021 (351,586 people) than in 2006 (168,619 people).

Where did this data come from?

There are multiple data sources because immigrants enter the US through multiple pathways. Data on visa admissions comes from the US State Department; we exclude people who come with visas for short-term tourism, cultural exchange, or visiting. Data on refugees and asylum-seekers comes from the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Data on green cards comes from the DHS’s expanded lawful permanent resident tables.

Read more about where immigrants are moving in the US , and get the data directly in your inbox by signing up for our email newsletter .

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Related articles, temporary agricultural visas increase in 2020, despite pandemic, where are immigrants moving in the us, how many people seek asylum in the us, what types of work visas and green cards does the us issue, related data, immigrant population.

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• Winter 2021

The State of the American Dream

Surviving or Thriving? What It Takes for Immigrants to Succeed

The American dream is alive for immigrants, but the obstacles can feel nearly insurmountable — and that burden can be felt for generations.

If you were to review my Google search history, the most recent phrase you would find is “top 10 personal finance books.” You might think better budgeting is part of my New Year’s resolutions, or maybe I’m looking to buy a house or save for a big trip (COVID-permitting). Part of that may be true, but I am also the daughter of immigrants — and part of the “1.5 generation” that was born somewhere else but grew up here — and that means the reason I’m devouring any and all tips on personal financial management is a bit more complicated.

For every dollar I save or invest for myself, I save or invest one — sometimes more — for my mother and extended family. 

They fled war and conflict in Afghanistan, lost their livelihoods and professions, and arrived in a completely new environment with its own gargantuan share of challenges. They rebuilt their lives from the ground up. I am deeply proud of them and of their achievements, and I am humbled to be their daughter, niece, and cheerleader. Every opportunity I have had in my life is because of their sacrifice, hard work, and resilience.

Enduring through these experiences and working twice as hard for each step forward, however, takes its toll  — a toll that is felt both socially and economically. Their story is not unique, and neither are the struggles of first- and second-generation families. As we strive to achieve and maintain our American dream, I share just one perspective to help illustrate what it means to attempt to put into practice the idea of America as the land of opportunity.

First generation challenges

Without getting into the why , we will start with facts: People leave their home countries, and people choose to come to the United States. With the caveat that immigrants are not a monolithic group, what challenges might some face when they get here?

At the forefront may be an inability to communicate. As of 2018, almost half of immigrants in the U.S. are not English proficient, according to Pew Research.  It takes time to learn a language, and that time increases with age of migration. This affects immigrants’ ability to access services, navigate the bureaucracy of government institutions, and understand the nuances of things like insurance policies and health care. It also increases their risk of being taken advantage of by those who wish to profit from their lack of language access. The Internal Revenue Service’s list of 2020 tax scams included one specifically targeting nonnative English speakers. A taxpayer receives a phone call purportedly from the IRS threatening jail time, deportation, or revocation of a driver’s license if they don’t provide personal or financial information.

I recently helped my mother call her auto insurance company to argue against an increase in her rate. It turns out that the company automatically estimates her mileage, not based on her history of driving but a seemingly arbitrary number, and puts the onus on the customer to call and report the actual mileage in order to accurately calculate her payment. While practices like these are not inherently nefarious, they require that you (1) understand what the statement is telling you, (2) know what to do about it, and (3) can articulate your argument. If not, you lose more of your money, essentially paying a language penalty.

First-generation immigrants may also face psychological trauma or adverse health effects from the circumstances of migration from their home country, or violence endured during their journey. This is especially true for women and girls, who face an increased risk of gender-based violence, abuse, and trafficking.

For those who were educated, accomplished professionals in their home country, the inability to pursue their original careers — due to language and credentialing requirements, for example —  and need to take low-skilled, low-paying jobs in order to quickly bring in income may result in a loss of value and self-worth. Over time, this may also mean the inability to save for retirement or their children’s education. They may not know that they need to in the first place, and/or may not have the means to do so. And all of this may be compounded by the realities of integrating into a new culture and society that can be a difficult task in and of itself.

Immigrants overcome these obstacles and more with an intense motivation to re-establish their lives and create a brighter future for their children and loved ones. While doing so, they contribute to economic growth, spark innovation and creativity, and enrich the food, art, and musical landscape of America. But that success is not guaranteed, and it may not be enough to reach the level of prosperity and integration that results in socioeconomic advancement and the opportunities it provides. Not every immigrant is stuck in a low-paying job forever, but neither is every immigrant a successful, millionaire entrepreneur.

[Immigrants’] success is not guaranteed, and it may not be enough to reach the level of prosperity and integration that results in socioeconomic advancement and the opportunities it provides.

“1.5”- and second-generation responsibilities

The struggles of first-generation immigrants have social and economic implications for their “1.5”- and second-generation families.

Many children of immigrants spend time translating documents, making phone calls on behalf of their parents, finding relevant information, and generally providing support when needed. While native-born children may do this for native-born parents as well, the difference is that immigrant children start young, often requiring them to grow up faster. It also brings into focus the intricacies of navigating two cultures and environments that may be very different, and, at a young age, can elicit chaos and confusion at seemingly conflicting identities. I still remember what it felt like to stand in line at the then Immigration and Naturalization Service office at 5 a.m.  and then telling my elementary school friends I had an identification card that said I was an “alien.”

As we become adults, go through college and enter the workforce, we recognize the advantages that some of our classmates and colleagues had: the help with school work when needed; understanding the American educational system and how to manage key milestones like taking the SATs or college applications; lack of student loans because one’s parents were able to pay for college; the social connections that lead to internships at major companies or institutions; the ability to take unpaid internships in expensive cities because rent was taken care of; financial management and investing advice shared; vacations paid for and money set aside.

All of this lays bare just how important equitable education systems and policies are in helping immigrants reach the ladder of prosperity that seems to have twice as many rungs for us to climb. We don’t have the benefit of parents guiding us through the pathways to success in America, so we have to find that guidance elsewhere.

It also means that sometimes first- and “1.5”-generation immigrant children don’t have the space to consider pursuing their “dream” job because finding stable, secure, and dignified work becomes the priority. When your early childhood years are filled with uncertainty, and you learn responsibility at a young age, it seems too risky to pursue a career in the arts or other professions without a guaranteed income. Second-generation children and their younger siblings might have that luxury down the line once an immigrant family is more settled and established. And the “1.5”-generation might branch out and pursue their passions later in their adult lives when it seems more feasible to do so.

When your early childhood years are filled with uncertainty, and you learn responsibility at a young age, it seems too risky to pursue a career in the arts or other profession without a guaranteed income.

And as we get older — and our families get older — we worry about our family’s retirement years. Were they able to save enough? What if they have a health crisis? What if they need in-home caregiving?

As a woman, I already face a gender wage gap, a “pink tax” that charges me more than men for the same item, and the need to save more money for retirement because women tend to live longer.  Statistically, I am more likely than a man to be a caregiver for my parents. As a millennial woman — but one of the lucky millennials that is currently employed — I face the reality that Social Security may not exist when I retire, and I may be paying into something that has nothing to give me back. I need to put even more aside to address this eventuality. And as an unmarried woman, I can add the inability to take part in the tax benefits of marriage and children (while also not bearing the associated costs).

How can I ensure that my family is able to continue to live a life of dignity and prosperity, while facing the reality of what it takes to guarantee that for them? Will I be able to guarantee it for myself, and my future family if I have one? 

What Statistics Don’t Tell You

You can look at the statistics of how many immigrants have bought homes or started businesses, but those statistics don’t tell you what it took to get there or the nuances of maintaining those achievements over time.

It also doesn’t tell you that immigrant children carry the emotional weight of what their families lost. It is, after all, part of their immigrant story and heritage too. Part of my identity as a first-generation immigrant who moved here at a young age is enmeshed in the opportunities I have had as a result: to get an education, to pursue work that is meaningful to me, to build a life and stand on my own two feet because I live in a country that allows me the freedom and independence to do that. And I am privileged in many ways within the immigrant community  — in being documented, and in access to higher education, for example.

The part of my identity that is the child of immigrants understands what my family lost — and what they sacrificed — in the process of leaving their home and wants desperately to help them regain some semblance of it. I would not be here and would not have had any of those opportunities had they not made the journey across continents. I owe it to them to try to make life a little bit easier.

The part of my identity that is the  child of immigrants   understands what my family lost — and what they sacrificed — in the process of leaving their home and wants desperately to help them regain some semblance of it.

Educating myself on personal financial management and taking appropriate steps is just one way I’m trying to do that. But it’s worth asking a very important question: do we want immigrants in the United States to survive, or thrive? If the latter, what does it take to get there?

If the American dream and living in the “land of opportunity” means that immigrants are better off here than in their home countries, then perhaps that is a relatively low threshold to reach. But we have a lot of work to do if it means building generational wealth, climbing the socioeconomic ladder, developing social connections and being civically engaged  — to ensure not just access to basic social services but the whole continuum of social, political, and economic integration that builds a strong foundation for success for generations to come. That’s what it looks like for immigrants to thrive in America.

My goal here is not to dive into the specifics of successful immigrant integration policies and programs, but rather to provide a personal perspective of an immigrant family’s enduring struggle to succeed. We can place the challenges immigrants face in discreet buckets of education, inclusive access, economic mobility, etc., but sometimes we fail to connect human faces and stories with those challenges, or to consider the intergenerational aspects of them.

We focus on the beauty of the American dream without evaluating what it means to achieve it and maintain it, especially today. If all I’ve done is spread an ounce more of awareness that contributes to asking better questions, and perhaps more empathetic policy responses, then I will have made my immigrant family proud.

• Previous Article The American Dream is Also About Generosity and Respect An Essay by Joseph Kim, North Korean Refugee and Expert in Residence in the Human Freedom Initiative at the Bush Institute
• Next Article Building Opportunity for Generations An Essay by Andrew Kaufmann, Deputy Director of External Affairs at the George W. Bush Presidential Center

Why immigrants are America’s superpower

• Full Transcript

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Wendy edelberg and wendy edelberg director - the hamilton project , senior fellow - economic studies david dollar david dollar senior fellow - foreign policy , global economy and development , john l. thornton china center.

July 3, 2023

• 26 min read

Wendy Edelberg, senior fellow and director of The Hamilton Project at Brookings, discusses the positive impact of immigration on the dynamism and fiscal sustainability of the U.S. economy. She also explains her research on the impact immigrants have on local, state, and federal finances. As a whole, immigrants are a net benefit to the U.S. economy, but based largely on immigrants’ education levels, the fiscal cost is disproportionately paid by certain state and local areas. Together with co-author Tara Watson, Edelberg proposes a way to redirect some of the federal gains to these communities, piggy-backing on existing programs.

Related Content

Wendy Edelberg, Tara Watson

December 7, 2022

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DOLLAR: Hi, I’m David Dollar, host of the Brookings trade podcast Dollar and Sense. As we celebrate America’s birthday, an important topic for discussion is immigration. My guest today is Wendy Edelberg, a senior fellow at Brookings and director of The Hamilton Project. As I see it, The Hamilton Project focuses on practical research on how to create a growing economy that benefits more Americans. Great name, by the way. I mean, Hamilton was one of our early immigrants to the United States. So, very appropriate. Welcome to the show.

EDELBERG: Thanks very much. And I very much like your description of what we do. So, it sounds right.

DOLLAR: So, immigration took a big hit during the COVID pandemic. Have we recovered now to pre-pandemic levels? Are we back to where we were? What’s the situation currently with immigration?

EDELBERG: So, frustratingly, the answer to that question is more complicated than you might think. So, first, stepping back, immigration has always been important in this country. So, historically, like on average between 1870 and 1910, approximately 15% of the population was foreign born. And that’s moved around decade by decade. But in 2021, for example, it was 13.6%. Just to give a sense of the numbers.

Okay, now, the cataclysm to immigration that was COVID. So, for example, in 2019, about 460,000 visas were issued over the course of the year. In some months in 2020, the number of offices that were issued was at times in the hundreds. That’s how much immigration just fell off a cliff in the early days of COVID.

Now it’s come back and visa issuance does look like it’s back. But what makes it complicated is first, immigration numbers come out with a huge lag, but also, census revised population statistics. And they give us updated numbers according to those revisions, but they don’t revise back. So, you can’t compare today’s estimates of the population with previous estimates of the population. So, you’ll see in the press some people have said immigration’s back, but that’s comparing apples and oranges because of this revision to the data that’s not reflected in the history.

So, my best guess, accounting for that complicated revision to history is that we’re still, insofar as immigration matters for the labor force, as much as 500,000 short of where you would have expected to be in the absence of the pandemic.

DOLLAR: Okay. So, we’re partly back?

EDELBERG: Partly back.

DOLLAR: Your assessment is we’re not all the way back?

EDELBERG: That’s right.

DOLLAR: And around that figure you mentioned around 14% of the population, that would be one in seven?

EDELBERG: Yeah, that sounds right.

DOLLAR: And I just want to be clear for our listeners, we’re talking about people who are born outside of the United States who’ve come here and are here during when census counts are made, and many of them are U.S. citizens now, and most of them are here legally. But we also, do have some undocumented workers and they would be part our best estimates of what the immigration population is in the U.S.

EDELBERG: That’s right. And I’ll go back and forth between using foreign born and immigrants to mean the same thing, which they essentially do. But someone who was born abroad but has been in this country for many decades would still be an immigrant.

DOLLAR: So, where immigrants fit into our labor market depends on their education level. So, can we characterize the average education of immigrants? I know this is a tough question because we really have an amazingly diverse group of immigrants coming from all over the world. But can we make some general points about the education level?

EDELBERG: So, immigrants are disproportionately both higher educated than the average population, but also, lower educated than the average population. It’s that they’re there’s fewer of them in the middle than would be true if they if they matched the population of what we call native born people.

So, foreign born people are most heavily represented in the population that does not have a high school diploma, for example. And consistent with that, a foreign-born workforce is disproportionately concentrated in occupations with lower average wages like the service sector. But, a third of adult immigrants in the U.S. have at least a bachelor’s degree. And in fact, the statistic is amazing, almost 20% of all of those in the U.S. with a graduate degree are foreign born. So, we have lots of people at both ends of the education spectrum.

DOLLAR: Right. So, that’s actually quite interesting. And if I could just editorialize and you can correct me, but it seems to me in some ways that might be less disruptive of our economy in a sense, the fact that we’re getting people at the low-skilled end and then we’re getting lots of people at the highly skilled end. If everybody were in the same skill class, you know, then it could have a pretty big effect on relative wages. Am I right about this or … ?

EDELBERG: Well, so, you’re right in that the system all works best for everybody when the skills of immigrants complement the skills of the native population, rather than act basically as substitutes for the skills of the native population.

So, we have a lot of evidence that when an immigrant comes in who has less education, we see the relative wages of those with more education actually go up because those are complementary sets of skills.

But conversely, when immigrants with lower education come into the United States, we see wages of similarly situated people in the U.S. who have less education, who, let’s say, only have a high school degree, we see their wages fall, or at least their relative wages fall because they they’re more substitutes.

And just drilling down one more one more point on this whole idea of substitutes. In fact, the people who see the biggest hit to their wages when immigration goes up are recent immigrants. So, when immigrants come in who have less education, the most downward pressure on wages that we see across the population are immigrants who’ve come in recently who also, have less education.

DOLLAR: That’s extremely interesting. I’m aware of some cases where you get immigrant populations in parts of the U.S. that are opposed to further immigration. It always seemed a little odd to me, but what you’re saying makes a lot of sense.

EDELBERG: This is the whole thing of pulling up the ladder, that’s the metaphor that people use. You get on board and then you pull up the ladder.

DOLLAR: Right. So, we’re not going to get into the politics of immigration.

EDELBERG: Yeah yeah yeah, but that is one of the impetuses.

DOLLAR: Yeah, but those comments you just made give us a lot of insight into why it’s controversial for certain populations and why it’s less controversial for others. Especially interesting that even if you’re highly educated and there are more highly educated people coming and you think that might create competition, I like your point that in many cases it’s complementary.

EDELBERG: The short answer is it depends. So, if you are part of a highly educated workforce that has a lot of competition from a highly educated immigrant workforce, just like we talked about for immigrants and native populations with less education, you may actually see downward wage pressure because you have immigrants coming in who are highly skilled, just like you’re highly skilled, and they are competing for jobs, the exact same jobs that you’d be competing for.

DOLLAR: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, most economists I know are enthusiastic about immigration and it’s an important part of globalization, that’s why it’s a great topic for us. And most economists are enthusiastic because it has positive effects on the growth and the dynamism of the economy. So, can you walk us through what are some of the channels through which immigration affects the macroeconomic performance—growth, fiscal sustainability, these kinds of issues?

EDELBERG: Yeah, absolutely. So, we just talked about a bunch of the distributional effects, and I’ll come back to those in a second. But now the way I’m going to take your question is that it’s really about how immigration affects the aggregate economy. So, the economy on average.

So, the first most obvious place to start is population growth and labor force growth. So, foreign born people accounted for half of the growth in the U.S. labor force between 2010 and 2018. Half. That’s a big number. And over the next decade, projections which look utterly reasonable to me by the Congressional Budget Office show that immigration will account for about three-quarters of the overall increase in the size of the population. So, over the next decade, immigration accounts for three quarters of the overall increase in the population. So, the other quarter, just to be clear, is because there are more births and deaths, but three-quarters is because of immigration.

That will get that fraction is actually going to get larger and larger over time until what is widely expected is that fertility gets low enough that, in fact, aside from immigration, we actually have net shrinking of the population. And so, immigration, more than accounts for all of the population growth within the next couple of decades. So, population growth critically important for its effect on the aggregate economy.

And generally speaking, immigrants are far more likely to work than people who are born in the U.S. They have higher labor force participation rates. So, everything I just said is even more important when it comes to the labor force. All right. So, that’s just people.

Now, let’s talk about productivity growth. And here we know we have a ton of evidence that immigration spurs productivity growth. We know that, for example, immigrants receive patents at twice the rate of the native-born population. We know that immigrants, broadly speaking, have a complementary skillset. So, they come in with different skills than the native population has. And the combination of those skills leads us all to be more productive. So, we know we have tons of evidence that that’s what happens in the aggregate. I am acutely aware that there are distributional effects and we need to be aware of that and make sure that—I’m just going to use an incredibly tired phrase—but that the winners compensate the losers, because if all we’re worried about is what happens to people’s wages, some people will feel negative effects of this, but let’s not lose sight of what happens to the aggregate economy.

DOLLAR: Wendy, I do a lot of work on the Chinese economy and certain amount on the Japanese economy as well. These are the second and third largest economies in the world after the United States, and they’re facing really serious labor force decline. Tt’s already started in Japan. Actually, the working age population has peaked in China and it’s going to start to decline. And it’s very hard to reverse that. And these are not immigration-friendly societies. They’re densely populated. So, even though the labor force is starting to decline, they have a lot of old people, they have a lot of people. And you just do not see a lot of immigration into a place like China or Japan. And so, that really affects their economic prospects. And what you were just describing about the U.S., I sometimes suspect immigration is our superpower, basically.

EDELBERG: And where do some of the best and brightest from China and India want to go? They want to come here. I mean, this is why I started with the statistics that I started with. We are a country of immigrants. And absolutely, this is one of our superpowers.

DOLLAR: But you’ve emphasized they’re also costs associated with immigration. We’ve talked a little bit about the distributional consequences, but there’s also fiscal costs. And this is the point of some of your recent research. So, can you talk us through a little bit on these fiscal costs? And as I understand your argument, a lot of these are local and, in fact, a lot of the benefits end up increasing federal tax collection. So, if you’re going to have, as you said, which is classic economists speak, you don’t have the winners compensate the losers. Probably some kind of fiscal redistribution is going to be necessary. So, tell us a little bit more about that.

EDELBERG: Yeah, I should probably apologize for that again. But. All right. So, I wrote a policy proposal with a colleague here at Brookings, Tara Watson, and what we relied on for the statistics that I’m about to describe is from a National Academy of Sciences report. And they looked very carefully at what the fiscal effects are from adding one additional immigrant into the United States. And here’s what they found. And a lot of people have looked closely at these numbers, so, they’re trustworthy.

So, at the federal level, an immigrant is said to contribute on average a little over $1,000 more in revenues than they receive in federal benefits. So, in other words, bring in an additional immigrant and the federal balance sheet looks healthier as a result of expanded immigration. Now, this is partly because immigrants pay a whole lot in taxes, and this is partly because recent immigrants actually aren’t eligible for a whole slew of federal benefits. So, immigrants are good for the federal balance sheet. Okay.

But that same report also, looked at what immigration does to state and local finances. And it found that an additional immigrant actually costs state and local governments about $2,000 more in spending that they incur at the state and local government level relative to the taxes that they receive. And this is just the story that we told for the federal government but in reverse. They get less in taxes because income taxes and sales taxes are just lower at the state level. But at the same time, most of the benefits that you get at the state and local level immigrants are eligible for. And even more importantly, their children are eligible for, because the biggest costs here are to provide education to the children of immigrants.

Now, there are lots of different ways of looking at these numbers. We can also, look at them over a 75-year like essentially life span, because when the immigrants come in, they’re typically not at their peak earnings so their peak earning years are still well ahead of them. And their children typically earn more than they do. And so, they have earnings and so, they’re going to pay tax revenues over the course of their lives. And so, you can look at what the fiscal effects are of an immigrant, not just in one particular year of snapshot, but over the 75-year period.

And there what we see is that the net fiscal benefit to the federal government is between $100,000 and $300,000. So, there’s a huge range because you have to make a whole lot of assumptions if you’re going to talk about what the net present value is over a 75-year period, but it’s clearly positive and pretty significantly large for the federal government.

At the state and local level what we find is that there’s just a small net fiscal benefit. So, it’s a couple thousand dollars. It’s trivially small, but it is positive, which is to say that despite all the expenses, particularly on education, that state and local governments have to do for immigrants and more importantly, their children, they make enough back in taxes to essentially over a lifetime pay for those expenses. But because of the timing, it takes a long time for them to earn back that money in a fiscal sense.

So, the effects on state and local governments, though, differ by the education of the immigrant. So, we can look at those same 75-year calculations and look at how they differ for state and local finances for an immigrant who comes in without a high school degree versus an immigrant who comes in with a bachelor’s degree. So, for an immigrant who comes in without a high school degree, all of the costs, all of the increases in spending that the state and local governments are going to incur for that immigrant and that immigrant’s children are going to outweigh the taxes that the state and local government can expect to get over the 75-year period. It’s going to outweigh by between $80,000 and $90,000. Which is to say, if an immigrant comes in to some area, the state and local government—the area that they’ve moved into—is going to incur a fiscal burden for an immigrant without a high school degree of between $80,000 and $90,000.

However, if the immigrant has a bachelor’s degree, it’s completely flipped. And in fact, the state and local government will is estimated to get more in taxes relative to all of the spending obligations that they incur to the tune of between $120,000 and $130,000. So, immigrant with less than high school degree net fiscal burden on state and local governments over an entire life span of between $80,000 and $90,000. Immigrant with a bachelor’s degree or more is a net fiscal benefit to state and local governments over a 75-year period between $120,000, $130,000.

So, one reason to go through all of the pain and suffering of going through these numbers is to give you a sense of why different communities may have a completely different understanding of immigration. So, communities that have disproportionately welcomed immigrants that have bachelor’s degrees may say there is nothing but fiscal upside. What the heck? Why are we having this conversation about the burden of immigration? Immigration is not a burden at all.

And that just that picture may just be completely unrecognizable to a community that is disproportionately welcoming immigrants without high school degrees, for example. And they’re experiencing pretty significant fiscal burdens at the state and local government level. And this is all regardless of what’s happening to the federal government, because the federal government’s doing great, basically, no matter what level of education the immigrants have.

DOLLAR: Right, so, what I take away from that is all of the all of the immigrants essentially have a net positive effect on our fiscal situation think thinking of a consolidated local central government together, local-federal government together. But then when you break it down by skill group and between the central and the local basically the unskilled immigrants create a fiscal burden for local government, even though if you factor in what’s happening at the federal level, it’s a net benefit for the economy.

EDELBERG: You said very nicely and this is largely because the federal government can pretty easily pick and choose what benefits it wants to allow immigrants to be eligible for.

DOLLAR: I actually love this about America, that if there’s a school kid in the school district, they’re entitled to go to public school. Doesn’t matter if they’re immigrant, doesn’t matter even if they’re in the country legally, they’re entitled to go to school. I think it’s a great thing about our system. But I can see how that could create a strain for certain local governments.

EDELBERG: Absolutely.

DOLLAR: And what that brings us to next is you have a really nice interactive tool on your website. I’m going to let you explain it. It’s basically as I look at it, it’s trying to show us where some of this local fiscal burden is particularly acute.

EDELBERG: So, what Tara and I started with was this this understanding and deep appreciation for the fact that immigration is, as we said at the beginning, one of our superpowers. It is absolutely essential for robust economic growth. It is a central aspect of the U.S. economy. And we just need to do it better. And we need to recognize that not everyone in the United States is experiencing all of the costs and enormous benefits of immigration equally.

So, we zeroed in on this population that the literature tells us creates a disproportionately large fiscal burden on state and local governments. And so, using census data, we estimated something that we call an immigration impact index, which is the share of the non-institutionalized adults in a local area that have arrived in the past five years and do not have a college degree.

And so, we did the past five years because we know that, you know, I threw in at one point that when immigrants initially come to this country, we have a lot of evidence that they are not yet at their peak earnings. They’re going to earn more over time. And so, recent immigrants are going to require more and benefits and probably pay less in taxes than immigrants who have been here for a while. And we wanted to focus on those without a college degree for all of the numbers that I went into in enormous detail.

And so, if we look at this population, we can see that nationwide the number of what we’re calling impact index immigrants is a bit less than 1% of the adult population or somewhere between two and a quarter, two and a half million people. And so, at the state level, as maybe won’t surprise you too much, the places where we see the highest proportion of these index immigrants is in Florida, Texas, California, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, like states that probably don’t surprise you.

But in some communities, like for example, in Florida, New Jersey, New York, Texas, in parts of those states, they represent 6% or more of the local adult population. So, there are some areas that where this population of recent immigrants without a college degree is like a recognizably large percentage of this population, and that local government is going to be experiencing a pretty notable fiscal burden.

But then what our tool allows you to see is how incredibly varied the preponderance of these immigrants are actually across the entire United States. So, like at the local area, there are areas near Wichita and Topeka in Kansas—

DOLLAR: —I noticed that there were a lot of communities along the Mississippi River—

EDELBERG: —Yeah, where it’s more than 2% of the population. There are counties in central Oklahoma where it’s more than 2% of the population. And there there’s like a mountain region in northern Georgia where they’re 2% of the population. So, one of the things was just to just to show readers and users of this interactive that, in fact, this is not this is not an issue that is only about California. This is not an issue that is only about New Jersey or Florida. There are counties all over the country who are welcoming these immigrants and are disproportionately bearing the fiscal burden of taking them into their communities.

DOLLAR: So, our Dollar and Sense web page, which has this interview, will connect or link to your interactive tool. So, I encourage people to look at it because I thought it was really interesting. I love that kind of thing. Last question for you, Wendy, is is there a simple, administratively easy way we could deal with this?

EDELBERG: There is a very simple and straightforward way to do this. It, of course, will cost money. But what it really means is a redistribution of the fiscal benefits of immigration from the federal government to the state and local governments. So, we size that the fiscal benefit that really should be transferred from the federal government to state and local governments should be about $2,500 per what we’ve called index immigrants, impact index immigrants. So, those who have recently arrived without a college degree. And that’s partly based on the National Academy of Sciences report, it’s partly based on looking at some other things about what we’re looking about with recent immigrants, what we’re looking at with education, knowing that we’re not incorporating the overall productivity gains of immigration.

But in any case, $2,500 we think will basically cover the fiscal burden to these state and local governments. And we want to put the majority of that through the education system. And we want to put about a third of that through the health care system. And you might say, yeah, but don’t we already give like local school districts extra money if they have to teach students English as a second language? And listeners might be shocked and horrified to know that the additional resources that a school system gets to teach English as a second language is $150 per student.

Not only is that not enough to just do the additional teaching, but we also, wanted to think about getting additional resources to the education district for all the costs that come with welcoming immigrants with less than a college degree into your community: the community resources you need to give them, the after school resources you need to give them, the ways that they’re that that these students that the students of immigrants might need additional resources from teachers to get them caught up.

There are many and varied ways that recent immigrants with less than a college degree will need more resources in an education district. And so, not only did we want to give a lot more, And so, we size at about 1,700 dollars per impact index immigrant, but we also, wanted it to be not tied to any particular type of type of cost. There are no particular requirements. It goes into the education system.

But then that district is free to spend the money as they see fit. Maybe they’re doing a spectacular job spending on these children of immigrants. But maybe then what they’re doing is they don’t have the resources left over to spend on native children. And so, we didn’t want to say, here’s money and you have to spend it in this way on this population. What we wanted to say is we recognize that there is a fiscal burden to your educational district and here is money from the federal government to redistribute some of the fiscal benefit that the federal government gets to you, education district, who is experiencing acutely the fiscal burden.

And we have a somewhat similar way of thinking about getting more resources into the health care system to provide health care benefits to these communities that are welcoming immigrants without college degrees.

DOLLAR: So, I love the administrative simplicity. Sometimes we try to do good, but it’s complicated. There’s a lot of reporting requirements, and if you can do it administratively simply, then that’s really the way to go.

EDELBERG: What’s amazing is that we actually do this for school districts in a completely different context without batting an eye. And it’s called Impact Aid. So, school districts can say we need money from the federal government because the federal government has basically created an area in our school district that has essentially reduced our tax base but added fiscal burdens to us.

So, a completely obvious example here is a military base. So, if the federal government comes along and plops a military base down in the middle of a community, that military base isn’t paying state and local taxes. But it is saying you have to educate these children who live on this military base. School districts are allowed to apply for what is called Impact Aid and say, because of federal policy you have actually imposed a fiscal burden on us without giving us the resources to be able to pay for it, so you need to give us money. We don’t bat an eye. We say that is fine because of a federal policy decision. We have created a fiscal burden on these state and local governments. We are going to transfer money to you.

So, in fact, what we say is let’s basically use that exact same system and say immigration policy has basically created a fiscal burden on state and local governments.

DOLLAR: I’m David Dollar, and I’ve been talking to my colleague Wendy Edelberg about immigration, which is we decided is America’s superpower. It’s good for the economy. It’s good for the consolidated fiscal situation of the United States. But Wendy’s research, together with colleagues, points out that a lot of the costs are borne at the local level, particularly for education and health. And she’s got a nice, simple proposal for a transfer mechanism so that we essentially redistribute some of the benefits of immigration to make sure that the costs are covered at the local level. So, thank you very much, Wendy.

EDELBERG: Thank you. It was fun talking.

DOLLAR: Thank you all for listening. We release new episodes of Dollar and Sense every other week. So, if you haven’t already, follow us wherever you get podcasts and stay tuned.

It’s made possible by support from supervising producer Kuwilileni Hauwanga; producer Fred Dews; audio engineer Gastón Reboredo; and other Brookings colleagues. Show art is by Katie Merris.

If you have questions about the show or episode suggestions, you can email us at Podcasts at Brookings dot edu. Dollar and Sense is part of the Brookings Podcast Network. Find more podcasts on our website, Brookings dot edu slash Podcasts.

Until next time, I’m David Dollar and this has been Dollar and Sense .

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Eight brilliant student essays on immigration and unjust assumptions.

Read winning essays from our winter 2019 “Border (In)Security” student writing contest.

For the winter 2019 student writing competition, “Border (In)Security,” we invited students to read the YES! Magazine article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the “Constitution-Free Zone” by Lornet Turnbull and respond with an up-to-700-word essay. 

Students had a choice between two writing prompts for this contest on immigration policies at the border and in the “Constitution-free zone,” a 100-mile perimeter from land and sea borders where U.S. Border Patrol can search any vehicle, bus, or vessel without a warrant. They could state their positions on the impact of immigration policies on our country’s security and how we determine who is welcome to live here. Or they could write about a time when someone made an unfair assumption about them, just as Border Patrol agents have made warrantless searches of Greyhound passengers based simply on race and clothing.

The Winners

From the hundreds of essays written, these eight were chosen as winners. Be sure to read the author’s response to the essay winners and the literary gems that caught our eye.

Middle School Winner: Alessandra Serafini

High School Winner: Cain Trevino

High School Winner: Ethan Peter

University Winner: Daniel Fries

Powerful Voice Winner: Emma Hernandez-Sanchez

Powerful Voice Winner: Tiara Lewis

Powerful Voice Winner: Hailee Park

Powerful Voice Winner: Aminata Toure

From the Author Lornet Turnbull

Literary Gems

Middle school winner.

Alessandra Serafini

Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

Broken Promises

“…Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These words were written by Emma Lazarus and are inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. And yet, the very door they talk about is no longer available to those who need it the most. The door has been shut, chained, and guarded. It no longer shines like gold. Those seeking asylum are being turned away. Families are being split up; children are being stranded. The promise America made to those in need is broken.

Not only is the promise to asylum seekers broken, but the promises made to some 200 million people already residing within the U.S. are broken, too. Anyone within 100 miles of the United States border lives in the “Constitution-free zone” and can be searched with “reasonable suspicion,” a suspicion that is determined by Border Patrol officers. The zone encompasses major cities, such as Seattle and New York City, and it even covers entire states, such as Florida, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. I live in the Seattle area, and it is unsettling that I can be searched and interrogated without the usual warrant. In these areas, there has been an abuse of power; people have been unlawfully searched and interrogated because of assumed race or religion.

The ACLU obtained data from the Customs and Border Protection Agency that demonstrate this reprehensible profiling. The data found that “82 percent of foreign citizens stopped by agents in that state are Latino, and almost 1 in 3 of those processed are, in fact, U.S. citizens.” These warrantless searches impede the trust-building process and communication between the local population and law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, this lack of trust makes campaigns, such as Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something,” ineffective due to the actions of the department’s own members and officers. Worst of all, profiling ostracizes entire communities and makes them feel unsafe in their own country.

Ironically, asylum seekers come to America in search of safety. However, the thin veil of safety has been drawn back, and, behind it, our tarnished colors are visible. We need to welcome people in their darkest hours rather than destroy their last bit of hope by slamming the door in their faces. The immigration process is currently in shambles, and an effective process is essential for both those already in the country and those outside of it. Many asylum seekers are running from war, poverty, hunger, and death. Their countries’ instability has hijacked every aspect of their lives, made them vagabonds, and the possibility of death, a cruel and unforgiving death, is real. They see no future for their children, and they are desperate for the perceived promise of America—a promise of opportunity, freedom, and a safe future. An effective process would determine who actually needs help and then grant them passage into America. Why should everyone be turned away? My grandmother immigrated to America from Scotland in 1955. I exist because she had a chance that others are now being denied.

Emma Lazarus named Lady Liberty the “Mother of Exiles.” Why are we denying her the happiness of children? Because we cannot decide which ones? America has an inexplicable area where our constitution has been spurned and forgotten. Additionally, there is a rancorous movement to close our southern border because of a deep-rooted fear of immigrants and what they represent. For too many Americans, they represent the end of established power and white supremacy, which is their worst nightmare. In fact, immigrants do represent change—healthy change—with new ideas and new energy that will help make this country stronger. Governmental agreement on a humane security plan is critical to ensure that America reaches its full potential. We can help. We can help people in unimaginably terrifying situations, and that should be our America.

Alessandra Serafini plays on a national soccer team for Seattle United and is learning American Sign Language outside of school. Her goal is to spread awareness about issues such as climate change, poverty, and large-scale political conflict through writing and public speaking.

  High School Winner

Cain Trevino

North Side High School, Fort Worth, Texas

Xenophobia and the Constitution-Free Zone

In August of 2017, U.S. Border Patrol agents boarded a Greyhound bus that had just arrived at the White River Junction station from Boston. According to Danielle Bonadona, a Lebanon resident and a bus passenger, “They wouldn’t let us get off. They boarded the bus and told us they needed to see our IDs or papers.” Bonadona, a 29-year-old American citizen, said that the agents spent around 20 minutes on the bus and “only checked the IDs of people who had accents or were not white.” Bonadona said she was aware of the 100-mile rule, but the experience of being stopped and searched felt “pretty unconstitutional.”

In the YES! article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’” by Lornet Turnbull, the author references the ACLU’s argument that “the 100-mile zone violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.” However, the Supreme Court upholds the use of immigration checkpoints for inquiries on citizenship status. In my view, the ACLU makes a reasonable argument. The laws of the 100-mile zone are blurred, and, too often, officials give arbitrary reasons to conduct a search. Xenophobia and fear of immigrants burgeons in cities within these areas. People of color and those with accents or who are non-English speakers are profiled by law enforcement agencies that enforce anti-immigrant policies. The “Constitution-free zone” is portrayed as an effective barrier to secure our borders. However, this anti-immigrant zone does not make our country any safer. In fact, it does the opposite.

As a former student from the Houston area, I can tell you that the Constitution-free zone makes immigrants and citizens alike feel on edge. The Department of Homeland Security’s white SUVs patrol our streets. Even students feel the weight of anti-immigrant laws. Dennis Rivera Sarmiento, an undocumented student who attended Austin High School in Houston, was held by school police in February 2018 for a minor altercation and was handed over to county police. He was later picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and held in a detention center. It is unfair that kids like Dennis face much harsher consequences for minor incidents than other students with citizenship.

These instances are a direct result of anti-immigrant laws. For example, the 287(g) program gives local and state police the authority to share individuals’ information with ICE after an arrest. This means that immigrants can be deported for committing misdemeanors as minor as running a red light. Other laws like Senate Bill 4, passed by the Texas Legislature, allow police to ask people about their immigration status after they are detained. These policies make immigrants and people of color feel like they’re always under surveillance and that, at any moment, they may be pulled over to be questioned and detained.

During Hurricane Harvey, the immigrant community was hesitant to go to the shelters because images of immigration authorities patrolling the area began to surface online. It made them feel like their own city was against them at a time when they needed them most. Constitution-free zones create communities of fear. For many immigrants, the danger of being questioned about immigration status prevents them from reporting crimes, even when they are the victim. Unreported crime only places more groups of people at risk and, overall, makes communities less safe.

In order to create a humane immigration process, citizens and non-citizens must hold policymakers accountable and get rid of discriminatory laws like 287(g) and Senate Bill 4. Abolishing the Constitution-free zone will also require pressure from the public and many organizations. For a more streamlined legal process, the League of United Latin American Citizens suggests background checks and a small application fee for incoming immigrants, as well as permanent resident status for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients. Other organizations propose expanding the green card lottery and asylum for immigrants escaping the dangers of their home countries.

Immigrants who come to the U.S. are only looking for an opportunity to provide for their families and themselves; so, the question of deciding who gets inside the border and who doesn’t is the same as trying to prove some people are worth more than others. The narratives created by anti-immigrant media plant the false idea that immigrants bring nothing but crime and terrorism. Increased funding for the border and enforcing laws like 287(g) empower anti-immigrant groups to vilify immigrants and promote a witch hunt that targets innocent people. This hatred and xenophobia allow law enforcement to ask any person of color or non-native English speaker about their citizenship or to detain a teenager for a minor incident. Getting rid of the 100-mile zone means standing up for justice and freedom because nobody, regardless of citizenship, should have to live under laws created from fear and hatred.

Cain Trevino is a sophomore. Cain is proud of his Mexican and Salvadorian descent and is an advocate for the implementation of Ethnic Studies in Texas. He enjoys basketball, playing the violin, and studying c omputer science. Cain plans to pursue a career in engineering at Stanford University and later earn a PhD.  

High School Winner

Ethan Peter

Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

I’m an expert on bussing. For the past couple of months, I’ve been a busser at a pizza restaurant near my house. It may not be the most glamorous job, but it pays all right, and, I’ll admit, I’m in it for the money.

I arrive at 5 p.m. and inspect the restaurant to ensure it is in pristine condition for the 6 p.m. wave of guests. As customers come and go, I pick up their dirty dishes, wash off their tables, and reset them for the next guests. For the first hour of my shift, the work is fairly straightforward.

I met another expert on bussing while crossing the border in a church van two years ago. Our van arrived at the border checkpoint, and an agent stopped us. She read our passports, let us through, and moved on to her next vehicle. The Border Patrol agent’s job seemed fairly straightforward.

At the restaurant, 6 p.m. means a rush of customers. It’s the end of the workday, and these folks are hungry for our pizzas and salads. My job is no longer straightforward.

Throughout the frenzy, the TVs in the restaurant buzz about waves of people coming to the U.S. border. The peaceful ebb and flow enjoyed by Border agents is disrupted by intense surges of immigrants who seek to enter the U.S. Outside forces push immigrants to the United States: wars break out in the Middle East, gangs terrorize parts of Central and South America, and economic downturns force foreigners to look to the U.S., drawn by the promise of opportunity. Refugees and migrant caravans arrive, and suddenly, a Border Patrol agent’s job is no longer straightforward.

I turn from the TVs in anticipation of a crisis exploding inside the restaurant: crowds that arrive together will leave together. I’ve learned that when a table looks finished with their dishes, I need to proactively ask to take those dishes, otherwise, I will fall behind, and the tables won’t be ready for the next customers. The challenge is judging who is finished eating. I’m forced to read clues and use my discretion.

Interpreting clues is part of a Border Patrol agent’s job, too. Lornet Turnbull states, “For example, CBP data obtained by ACLU in Michigan shows that 82 percent of foreign citizens stopped by agents in that state are Latino, and almost 1 in 3 of those processed is, in fact, a U.S. citizen.” While I try to spot customers done with their meals so I can clear their part of the table, the Border Patrol officer uses clues to detect undocumented immigrants. We both sometimes guess incorrectly, but our intentions are to do our jobs to the best of our abilities.

These situations are uncomfortable. I certainly do not enjoy interrupting a conversation to get someone’s dishes, and I doubt Border Patrol agents enjoy interrogating someone about their immigration status. In both situations, the people we mistakenly ask lose time and are subjected to awkward and uncomfortable situations. However, here’s where the busser and the Border Patrol officer’s situations are different: If I make a mistake, the customer faces a minor inconvenience. The stakes for a Border Patrol agent are much higher. Mistakenly asking for documentation and searching someone can lead to embarrassment or fear—it can even be life-changing. Thus, Border Patrol agents must be fairly certain that someone’s immigration status is questionable before they begin their interrogation.

To avoid these situations altogether, the U.S. must make the path to citizenship for immigrants easier. This is particularly true for immigrants fleeing violence. Many people object to this by saying these immigrants will bring violence with them, but data does not support this view. In 1939, a ship of Jewish refugees from Germany was turned away from the U.S.—a decision viewed negatively through the lens of history. Today, many people advocate restricting immigration for refugees from violent countries; they refuse to learn the lessons from 1939. The sad thing is that many of these immigrants are seen as just as violent as the people they are fleeing. We should not confuse the oppressed with the oppressor.

My restaurant appreciates customers because they bring us money, just as we should appreciate immigrants because they bring us unique perspectives. Equally important, immigrants provide this country with a variety of expert ideas and cultures, which builds better human connections and strengthens our society.

Ethan Peter is a junior. Ethan writes for his school newspaper, The Kirkwood Call, and plays volleyball for his high school and a club team. He hopes to continue to grow as a writer in the future. 

University Winner

Daniel Fries

Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

Detained on the Road to Equality

The United States is a nation of immigrants. There are currently 43 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. Millions of them are naturalized American citizens, and 23 million, or 7.2 percent of the population, are living here without documentation (US Census, 2016). One in seven residents of the United States was not born here. Multiculturalism is, and always has been, a key part of the American experience. However, romantic notions of finding a better life in the United States for immigrants and refugees don’t reflect reality. In modern history, America is a country that systematically treats immigrants—documented or not—and non-white Americans in a way that is fundamentally different than what is considered right by the majority.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment states,“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When a suspected undocumented immigrant is detained, their basic human rights are violated. Warrantless raids on Greyhound buses within 100 miles of the border (an area referred to by some as the “Constitution-free zone”) are clear violations of human rights. These violations are not due to the current state of politics; they are the symptom of blatant racism in the United States and a system that denigrates and abuses people least able to defend themselves.

It is not surprising that some of the mechanisms that drive modern American racism are political in nature. Human beings are predisposed to dislike and distrust individuals that do not conform to the norms of their social group (Mountz, Allison). Some politicians appeal to this suspicion and wrongly attribute high crime rates to non-white immigrants. The truth is that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, people born in the United States are convicted of crimes at a rate twice that of undocumented non-natives (Cato Institute, 2018).

The majority of immigrants take high risks to seek a better life, giving them incentive to obey the laws of their new country. In many states, any contact with law enforcement may ultimately result in deportation and separation from family. While immigrants commit far fewer crimes, fear of violent crime by much of the U.S. population outweighs the truth. For some politicians, it is easier to sell a border wall to a scared population than it is to explain the need for reformed immigration policy. It’s easier to say that immigrants are taking people’s jobs than explain a changing global economy and its effect on employment. The only crime committed in this instance is discrimination.

Human rights are violated when an undocumented immigrant—or someone perceived as an undocumented immigrant—who has not committed a crime is detained on a Greyhound bus. When a United States citizen is detained on the same bus, constitutional rights are being violated. The fact that this happens every day and that we debate its morality makes it abundantly clear that racism is deeply ingrained in this country. Many Americans who have never experienced this type of oppression lack the capacity to understand its lasting effect. Most Americans don’t know what it’s like to be late to work because they were wrongfully detained, were pulled over by the police for the third time that month for no legal reason, or had to coordinate legal representation for their U.S. citizen grandmother because she was taken off a bus for being a suspected undocumented immigrant. This oppression is cruel and unnecessary.

America doesn’t need a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants; it needs to seriously address how to deal with immigration. It is possible to reform the current system in such a way that anyone can become a member of American society, instead of existing outside of it. If a person wants to live in the United States and agrees to follow its laws and pay its taxes, a path to citizenship should be available.

People come to the U.S. from all over the world for many reasons. Some have no other choice. There are ongoing humanitarian crises in Syria, Yemen, and South America that are responsible for the influx of immigrants and asylum seekers at our borders. If the United States wants to address the current situation, it must acknowledge the global factors affecting the immigrants at the center of this debate and make fact-informed decisions. There is a way to maintain the security of America while treating migrants and refugees compassionately, to let those who wish to contribute to our society do so, and to offer a hand up instead of building a wall.

Daniel Fries studies computer science. Daniel has served as a wildland firefighter in Oregon, California, and Alaska. He is passionate about science, nature, and the ways that technology contributes to making the world a better, more empathetic, and safer place.

Powerful Voice Winner

Emma Hernandez-Sanchez

Wellness, Business and Sports School, Woodburn, Ore.

An Emotion an Immigrant Knows Too Well

Before Donald Trump’s campaign, I was oblivious to my race and the idea of racism. As far as I knew, I was the same as everyone else. I didn’t stop to think about our different-colored skins. I lived in a house with a family and attended school five days a week just like everyone else. So, what made me different?

Seventh grade was a very stressful year—the year that race and racism made an appearance in my life. It was as if a cold splash of water woke me up and finally opened my eyes to what the world was saying. It was this year that Donald Trump started initiating change about who got the right to live in this country and who didn’t. There was a lot of talk about deportation, specifically for Mexicans, and it sparked commotion and fear in me.

I remember being afraid and nervous to go out. At home, the anxiety was there but always at the far back of my mind because I felt safe inside. My fear began as a small whisper, but every time I stepped out of my house, it got louder. I would have dreams about the deportation police coming to my school; when I went to places like the library, the park, the store, or the mall, I would pay attention to everyone and to my surroundings. In my head, I would always ask myself, “Did they give us nasty looks?,” “Why does it seem quieter?” “Was that a cop I just saw?” I would notice little things, like how there were only a few Mexicans out or how empty a store was. When my mom went grocery shopping, I would pray that she would be safe. I was born in America, and both my parents were legally documented. My mom was basically raised here. Still, I couldn’t help but feel nervous.

I knew I shouldn’t have been afraid, but with one look, agents could have automatically thought my family and I were undocumented. Even when the deportation police would figure out that we weren’t undocumented, they’d still figure out a way to deport us—at least that was what was going through my head. It got so bad that I didn’t even want to do the simplest things like go grocery shopping because there was a rumor that the week before a person was taken from Walmart.

I felt scared and nervous, and I wasn’t even undocumented. I can’t even imagine how people who are undocumented must have felt, how they feel. All I can think is that it’s probably ten times worse than what I was feeling. Always worrying about being deported and separated from your family must be hard. I was living in fear, and I didn’t even have it that bad. My heart goes out to families that get separated from each other. It’s because of those fears that I detest the “Constitution-free zone.”

Legally documented and undocumented people who live in the Constitution-free zone are in constant fear of being deported. People shouldn’t have to live this way. In fact, there have been arguments that the 100-mile zone violates the Fourth Amendment, which gives people the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld these practices.

One question that Lornet Turnbull asks in her YES! article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’” is, “How should we decide who is welcome in the U.S and who is not?” Instead of focusing on immigrants, how about we focus on the people who shoot up schools, rape girls, exploit women for human sex trafficking, and sell drugs? These are the people who make our country unsafe; they are the ones who shouldn’t be accepted. Even if they are citizens and have the legal right to live here, they still shouldn’t be included. If they are the ones making this country unsafe, then what gives them the right to live here?

I don’t think that the Constitution-free zone is an effective and justifiable way to make this country more “secure.” If someone isn’t causing any trouble in the United States and is just simply living their life, then they should be welcomed here. We shouldn’t have to live in fear that our rights will be taken away. I believe that it’s unfair for people to automatically think that it’s the Hispanics that make this country unsafe. Sure, get all the undocumented people out of the United States, but it’s not going to make this country any safer. It is a society that promotes violence that makes us unsafe, not a race.

Emma Hernandez-Sanchez is a freshman who is passionate about literature and her education. Emma wan ts to inspire others to be creative and try their best. She enjoys reading and creating stories that spark imagination. 

  Powerful Voice Winner

Tiara Lewis

Columbus City Preparatory Schools for Girls,

Columbus, Ohio

Hold Your Head High and Keep Those Fists Down

How would you feel if you walked into a store and salespeople were staring at you? Making you feel like you didn’t belong. Judging you. Assuming that you were going to take something, even though you might have $1,000 on you to spend. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. This is because people will always judge you. It might not be because of your race but for random reasons, like because your hair is black instead of dirty blonde. Or because your hair is short and not long. Or just because they are having a bad day. People will always find ways to bring you down and accuse you of something, but that doesn’t mean you have to go along with it.

Every time I entered a store, I would change my entire personality. I would change the way I talked and the way I walked. I always saw myself as needing to fit in. If a store was all pink, like the store Justice, I would act like a girly girl. If I was shopping in a darker store, like Hot Topic, I would hum to the heavy metal songs and act more goth. I had no idea that I was feeding into stereotypes.

When I was 11, I walked into Claire’s, a well-known store at the mall. That day was my sister’s birthday. Both of us were really happy and had money to spend. As soon as we walked into the store, two employees stared me and my sister down, giving us cold looks. When we went to the cashier to buy some earrings, we thought everything was fine. However, when we walked out of the store, there was a policeman and security guards waiting. At that moment, my sister and I looked at one another, and I said, in a scared little girl voice, “I wonder what happened? Why are they here?”

Then, they stopped us. We didn’t know what was going on. The same employee that cashed us out was screaming as her eyes got big, “What did you steal?” I was starting to get numb. Me and my sister looked at each other and told the truth: “We didn’t steal anything. You can check us.” They rudely ripped through our bags and caused a big scene. My heart was pounding like a drum. I felt violated and scared. Then, the policeman said, “Come with us. We need to call your parents.” While this was happening, the employees were talking to each other, smiling. We got checked again. The police said that they were going to check the cameras, but after they were done searching us, they realized that we didn’t do anything wrong and let us go about our day.

Walking in the mall was embarrassing—everybody staring, looking, and whispering as we left the security office. This made me feel like I did something wrong while knowing I didn’t. We went back to the store to get our shopping bags. The employees sneered, “Don’t you niggers ever come in this store again. You people always take stuff. This time you just got lucky.” Their faces were red and frightening. It was almost like they were in a scary 3D movie, screaming, and coming right at us. I felt hurt and disappointed that someone had the power within them to say something so harsh and wrong to another person. Those employees’ exact words will forever be engraved in my memory.

In the article, “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’,” Lornet Turnbull states, “In January, they stopped a man in Indio, California, as he was boarding a Los Angeles-bound bus. While questioning this man about his immigration status, agents told him his ‘shoes looked suspicious,’ like those of someone who had recently crossed the border.” They literally judged him by his shoes. They had no proof of anything. If a man is judged by his shoes, who else and what else are being judged in the world?

In the novel  To Kill a Mockingbird , a character named Atticus states, “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let’em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.” No matter how much you might try to change yourself, your hairstyle, and your clothes, people will always make assumptions about you. However, you never need to change yourself to make a point or to feel like you fit in. Be yourself. Don’t let those stereotypes turn into facts.

Tiara Lewis is in the eighth grade. Tiara plays the clarinet and is trying to change the world— one essay at a time. She is most often found curled up on her bed, “Divergent” in one hand and a cream-filled doughnut in the other.

Hailee Park

 Wielding My Swords

If I were a swordsman, my weapons would be my identities. I would wield one sword in my left hand and another in my right. People expect me to use both fluently, but I’m not naturally ambidextrous. Even though I am a right-handed swordsman, wielding my dominant sword with ease, I must also carry a sword in my left, the heirloom of my family heritage. Although I try to live up to others’ expectations by using both swords, I may appear inexperienced while attempting to use my left. In some instances, my heirloom is mistaken for representing different families’ since the embellishments look similar.

Many assumptions are made about my heirloom sword based on its appearance, just as many assumptions are made about me based on my physical looks. “Are you Chinese?” When I respond with ‘no,’ they stare at me blankly in confusion. There is a multitude of Asian cultures in the United States, of which I am one. Despite what many others may assume, I am not Chinese; I am an American-born Korean.

“Then… are you Japanese?” Instead of asking a broader question, like “What is your ethnicity?,” they choose to ask a direct question. I reply that I am Korean. I like to think that this answers their question sufficiently; however, they think otherwise. Instead, I take this as their invitation to a duel.

They attack me with another question: “Are you from North Korea or South Korea?” I don’t know how to respond because I’m not from either of those countries; I was born in America. I respond with “South Korea,” where my parents are from because I assume that they’re asking me about my ethnicity. I’m not offended by this situation because I get asked these questions frequently. From this experience, I realize that people don’t know how to politely ask questions about identity to those unlike them. Instead of asking “What is your family’s ethnicity?,” many people use rude alternatives, such as “Where are you from?,” or “What language do you speak?”

When people ask these questions, they make assumptions based on someone’s appearance. In my case, people make inferences like:

“She must be really good at speaking Korean.”

“She’s Asian; therefore, she must be born in Asia.”

“She’s probably Chinese.”

These thoughts may appear in their heads because making assumptions is natural. However, there are instances when assumptions can be taken too far. Some U.S. Border Patrol agents in the “Constitution-free zone” have made similar assumptions based on skin color and clothing. For example, agents marked someone as an undocumented immigrant because “his shoes looked suspicious, like those of someone who had recently crossed the border.”

Another instance was when a Jamaican grandmother was forced off a bus when she was visiting her granddaughter. The impetus was her accent and the color of her skin. Government officials chose to act on their assumptions, even though they had no solid proof that the grandmother was an undocumented immigrant. These situations just touch the surface of the issue of racial injustice in America.

When someone makes unfair assumptions about me, they are pointing their sword and challenging me to a duel; I cannot refuse because I am already involved. It is not appropriate for anyone, including Border Patrol agents, to make unjustified assumptions or to act on those assumptions. Border Patrol agents have no right to confiscate the swords of the innocent solely based on their conjectures. The next time I’m faced with a situation where racially ignorant assumptions are made about me, I will refuse to surrender my sword, point it back at them, and triumphantly fight their ignorance with my cultural pride.

Hailee Park is an eighth grader who enjoys reading many genres. While reading, Hailee recognized the racial injustices against immigrants in America, which inspired her essay. Hailee plays violin in her school’s orchestra and listens to and composes music. 

Aminata Toure

East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

We Are Still Dreaming

As a young Muslim American woman, I have been labeled things I am not: a terrorist, oppressed, and an ISIS supporter. I have been accused of planning 9/11, an event that happened before I was born. Lately, in the media, Muslims have been portrayed as supporters of a malevolent cause, terrorizing others just because they do not have the same beliefs. I often scoff at news reports that portray Muslims in such a light, just as I scoff at all names I’ve been labeled. They are words that do not define me. 

In a land where labels have stripped immigrants of their personalities, they are now being stripped of something that makes them human: their rights. The situation described in Lornet Turnbull’s article, “Two-Thirds of Americans are Living in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’,” goes directly against the Constitution, the soul of this country, something that asserts that we are all equal before the law. If immigrants do not have protection from the Constitution, is there any way to feel safe?

Although most insults are easy to shrug off, they are still threatening. I am ashamed when I feel afraid to go to the mosque. Friday is an extremely special day when we gather together to pray, but lately, I haven’t been going to the mosque for Jummah prayers. I have realized that I can never feel safe when in a large group of Muslims because of the widespread hatred of Muslims in the United States, commonly referred to as Islamophobia. Police surround our mosque, and there are posters warning us about dangerous people who might attack our place of worship because we have been identified as terrorists.

I wish I could tune out every news report that blasts out the headline “Terrorist Attack!” because I know that I will be judged based on the actions of someone else. Despite this anti-Muslim racism, what I have learned from these insults is that I am proud of my faith. I am a Muslim, but being Muslim doesn’t define me. I am a writer, a student, a dreamer, a friend, a New Yorker, a helper, and an American. I am unapologetically me, a Muslim, and so much more. I definitely think everyone should get to know a Muslim. They would see that some of us are also Harry Potter fans, not just people planning to bomb the White House.

Labels are unjustly placed on us because of the way we speak, the color of our skin, and what we believe in—not for who we are as individuals. Instead, we should all take more time to get to know one another. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. To me, it seems Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is a dream that should be a reality. But, for now, we are dreaming.

Aminata Toure is a Guinean American Muslim student. Aminata loves spoken-word poetry and performs in front of hundreds of people at her school’s annual poetry slam. She loves writing, language, history, and West African food and culture. Aminata wants to work at the United Nations when she grows up.

From the Author 

Dear Alessandra, Cain, Daniel, Tiara, Emma, Hailee, Aminata and Ethan,

I am moved and inspired by the thought each of you put into your responses to my story about this so-called “Constitution-free zone.” Whether we realize it or not, immigration in this country impacts all of us— either because we are immigrants ourselves, have neighbors, friends, and family who are, or because we depend on immigrants for many aspects of our lives—from the food we put on our tables to the technology that bewitches us. It is true that immigrants enrich our society in so many important ways, as many of you point out.

And while the federal statute that permits U.S. Border Patrol officers to stop and search at will any of the 200 million of us in this 100-mile shadow border, immigrants have been their biggest targets. In your essays, you highlight how unjust the law is—nothing short of racial profiling. It is heartening to see each of you, in your own way, speaking out against the unfairness of this practice.

Alessandra, you are correct, the immigration system in this country is in shambles. You make a powerful argument about how profiling ostracizes entire communities and how the warrantless searches allowed by this statute impede trust-building between law enforcement and the people they are called on to serve.

And Cain, you point out how this 100-mile zone, along with other laws in the state of Texas where you attended school, make people feel like they’re “always under surveillance, and that, at any moment, you may be pulled over to be questioned and detained.” It seems unimaginable that people live their lives this way, yet millions in this country do.

You, Emma, for example, speak of living in a kind of silent fear since Donald Trump took office, even though you were born in this country and your parents are here legally. You are right, “We shouldn’t have to live in fear that our rights will be taken away.”

And Aminata, you write of being constantly judged and labeled because you’re a Muslim American. How unfortunate and sad that in a country that generations of people fled to search for religious freedom, you are ashamed at times to practice your own. The Constitution-free zone, you write, “goes directly against the Constitution, the soul of this country, something that asserts that we are all equal before the law.”

Tiara, I could personally relate to your gripping account of being racially profiled and humiliated in a store. You were appalled that the Greyhound passenger in California was targeted by Border Patrol because they claimed his shoes looked like those of someone who had walked across the border: “If a man is judged by his shoes,” you ask, “who else and what else are getting judged in the world?”

Hailee, you write about the incorrect assumptions people make about you, an American born of Korean descent, based solely on your appearance and compared it to the assumptions Border Patrol agents make about those they detain in this zone.

Daniel, you speak of the role of political fearmongering in immigration. It’s not new, but under the current administration, turning immigrants into boogiemen for political gain is currency. You write that “For some politicians, it is easier to sell a border wall to a scared population than it is to explain the need for reformed immigration policy.”

And Ethan, you recognize the contributions immigrants make to this country through the connections we all make with them and the strength they bring to our society.

Keep speaking your truth. Use your words and status to call out injustice wherever and whenever you see it. Untold numbers of people spoke out against this practice by Border Patrol and brought pressure on Greyhound to change. In December, the company began offering passengers written guidance—in both Spanish and English—so they understand what their rights are when officers board their bus. Small steps, yes, but progress nonetheless, brought about by people just like you, speaking up for those who sometimes lack a voice to speak up for themselves.

With sincere gratitude,

Lornet Turnbull

Lornet Turnbull is an editor for YES! and a Seattle-based freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter  @TurnbullL .

We received many outstanding essays for the Winter 2019 Student Writing Competition. Though not every participant can win the contest, we’d like to share some excerpts that caught our eye:

After my parents argued with the woman, they told me if you can fight with fists, you prove the other person’s point, but when you fight with the power of your words, you can have a much bigger impact. I also learned that I should never be ashamed of where I am from. —Fernando Flores, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

Just because we were born here and are privileged to the freedom of our country, we do not have the right to deprive others of a chance at success. —Avalyn Cox, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

Maybe, rather than a wall, a better solution to our immigration problem would be a bridge. —Sean Dwyer, Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

If anything, what I’ve learned is that I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to change our world. I don’t know how to make a difference, how to make my voice heard. But I have learned the importance of one word, a simple two-letter word that’s taught to the youngest of us, a word we all know but never recognize: the significance of ‘we.’ —Enna Chiu, Highland Park High School, Highland Park, N.J.

Not to say the Border Patrol should not have authorization to search people within the border, but I am saying it should be near the border, more like one mile, not 100. —Cooper Tarbuck, Maranacook Middle School, Manchester, Maine.

My caramel color, my feminism, my Spanish and English language, my Mexican culture, and my young Latina self gives me the confidence to believe in myself, but it can also teach others that making wrong assumptions about someone because of their skin color, identity, culture, looks or gender can make them look and be weaker. —Ana Hernandez, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

We don’t need to change who we are to fit these stereotypes like someone going on a diet to fit into a new pair of pants. —Kaylee Meyers, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

If a human being with no criminal background whatsoever has trouble entering the country because of the way he or she dresses or speaks, border protection degenerates into arbitrariness. —Jonas Schumacher, Heidelberg University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany

I believe that you should be able to travel freely throughout your own country without the constant fear of needing to prove that you belong here . —MacKenzie Morgan, Lincoln Middle School, Ypsilanti, Mich.

America is known as “the Land of Opportunity,” but this label is quickly disappearing. If we keep stopping those striving for a better life, then what will become of this country? —Ennyn Chiu, Highland Park Middle School, Highland Park, N.J.

The fact that two-thirds of the people in the U.S. are living in an area called the “Constitution-free zone” is appalling. Our Constitution was made to protect our rights as citizens, no matter where we are in the country. These systems that we are using to “secure” our country are failing, and we need to find a way to change them. —Isis Liaw, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

I won’t let anyone, especially a man, tell me what I can do, because I am a strong Latina. I will represent where I come from, and I am proud to be Mexican. I will show others that looks can be deceiving. I will show others that even the weakest animal, a beautiful butterfly, is tough, and it will cross any border, no matter how challenging the journey may be. —Brittany Leal, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

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Immigration Issues in the United States Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

National concerns, self-identity, benefits of immigration, discussion and recommendations.

Immigration is a vital context of the American Dream and national identity. However, the outdated immigration system and globalization trends have led to a shift in perception of immigration as white nationalism is on the rise. There are socio-political concerns about the impact of immigration on self-identity and security of the United States. This report seeks to investigate these fears and compare them to the benefits for the country to determine if immigration should be curbed. A discussion is held regarding the perceptions and realities of international migration and its principles from a political and ethical perspective. Recommendations are then provided regarding reform of the national immigration system.

Immigration is the foundation of the United States as a country. It was built on the labor, ideas, and cultural melting pot of immigrants coming to the US in the hopes of achieving the American dream, finding a new life, and establishing a home for their families. This report seeks to investigate whether the United States should be defined as a nation of immigrants or should it take extensive efforts to curb foreign entry into the country. The United States has built its self-identity on immigration and its extraordinary socio-economic and technological progress depends on it, but in the realities of an unstable global society, measures should be taken to ensure neutrality and competence in immigration policy.

The US has one of the largest immigrant populations in the world, exceeding 40 million individuals, which is around 14% of the total population (Migration Policy Institute, 2019). In recent years, there has been a rise in nationalism which places the blame on the nation’s socio-economic issues on immigration and challenging the concept of the US self-identity. There is an overwhelming public debate and policymakers are commonly unable to reach an agreement on immigration due to the complexity of economic, security, and humanitarian concerns.

From an economic standpoint, anti-immigration critics consider immigrants to be taking away jobs and creating a strain on public services funded by taxes. Security is being challenged as a significant amount of violence and drug crime is attributed to immigrants, particularly those illegally entering the country. The current Trump administration was elected and continues to gather massive support on its strong anti-immigration policies, particularly targeting Muslim and Hispanic migrants for security purposes (Felter & Renwick, 2018).

The words of an identity crisis are unheard of in other parts of the world where everyone is classified based on their characteristics, family, or religion. Mukherjeee (1997) recalls “The concept itself — of a person not knowing who he or she is — was unimaginable in our hierarchical, classification-obsessed society” (par. 6). However, the United States and many countries in Europe have been or becoming increasingly culturally pluralistic and diverse.

As a result of populations and cultures intertwining, influences and opinions coming from many directions, and new generations being born into varied mixed backgrounds, identity is becoming lost. Some regions are experiencing violence, instability, and lack of direction due to immigration and pluralism (Chua, 2007). This is concerning for the core white population of the United States, not just due to the concern about the loss of control and privilege, but also the prolonged effect immigration has on national stability, value system, and institutions.

Immigration has been studied for centuries, and in the United States, it has been a vital part of cultural and economic development. First, it is considered to be almost universally by experts to be an economic driver to the country by contributing to demographic growth, human capital, talent acquisition, and innovation. If the immigrant flow is managed flexibly and efficiently, it can generate U.S. economic growth at times of relative stagnation.

A restrictive policy is detrimental as the legislation limits legal work-related immigration among highly-educated scientists and engineers as well as the less educated labor force in construction and agriculture that few core Americans would participate in (Orrenius, 2016). The mobility, specialization, and motivational drive of immigrants have proven continuously to be a significant economic benefit.

In terms of self-identity and national culture, immigration holds various benefits as well. It introduces new customs, beliefs, and ideas into the general folklore and traditions of the nation. Many of the things that are considered innately American have their origins from immigrants bringing these aspects into the country for centuries and celebrating them in local communities. Immigrants are also known for their rich and active culture and civic lives as they participate in the American democratic process and local communities, allowing for the establishment of international and tolerant networks.

Furthermore, it is important to consider that migrants often link together, and a healthy immigration base in the country that actively engages in the aspects described above ensures that incoming immigrants are more likely to do so and less willing to participate in radical or criminal activity (McCarthy, 2018).

In a modern liberal society, free movement is considered to be an inalienable right, which if limited would provide a precedent for limitation of other human rights. However, these rights are realistically only observed within country borders. International migration is often done to improve lives and those of their families; therefore, instilling a system of migration control would be coercion, that has historically and will continue to produce violence at the borders. This not only applies to border checkpoints and building the “Wall”, but various aspects such as measures that peaceful migrants attempt to gain entry into the country and threats that they face once settled down, for both legal and illegal aliens (Waldinger, 2018).

The reality is that there is no country without borders, and although such boundaries do imply discrimination, it is necessary to protect U.S. citizens. In a world where the number of immigrants exceeds the capacity of a country to take them in, choices must be made regarding admissions criteria of whom the country would be willing to accept as residents. This remains to be the primary socio-political debate from which the U.S. society will never find an escape. However, should be considered that immigration serves as both, a source for international integration and national fragmentation (Waldinger, 2018).

In the context of immigration, with its threats and benefits, it is evident that the immigration system requires comprehensive and intelligible reform. In her essay, Chua (2007) suggests, “if the U.S. immigration system is to reflect and further our ethnically neutral identity, it must itself be ethnically neutral, offering equal opportunity to [all]” (p. 3). Based on the discussion earlier, there should be more concrete criteria that would allow for a modern rules-based approach to immigration.

Most Americans support legal immigration and accept it as part of the American social contract despite the highly emotional nature of it. Historically, there have always been regulations in place regarding nationality and family ties, with very few people being able to afford passage to the United States. These rules were relaxed in the late 20th century, and it is ultimately left to the voters whether a new system should be re-established again.

The U.S. should bring forward incentives for immigration that were present in the past while laying down harsh penalties for violations of the law by individuals and companies. The aspects of immigration that are commonly exploited such as birthright tourism should be eliminated. Meanwhile, incentives such as professional opportunities under a legal status and safety if following proper refugee procedures would help establish a competent system (Gray, 2019). Although there would be challenges and undoubtedly, debate, the system eventually will balance out if a non-ideological and politically correct approach is taken to reforming it.

Immigration is a critical issue in the current political agenda. There are legitimate national concerns regarding security and national identity. However, immigration brings tremendous benefits economically, socially, and culturally, allowing to form a unique melting pot that promotes inclusivity and tolerance while driving forward economic growth and innovation. Nevertheless, the United States had been built on immigration and it should not be curbed significantly, but rather strong measures taken in policy reform to incentivize legal and dedicated immigrants while eliminating those seeking to use it for enrichment or illegal purposes.

Chua, A. (2007). The right road for America? Washington Post. Web.

Felter, C., & Renwick, D. (2018). The U.S. immigration debate . Web.

Gray, M. W. (2019). America’s immigration policy needs an overhaul . National Interest. Web.

McCarthy, J. (2018). 5 ways immigration enhances a country’s culture . Global Citizen . Web.

Migration Policy Institute. (2019). Frequently requested statistics on immigrants and immigration in the United States . Web.

Mukherjee, B. (1997). American dreamer . Mother Jones . Web.

Orrenius, P. (2016). Benefits of immigration outweigh the costs . The Catalyst, 2 . Web.

Waldinger, R. (2018). Immigration and the election of Donald Trump: Why the sociology of migration left us unprepared … And why we should not have been surprised. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41 (8), 1411-1426. Web.

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101 Immigration Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Immigration has been a hot-button issue in recent years, with debates raging over border security, refugee resettlement, and the economic impact of immigration. If you're tasked with writing an essay on immigration, you may be struggling to come up with a topic that is both interesting and relevant. To help you get started, we've compiled a list of 101 immigration essay topic ideas and examples to inspire your writing.

• The history of immigration in the United States
• The impact of immigration on American culture
• Immigration policies and their effects on immigrant communities
• The economic benefits of immigration
• The social challenges faced by immigrants
• The role of immigration in the labor market
• Immigration and crime rates
• The ethics of border enforcement
• The challenges faced by undocumented immigrants
• The impact of immigration on public health
• The experience of refugee resettlement
• The impact of immigration on education
• Immigration and the environment
• The politics of immigration reform
• The role of immigration in shaping national identity
• The impact of immigration on urban development
• Immigration and globalization
• The impact of immigration on family dynamics
• The role of immigration in the spread of disease
• The impact of immigration on social welfare programs
• Immigration and human trafficking
• The impact of immigration on rural communities
• Immigration and the criminal justice system
• The impact of immigration on housing markets
• The role of immigration in international relations
• Immigration and national security
• The impact of immigration on healthcare systems
• Immigration and labor rights
• The impact of immigration on income inequality
• The role of immigration in shaping political ideologies
• Immigration and climate change
• The impact of immigration on technology and innovation
• Immigration and economic development
• The role of immigration in addressing demographic challenges
• Immigration and social mobility
• The impact of immigration on language diversity
• Immigration and social cohesion
• The role of immigration in shaping cultural identity
• Immigration and food culture
• The impact of immigration on public transportation
• Immigration and urban planning
• The role of immigration in revitalizing declining communities
• Immigration and gentrification
• The impact of immigration on small businesses
• Immigration and entrepreneurship
• The role of immigration in addressing labor shortages
• Immigration and education disparities
• The impact of immigration on rural economies
• Immigration and agricultural production
• The role of immigration in addressing healthcare shortages
• Immigration and environmental conservation
• The impact of immigration on social services
• Immigration and income inequality
• The role of immigration in cultural exchange
• Immigration and the arts
• The impact of immigration on sports
• Immigration and media representation
• The role of immigration in shaping public opinion
• Immigration and social media
• The impact of immigration on voting patterns
• Immigration and civic engagement
• The role of immigration in community organizing
• Immigration and social justice movements
• The impact of immigration on political participation
• Immigration and activism
• The role of immigration in shaping public policy
• Immigration and civil rights
• The impact of immigration on political polarization
• Immigration and the role of government
• The role of immigration in international development
• Immigration and conflict resolution
• The impact of immigration on peacebuilding efforts
• Immigration and humanitarian aid
• The role of immigration in addressing global challenges
• Immigration and sustainable development
• The impact of immigration on human rights
• Immigration and social change
• The role of immigration in promoting diversity
• Immigration and cultural preservation
• The impact of immigration on indigenous communities
• Immigration and gender equality
• The role of immigration in addressing social inequalities
• Immigration and intergenerational mobility
• The impact of immigration on social cohesion
• Immigration and social welfare
• The role of immigration in addressing poverty
• Immigration and social justice
• The impact of immigration on human development
• Immigration and social inclusion
• The role of immigration in promoting social progress
• Immigration and social integration
• The impact of immigration on community resilience
• Immigration and disaster response
• The role of immigration in addressing humanitarian crises
• Immigration and conflict prevention
• The impact of immigration on peacebuilding
• Immigration and human security
• The role of immigration in promoting global peace
• Immigration and international cooperation
• The impact of immigration on sustainable development goals
• Immigration and the future of humanity

These are just a few examples of the many immigration essay topics you could explore in your writing. Whether you're interested in the social, economic, political, or cultural aspects of immigration, there is no shortage of compelling topics to explore. So pick a topic that resonates with you, do some research, and start writing!

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The Debate in the United States over Immigration

These essays examine economic, political, social, and legal issues related to immigration into the United States—from compelling arguments for limited immigration to forceful arguments for open borders. They assess the benefits and costs of immigration and its impact on education, social welfare, and health care.

With the annual number of immigrants to the United States at an all-time high, the debate over immigration has reached a fevered pitch. Do today's immigrants come to this country just to go on welfare? Will immigration forever change America's ethnic, cultural, and political landscape? Some see unrestrained immigration as the lifeblood of the world's most successful society, while others have called for closing the borders entirely. After the introduction, which examines the historical debate over immigration, the book looks at the current spectrum of economic, political, social, and legal issues related to immigration into the United States—from compelling arguments for limited immigration to forceful arguments for open borders. As part of the program on American Institutions and Economic Performance, leading scholars and business experts convened at the Hoover Institution in October 1996. Amid swirling controversy over passage of California's Proposition 187, which denies welfare benefits to illegal immigrants, conference participants discussed current state and federal immigration policies and the strengths and weaknesses of proposed changes. Presented here is a powerful cross section of papers from that conference, each covering a major aspect of the overall immigration issue. The distinguished participants offer assessments of the benefits and costs of immigration, along with its impact on education, social welfare, and health care, and then presents appraisals of the widely publicized subject of undocumented immigration and employer sanctions. With immigration becoming a personal issue for millions of Americans, The Debate in the United States over Immigration illuminates fundamental, individual truths crucial to making policy decisions that will ultimately best serve American society.

Copyright 1997.

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You are here, how the united states immigration system works.

• Immigration 101
• How the Immigration System Works

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U.S. immigration law is based on the following principles: the reunification of families, admitting immigrants with skills that are valuable to the U.S. economy, humanitarian protections, and promoting diversity. This fact sheet provides basic information about how the U.S. legal immigration system is designed and functions.

The law governing U.S. immigration policy is called the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA allows the United States to grant up to 675,000 permanent immigrant visas each year across various visa categories. On top of those 675,000 visas, the INA sets no limit on the annual admission of U.S. citizens’ spouses, parents, and children under the age of 21. In addition, each year the president is required to consult with Congress and set an annual number of refugees to be admitted to the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Finally, humanitarian protections such as asylum, Temporary Protected Status, and other programs which may permit someone to reside in the United States legally do not have numerical caps, but do have other restrictions.

Once a person is granted an immigrant visa or receives certain other eligible protections, such as asylum or refugee status, they can apply to become a lawful permanent resident (LPR). Individuals arriving on immigrant visas become LPRs when they arrive in the United States.

After residing in the United States for five years (or three years in some circumstances), LPRs are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. There is no requirement that an LPR apply for citizenship. LPRs are eligible to apply for nearly all jobs (i.e., jobs not legitimately restricted to U.S. citizens) and are permitted to remain in the country permanently, while still remaining subject to immigration laws.  

Each year the United States also admits a variety of noncitizens on a temporary basis. Such “non-immigrant” visas are granted to everyone from tourists to foreign students to temporary workers permitted to remain in the country for varying lengths of time. While certain employment-based non-immigrant visas are subject to annual caps, other non-immigrant visas (including tourist and student visas) have no numerical limits.

I. Family-Based Immigration

Family unification is an important principle governing U.S. immigration policy. The family-based immigration system allows U.S. citizens and LPRs to enable certain family members to gain LPR status as well. Even U.S. citizens seeking to help an immediate family member already in the United States must technically petition for a visa so that their family member can become an LPR.

An unlimited number of visas are available every year for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. Prospective immigrants in this category must meet standard eligibility criteria, and petitioners must meet certain age and financial requirements. Immediate relatives are:

• Spouses of U.S. citizens;
• Unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens (under 21 years old); and
• Parents of U.S. citizens (petitioner must be at least 21 years old to petition for a parent).

An additional limited number of visas are available every year under the family preference system for other non-immediate family members. Prospective immigrants in the family preference system must meet standard eligibility criteria, and petitioners must meet certain age and financial requirements. The family preference system includes:

• Adult children (married and unmarried) of U.S. citizens;
• Brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens (petitioner must be at least 21 years old to petition for a sibling); and
• Spouses and unmarried children (minor and adult) of LPRs.

In order to balance the overall number of immigrants arriving based on family relationships, Congress established a complicated system for calculating the available number of family preference visas for any given year. The number is determined by starting with 480,000 (the maximum number in principle allocated for all family-based immigrants) and then subtracting the number of immediate relative visas issued during the previous year and the number of people “paroled” into the United States during the previous year. The number of unused employment-based visas from the preceding year are then added to this total to establish the number of visas that are available through the family preference system. However, by law, the number of family-based visas allocated through the preference system may not be lower than 226,000. The number of visas issued to immediate relatives often exceeds 254,000 in a given year which triggers the 226,000 minimum for family preference visas. As a result, the total number of family-based visas often exceeds 480,000. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, family-based immigrant visas comprised 58 percent of all new LPRs in the United States.

The family-based immigration system is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Family-Based Immigration System

In order to be admitted through the family-based immigration system, a U.S. citizen or LPR sponsor must petition for an individual relative, establish the legitimacy of the relationship, meet minimum income requirements, and sign an affidavit of support stating that the sponsor will be financially responsible for the family member(s) upon arrival in the United States or adjustment to LPR status within the United States. The individual relative must also meet certain eligibility requirements that include submitting to a medical exam and obtaining required vaccinations (including a COVID-19 vaccination), an analysis of any immigration or criminal history, as well as demonstrating that they will not become primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.

The spouses and children who accompany or follow the principal immigrant (the one sponsored by the U.S. citizen or LPR under the family-preference category) are referred to as derivative immigrants. Derivative immigrants also count toward the numerical caps for the categories in Table 1. That means that many of the visa slots allotted for members of these categories are often actually used by the spouses and children of the members. For example, in FY 2022, 40,973 people were admitted in the category “brothers and sisters” of U.S. citizens, but only 14,952 of them were actual brothers or sisters of U.S. citizens. The rest were spouses (10,037) and children (15,984) of the siblings of U.S. citizens.

II. Employment-Based Immigration

The United States provides various ways for immigrants with valuable skills to come to the country on either a temporary or a permanent basis.

Temporary Visa Classifications

Temporary employment-based visa classifications permit employers to hire and petition for foreign nationals for specific jobs for limited periods. Most temporary workers must work for the employer that petitioned for them and have limited ability to change jobs. There are more than 20 types of visas for temporary nonimmigrant workers. These include L-1 visas for intracompany transfers; various P visas for athletes, entertainers, and skilled performers; R-1 visas for religious workers; various A visas for diplomatic employees; O-1 visas for workers of extraordinary ability; and various H visas for both highly skilled and lesser-skilled workers. The visa classifications vary in terms of their eligibility requirements, duration, whether they permit workers to bring dependents, and other factors. In most cases, these workers must leave the United States if their status expires or if their employment is terminated. It may be possible, depending on the type of job and the foreign national’s qualifications, for an employer to sponsor the worker for permanent employment. A foreign national does not have to be working for the employer in order to be sponsored. However, depending on the permanent immigration category sought and the foreign national’s current nonimmigrant category, he or she may be able to complete the steps to become an LPR while continuing to live and work in the United States.

Permanent Immigration

The overall numerical limit for permanent employment-based immigrants is 140,000 per year. This number includes the immigrants plus their eligible spouses and minor unmarried children, meaning the actual number of employment-based immigrants is less than 140,000 each year. Any unused family preference immigrant numbers from the preceding year are added to this cap to establish the number of visas that are available for allocation through the employment-based system. The total number of available visas is then divided into five preference categories. For some categories, the sponsoring employer must first test the U.S. labor market under terms and conditions established by the Department of Labor (DOL), and the Secretary of Labor must certify that the petitioner’s application meets certain requirements before the sponsor may file a petition with U.S.  Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). For some categories, the sponsor’s first step is to file a petition with USCIS or the foreign national may self-petition. The final step is the foreign national’s application for an immigrant visa at a U.S. embassy or consulate abroad or an application to adjust status to LPR if in lawful status in the United States. For consular processing, the immigrant visa application cannot be filed until after USCIS approves the immigrant petition. For adjustment of status, the time to file the application depends on whether a visa number is considered to be immediately available.

The employment-based visa categories are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2: Permanent Employment-Based Preference System

In FY 2022, immigrants admitted through the employment preferences made up 26.5 percent of all new LPRs in the United States.

III. Per-Country Ceilings

In addition to the numerical limits placed on the various immigration preference categories, the INA also places a limit on how many immigrants can come to the United States from any one country. Currently, no group of permanent immigrants (family-based and employment-based combined) from a single country can exceed seven percent of the total number of people immigrating to the United States in a single fiscal year. This is not a quota to ensure that certain nationalities make up seven percent of immigrants, but rather a limit that is set to prevent any immigrant group from dominating immigration flows to the United States.

IV. Refugees and Asylees

Refugees are admitted to the United States based upon an inability to return to their home countries because of a “well-founded fear of persecution” due to their race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin. Refugees apply for admission from outside of the United States, often from a “transition country” that is outside their home country. The admission of refugees turns on numerous factors, such as the degree of risk they face, membership in a group that is of special concern to the United States (designated yearly by the president and Congress), and whether or not they have family members in the United States.

Each year, the president, in consultation with Congress, determines the numerical ceiling for refugee admissions. The overall cap is broken down into limits for each region of the world. After September 11, 2001, the number of refugees admitted into the United States fell drastically. After the Bush administration put new security checks in place, annual refugee admissions returned to their previous levels and rose during the Obama administration. During the Trump administration, the refugee ceiling fell sharply, from 110,000 in FY 2017 to 45,000 in FY 2018 and 30,000 in FY 2019. For FY 2020, the ceiling was set at an all-time low of 18,000—although only 11,814 were actually admitted (the lowest number of admitted refugees since the system was created in 1980.) The FY 2021 ceiling was set at 15,000 by the Trump administration, but was subsequently raised to 62,500 by the Biden administration. The Biden administration set the admission ceiling to 125,000 people for FY 2022 through FY 2024. Additionally, the Biden administration created a new Priority 2 category for certain Iraqi, Afghan, and Syrian refugees.

The 125,000 allotted admissions for FY 2024 were divided by region per the following flexible allocations, which can also be further divided up by individual country.

Table 3: Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions, FY 2024

Asylum is available to persons already in the United States or arriving at a port of entry who are seeking protection based on the same five protected grounds upon which refugees rely. There is no limit on the number of individuals who may apply for and be granted asylum each year, nor are there specific categories for determining who may seek asylum. In FY 2022, 36,615 individuals were granted asylum, as the system continued to recover from closures and disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Refugees and asylees are eligible to become LPRs one year after admission to the United States as a refugee or one year after receiving asylum.

V. The Diversity Visa Program

The Diversity Visa Program was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 as a dedicated channel for immigrants from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Each year, 55,000 visas are allocated randomly through a computer-generated lottery to nationals from countries that have sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years. Of the 55,000, up to 5,000 are made available for use under the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act program, created in 1997 to provide relief to certain asylum seekers who applied for asylum before a specific date. This results in a reduction of the actual annual diversity visa limit to 50,000. The program was originally intended to favor immigration from Ireland (during the first three years of the program at least 40 percent of the visas were exclusively allocated to Irish immigrants). Diversity visas are now distributed on a regional basis and benefit Africans and Eastern Europeans in particular.

To be eligible for a diversity visa, potential applicants from qualifying countries must have a high school education (or its equivalent) or have, within the past five years, a minimum of two years working in a profession requiring at least two years of training or experience. Spouses and minor unmarried children of the principal applicant may also enter as derivatives.

Immigration bans implemented by the Trump administration effectively shut down the Diversity Visa Program in 2020 and left roughly 43,000 of that year’s lottery winners without their visas. Those 2020 lottery winners who did not receive visas by the end of the fiscal year lost their chance to immigrate to the United States, prompting some of them to file lawsuits against the federal government in an effort to obtain their visas. Although the Biden administration subsequently lifted the immigration bans, the Diversity Visa Program has resumed at a very slow pace.

VI. Other Forms of Humanitarian Relief Which Permit Individuals to Enter or Remain in the United States Temporarily Without Visas.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is granted to people who are in the United States but cannot return to their home country because of “natural disaster,” “extraordinary temporary conditions,” or “ongoing armed conflict” from specifically designated countries or regions within a country. TPS is granted to individuals from a country for six, twelve, or eighteen months and can be extended beyond that if unsafe conditions in the country persist., and if the people meet the entry and residency requirements set for that particular TPS designation. TPS does not necessarily lead to LPR status or confer any other immigration status.

Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) provides protection from deportation for individuals whose home countries are unstable, therefore making return dangerous. Unlike TPS, which is authorized by statute, DED is at the discretion of the executive branch. DED does not necessarily lead to LPR status or confer any other immigration status.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a program established in 2012 which permits certain individuals who were brought to the United States while under the age of 16 and who have resided continuously in the United States since June 15, 2007, to remain in the United States and work lawfully for at least two years, so long as they have no significant criminal record and have graduated high school or college or received a degree equivalent. It does not confer any path to permanent legal status and requires renewal every two years. While there have been multiple challenges to DACA in the federal courts, as of the date of publication, the program is still in place.

Humanitarian parole is a longstanding executive authority which allows certain individuals to enter the United States, even though they may not meet the definition of a refugee and may not be eligible to immigrate through other channels. Parolees may be admitted temporarily for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. Since humanitarian parole was first created in 1952, presidents of both parties have used the authority extensively. From 2020 through 2024, the Biden administration created several sponsorship-based parole programs, including the Uniting for Ukraine program to admit Ukrainians fleeing war, and a parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans seeking to temporarily reside in the United States.

Individuals who enter the country through humanitarian parole are not on a path to permanent status. If a person granted parole wishes to remain in the country long-term, they must generally apply for and obtain a different immigration status. Those granted parole may generally apply for work authorization for the duration of their parole.

VII. U.S. Citizenship

In order to qualify for U.S. citizenship through naturalization, an individual must have had LPR status (a green card) for at least five years (or three years if the green card was obtained through a U.S. citizen spouse or through the Violence Against Women Act, VAWA). There are other exceptions including, but not limited to, members of the U.S. military who serve in a time of war or declared hostilities. Applicants for U.S. citizenship must be at least 18 years old, demonstrate continuous residency, demonstrate “good moral character,” pass English and U.S. history and civics exams (with certain exceptions), and pay an application fee, among other requirements.

VIII.  Conclusion  

The U.S. immigration system is a complex network of visas, humanitarian relief, pathways to permanent residency and citizenship, as well as temporary status for people facing specific crises in their home country.

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Key facts about U.S. immigration policies and Biden’s proposed changes

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, his administration has acted on a number of fronts to reverse Trump-era restrictions on immigration to the United States. The steps include plans to boost refugee admissions , preserving deportation relief for unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and not enforcing the “ public charge ” rule that denies green cards to immigrants who might use public benefits like Medicaid.

Biden has also lifted restrictions established early in the coronavirus pandemic that drastically reduced the number of visas issued to immigrants. The number of people who received a green card declined from about 240,000 in the second quarter of the 2020 fiscal year (January to March) to about 79,000 in the third quarter (April to June). By comparison, in the third quarter of fiscal 2019, nearly 266,000 people received a green card.

Biden’s biggest immigration proposal to date would allow more new immigrants into the U.S. while giving millions of unauthorized immigrants who are already in the country a pathway to legal status. The expansive legislation would create an eight-year path to citizenship for the nation’s estimated 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants , update the existing family-based immigration system, revise employment-based visa rules and increase the number of diversity visas . By contrast, President Donald Trump’s administration sought to restrict legal immigration in a variety of ways, including through legislation that would have overhauled the nation’s legal immigration system by sharply reducing family-based immigration.

The Biden administration has proposed legislation that would create new ways for immigrants to legally enter the United States. The bill would also create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants living in the country.

To better understand the existing U.S. immigration system, we analyzed the most recent data available on federal immigration programs. This includes admission categories for green card recipients and the types of temporary employment visas available to immigrant workers. We also examined temporary permissions granted to some immigrants to live and work in the country through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status programs.

This analysis relies on data from various sources within the U.S. government, including the Department of Homeland Security, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of State, Federal Register announcements and public statements from the White House.

The Senate is considering several immigration provisions in a spending bill, the Build Back Better Act , that the House passed in November 2021. While passage of the bill is uncertain – as is the inclusion of immigration reforms in the bill’s final version – the legislation would make about 7 million unauthorized immigrants eligible to apply for protection from deportation, work permits and driver’s licenses.

Amid a record number of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, Biden reinstated in December 2021 a Trump-era policy that requires those who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border and seek asylum to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed. Biden had earlier ended the Migration Protection Protocols , or “Remain in Mexico” policy, and then restarted it after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lawsuit by Texas and Missouri that challenged the program’s closure. Asylum seekers do not receive a legal status that allows them to live and work in the U.S. until the claim is approved.

Overall, more than 35 million lawful immigrants live in the U.S.; most are American citizens. Many live and work in the country after being granted lawful permanent residence, while others receive temporary visas available to students and workers. In addition, roughly 1 million unauthorized immigrants have temporary permission to live and work in the U.S. through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status programs.

Here are key details about existing U.S. immigration programs, as well as Biden’s proposed changes to them:

Family-based immigration

In fiscal 2019, nearly 710,000 people received lawful permanent residence in the U.S. through family sponsorship. The program allows someone to receive a green card if they already have a spouse, child, sibling or parent living in the country with U.S. citizenship or, in some cases, a green card. Immigrants from countries with large numbers of applicants often wait for years to receive a green card because a single country can account for no more than 7% of all green cards issued annually.

Biden’s proposal would expand access to family-based green cards in a variety of ways, such as by increasing per-country caps and clearing application backlogs. Today, family-based immigration – referred to by some as “ chain migration ” – is the most common way people gain green cards, in recent years accounting for about two-thirds of the more than 1 million people who receive green cards annually.

Refugee admissions

The U.S. admitted only 11,411 refugees in fiscal year 2021, the lowest number since Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act for those fleeing persecution in their home countries. The low number of admissions came even after the Biden administration raised the maximum number of refugees the nation could admit to 62,500 in fiscal 2021 . Biden has increased the refugee cap to 125,000 for fiscal 2022, which started on Oct. 1, 2021.

The low number of admissions in recent years is due in part to the ongoing pandemic. The U.S. admitted only about 12,000 refugees in fiscal 2020 after the country suspended admissions during the coronavirus outbreak . This was down from nearly 54,000 in fiscal 2017 and far below the nearly 85,000 refugees admitted in fiscal 2016, the last full fiscal year of the Obama administration.

The recent decline in refugee admissions also reflects policy decisions made by the Trump administration before the pandemic. Trump capped refugee admissions in fiscal 2020 at 18,000 , the lowest total since Congress created the modern refugee program in 1980.

Employment-based green cards

In fiscal 2019, the U.S. government awarded more than 139,000 employment-based green cards to foreign workers and their families. The Biden administration’s proposed legislation could boost the number of employment-based green cards, which are capped at about 140,000 per year . The proposal would allow the use of unused visa slots from previous years and allow spouses and children of employment-based visa holders to receive green cards without counting them against the annual cap. These measures could help clear the large backlog of applicants. The proposed legislation also would eliminate the per-country cap that prevents immigrants from any single country to account for more than 7% of green cards issued each year.

Diversity visas

Each year, about 50,000 people receive green cards through the U.S. diversity visa program , also known as the visa lottery. Since the program began in 1995, more than 1 million immigrants have received green cards through the lottery, which seeks to diversify the U.S. immigrant population by granting visas to underrepresented nations. Citizens of countries with the most legal immigrant arrivals in recent years – such as Mexico, Canada, China and India – are not eligible to apply.

The Biden administration has proposed legislation to increase the annual total to 80,000 diversity visas. Trump had sought to eliminate the program .

In fiscal 2019, more than 188,000 high-skilled foreign workers received H-1B visas . H-1B visas accounted for 22% of all temporary visas for employment issued in 2019. This trailed only the H-2A visa for agricultural workers, which accounted for nearly a quarter (24%) of temporary visas. In all, nearly 2 million H-1B visas were issued from fiscal years 2007 to 2019.

The Biden administration is expected to review policies that led to increased denial rate s of H-1B visa applications under the Trump administration. In addition, Biden has delayed implementing a rule put in place by Trump that sought to prioritize the H-1B visa selection process based on wages, which would have raised the wages of H-1B recipients overall. Biden also proposed legislation to provide permanent work permits to spouses of H-1B visa holders. By contrast, the Trump administration had sought to restrict these permits. The Trump administration also created an electronic registration system that led to a record number of applicants for fiscal 2021.

Temporary permissions

A relatively small number of unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. under unusual circumstances have received temporary legal permission to stay in the country. One key distinction for this group of immigrants is that, despite having received permission to live in the U.S., most don’t have a path to gain lawful permanent residence. The following two programs are examples of this:

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

About 636,000 unauthorized immigrants had temporary work permits and protection from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, as of Dec. 31, 2020. One of Biden’s first actions as president was to direct the federal government to take steps to preserve the program , which Trump had tried to end before the Supreme Court allowed it to remain in place . DACA recipients, sometimes called “Dreamers,” would be among the undocumented immigrants to have a path to U.S. citizenship under Biden’s immigration bill. Senators have also proposed separate legislation that would do the same.

Temporary Protected Status

Overall, it is estimated that more than 700,000 immigrants from 12 countries currently have or are eligible for a reprieve from deportation under Temporary Protected Status, or TPS , a federal program that gives time-limited permission for some immigrants from certain countries to work and live in the U.S. The program covers those who fled designated nations because of war, hurricanes, earthquakes or other extraordinary conditions that could make it dangerous for them to live there.

The estimated total number of immigrants is based on those currently registered, in addition to those estimated to be eligible from Myanmar – also called Burma – and Venezuela.

Immigrants from Venezuela and Myanmar are newly eligible for TPS under changes made after Biden took office in January 2021 by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the program. The government must periodically renew TPS benefits or they will expire. The department extended benefits into 2022 and beyond for eligible immigrants from nine nations: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. In addition, the Biden administration expanded eligibility for immigrants from Haiti based on recent turmoil.

Biden and congressional Democrats have proposed granting citizenship to certain immigrants who receive TPS benefits. Under Biden’s large immigration bill, TPS recipients who meet certain conditions could apply immediately for green cards that let them become lawful permanent residents. The proposal would allow TPS holders who meet certain conditions to apply for citizenship three years after receiving a green card, which is two years earlier than usual for green-card holders. By contrast, the Trump administration had sought to end TPS for nearly all beneficiaries, but was blocked from doing so by a series of lawsuits.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published March 22, 2021.

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Jens Manuel Krogstad is a senior writer and editor at Pew Research Center .

Ana Gonzalez-Barrera is a former senior researcher focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics at Pew Research Center .

1 in 10 eligible voters in the U.S. are naturalized citizens

How temporary protected status has expanded under the biden administration, after declining early in the covid-19 outbreak, immigrant naturalizations in the u.s. are rising again, most americans are critical of government’s handling of situation at u.s.-mexico border, most latinos say u.s. immigration system needs big changes, most popular.

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The U.S. Immigration Debate

• The United States is home to more foreign-born residents than any other country in the world. In 2022, immigrants composed almost 14 percent of the U.S. population.
• Congress has failed for decades to agree on how to address immigration challenges, leaving many policy questions up to the courts and executive branch.
• President Joe Biden has reversed many of the Donald Trump administration’s restrictive policies, even while implementing his own in response to a historic influx of migrants.

Introduction

Immigration has been a touchstone of the U.S. political debate for decades, as policymakers have weighed economic, security, and humanitarian concerns. However, Congress has continued to disagree on comprehensive immigration reform, effectively moving some major policy decisions into the executive and judicial branches of government and fueling debate in the halls of state and municipal governments.

Former President Donald Trump has put efforts to reshape asylum, border, and deportation policy at the center of his political movement. President Joe Biden had pledged to reverse Trump’s first-term actions and reform the system, but the end of pandemic-related border restrictions and a historic surge in migration have complicated his plans.

What is the immigrant population in the United States?

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Immigrants composed an estimated 13.9 percent of the U.S. population in 2022, amounting to roughly 46 million people out of a total of almost 335 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released in April 2024. Together, immigrants and their U.S.-born children made up about 27 percent of U.S. inhabitants, per the Current Population Survey. Though the share of the population that is foreign born has steadily risen since 1970, when there were fewer than ten million immigrants in the country, recent figures still fall below the record high of 14.8 percent in 1890. 

As of 2022, Mexico was the top country of origin for U.S. immigrants, with Mexicans constituting 23 percent of the total immigrant population. Other major countries of origin include India (6 percent); China, including Hong Kong and Macau (5 percent); and the Philippines (4 percent).

Undocumented immigration. The U.S. government estimated the undocumented population to be some eleven million people in 2022. This total represents a slight decrease from 11.8 million before the 2008 economic crisis [PDF], which led some immigrants to return to their home countries and discouraged others from coming to the United States. In fiscal year 2023 (FY 2023), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) apprehended nearly 2.5 million people trying to illegally cross the southern U.S. border, a record high.

Until 2013, almost all of those trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border were Mexican citizens, and most were individuals seeking work. Between 2013 and 2021, most immigrants came from Asia, particularly China and India. Mexico has since regained its status as the top country of origin, and Central Americans have made up an increasingly larger share of migrants at the southern U.S. border. Generally, they are coming not for work but to make asylum claims, and many of them are unaccompanied children. Some of these immigrants have different legal rights from Mexican nationals in the United States: Under a 2008 anti–human trafficking law, unaccompanied minors from noncontiguous countries have a right to a hearing before being deported to their home countries. The increase in Central American migration has strained the U.S. immigration system. At the end of FY 2023, there were nearly 2.8 million cases pending in immigration courts, the most on record.

Though many of the policies that aim to reduce unlawful immigration focus on enforcement at the border, individuals who arrive in the United States legally and overstay their visas comprise a significant portion of the undocumented population. A Center for Migration Studies report found that, between 2010 and 2018, individuals who overstayed their visas far outnumbered those who arrived by crossing the border illegally.

Legal immigration. The United States granted more than one million individuals [PDF] legal permanent residency in FY 2022, close to pre-pandemic levels. Some 58 percent of them were admitted on the basis of family reunification. Other categories included: employment-based preferences (27 percent), refugees (3 percent), diversity (4 percent), and asylees (5 percent). As of late 2023, more than four million applicants were on the State Department’s waiting list [PDF] for family- and employer-related immigrant visas, nearly a third of whom were from Mexico.

Hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals work legally in the United States under various types of nonimmigrant visas. In FY 2023, the United States granted more than  265,000 visas for high-skilled workers  [PDF], known as H1B visas, and over 310,000 visas for temporary workers in agriculture and other industries, or H2A visas. H1B visas are capped at 85,000 per fiscal year, with exceptions for certain fields .

Immigrants made up 18.6 percent of the U.S. civilian workforce [PDF] in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 18.1 percent the previous year. Compared to those born in the United States, greater shares of immigrants worked in service fields (21.8 percent of all foreign-born people); production, transportation, and material moving (15.2 percent); and natural resources, construction, and maintenance (13.8 percent). 

How do Americans feel about immigration?

A February 2024 poll by Gallup showed that 28 percent of surveyed Americans considered immigration to be the top problem facing the United States. In a separate Gallup poll conducted that same month, the majority of respondents felt that illegal immigration was a “critical” threat to U.S. national security.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted in April found that some 60 percent of the registered voters surveyed believed that undocumented immigrants currently in the United States should be allowed to stay, with 36 percent of respondents saying that undocumented immigrants should have the opportunity to apply for citizenship. In addition, a large majority of Americans still consider immigration to be overall good for the country.

How has Congress tried to address the issue?

The most recent push for an immigration policy overhaul was in 2013, following a decade in which Congress debated numerous immigration reforms, some considered comprehensive and others piecemeal. (Comprehensive immigration reform refers to omnibus legislation that attempts to address the following issues: demand for high- and low-skilled labor, the legal status of the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country, border security, and interior enforcement.) The last major legislation to make it through Congress was under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, when his administration granted legal amnesty to some three million undocumented residents; in 1990, President George H.W. Bush further expanded legal immigration by increasing the cap for immigrant visas from 270,000 to 700,000, though he lowered the quota to 675,000 after several years. In 2007, President George W. Bush worked with congressional Democrats to reach a compromise on a new comprehensive bill, but it ultimately failed to win enough support in the Senate.

President Barack Obama pressed hard for a comprehensive bill that would pair a path to legalization for undocumented residents with stronger border security provisions. The Democrat-led Senate passed this legislation in 2013, but the bill stalled in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Both Presidents Trump and Biden put forward their own plans, which were not seriously considered by Congress.  

What was the Obama administration’s approach?

With legislation thwarted, Obama focused on executive action, a tactic that his successors continued. In 2012, his administration began a program known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals , which offered renewable, two-year deportation deferrals and work permits to undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children and had no criminal records. 

Obama characterized the move as a “ stopgap measure ” and urged Congress to pass the DREAM Act , or Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors—legislation first introduced in 2001 that would have benefited many of the same people. Since then, more than 830,000 people have participated in DACA, and it’s estimated that almost 1.2 million more were eligible as of 2023. Obama attempted to extend similar benefits to undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents through a program known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), but the Supreme Court effectively killed it in 2016.

In 2014, Obama also grappled with a surge of more than sixty thousand unaccompanied minors at the southern border, mostly from Central America. He directed $750 million in aid to the region to improve conditions there. Meanwhile, his administration faced criticism for its enforcement policies, including detaining children in poor conditions and overseeing the deportation of more people— approximately three million —than either the Bill Clinton or George W. Bush administrations had.

What was the Trump administration’s approach?

Immigration remains a signature issue for Trump. He blames previous administrations for failing to secure the southern border, and in his first term, he advocated for sharply reducing both legal and illegal immigration. He repeatedly used executive action to reshape asylum, deportation, and border policy.

Border security and enforcement . Trump vowed to expand the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which he claimed would stop drugs and gangs from entering the country. He was unsuccessful in securing funding from Congress, leading to a federal government shutdown in 2019 and a subsequent declaration of a national emergency , which allowed him to divert funds to build the wall.

Other enforcement measures under Trump included increasing border personnel; sending thousands of active-duty troops to the border; threatening Mexico with tariffs if it did not increase its own border enforcement; and attempting to cut federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities, or jurisdictions that refuse to enforce federal immigration directives.

Trump also ratcheted up previous administrations’ deterrence efforts. He implemented a zero-tolerance policy, under which authorities arrested and prosecuted everyone caught crossing the southern border without authorization. This caused thousands of family separations , since by law children must be held apart from parents facing criminal prosecution. (Presidents Bush and Obama likewise faced criticism for child detention, but they did not make separations a matter of policy.)

DACA . Trump sought to end DACA, calling it unconstitutional. The move spurred multiple legal challenges and, in June 2020, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s plan . A December 2020 federal court ruling forced the Trump administration to resume accepting new applicants.

Travel bans and refugee cap . Trump aimed to sharply reduce the number of refugees and other immigrants granted legal entry into the United States. In 2017, he instituted a ban on immigration and travel from several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Somalia, and Yemen. The original order was rejected by the courts, but the Supreme Court upheld a more limited version. Trump also lowered the cap on the number of refugees the United States accepts each year to less than fifteen thousand for FY 2021—the lowest figure in the history of the U.S. refugee program . Additionally, he ended temporary protected status (TPS)—a program that allows migrants from certain crisis-stricken nations to live and work in the United States for a limited period—for several countries.

Asylum policy . Trump implemented new restrictions on asylum seekers. In 2018, the administration began “metering” asylum applications, or only accepting a limited number [PDF] each day. The next year, it launched the Migrant Protection Protocols , also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases were processed in U.S. courts. At the same time, it sought “safe third country” agreements with several Latin American countries, which would have allowed U.S. authorities to send asylum seekers who traveled through those countries back there. Only an agreement with Guatemala was implemented before that country terminated it in 2021. Additionally, the Trump administration invoked Title 42, previously a rarely used public health law, to deny asylum on health-related grounds amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Comprehensive reform effort . Like his immediate predecessors, Trump proposed broad immigration reform . His would have created a merit-based system to replace the current one,  which prioritizes family reunification. It also included an expansion of the border wall and an employment verification system known as E-Verify, but it did not address the status of current undocumented residents. Congress ultimately did not take up the proposal.

What has been Biden’s approach?

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Biden campaigned on overturning almost all of Trump’s immigration policies. Since then, the Biden administration has reduced immigration enforcement within the United States, ended the travel bans, expanded green-card access for certain undocumented immigrants, and ended the controversial Title 42 policy, though it did initially maintain many pandemic-related restrictions. The administration also initially halted construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, though it has since moved forward with plans to build additional sections; expanded TPS protections; terminated the Remain in Mexico program (with Supreme Court approval); and raised the refugee cap to 125,000 for fiscal years 2022–24. 

However, Biden’s efforts to undo Trump-era policies have been challenged by a historic influx of migrants at the southern border. The record surge in border crossings has prompted the administration to implement several new restrictions since 2023, including a so-called transit ban allowing the government to deny asylum to migrants who did not previously apply for protection in a third country. In addition, the administration can temporarily bar asylum requests when the number of illegal crossings exceeds a certain threshold; since the start of 2024, illegal crossings have slowed . 

Meanwhile, Biden has worked with Latin American leaders to increase aid to refugee populations, improve border management, and better coordinate emergency responses, even as his own comprehensive immigration reform bill and other border security legislation have failed in Congress. His administration has also launched efforts to accelerate the reunification of migrant families, including by reinstating the Central American Minors (CAM) program, which reunites children in the so-called Northern Triangle countries with their parents in the United States, and by creating a family-reunification task force. Additionally, Biden has pledged to invest $4 billion to address the drivers of migration from Central America, and he has sought to revive DACA; the Department of Homeland Security continues to accept and process renewal requests amid ongoing legal challenges to the program.

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How are state and local authorities handling these issues?

States vary widely in how they treat unauthorized immigrants. Some, including California and Massachusetts, allow undocumented immigrants to apply for drivers’ licenses, receive in-state tuition at universities, and obtain other benefits. At the other end of the spectrum are states such as Texas, where the legislature passed a law [PDF] mandating that local governments and law enforcement agencies cooperate with federal immigration officers.

The federal government is generally responsible for enforcing immigration laws, but it delegates some immigration-related duties to state and local law enforcement. However, the degree to which local officials are obliged to cooperate with federal authorities is a subject of intense debate: dozens of counties across thirteen states are home to so-called sanctuary cities that limit cooperation with immigration enforcement.

The degree to which local officials are obliged to cooperate with federal authorities is a subject of intense debate.

President Trump decried these sanctuary jurisdictions and reinstated a controversial Obama-era program known as Secure Communities, in which the FBI shares fingerprints of suspects collected by state and local law enforcement with federal immigration authorities. Under the program, state and local agencies also hand over individuals presumed to be in the country illegally. Biden terminated the program shortly after taking office. 

A range of court rulings during the Trump era increased pressure on states. In 2018, the Justice Department launched a lawsuit against California over sanctuary jurisdictions, which was ultimately dismissed by the Supreme Court. It filed similar suits against New Jersey and Washington, and a federal court ruled in 2020 that the Trump administration could withhold federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions, including New York City. Under Biden, the Justice Department reversed this stance, leading the Supreme Court to dismiss several pending cases .

The ongoing border crisis has driven increasing controversy over local responses. After Trump called on states to deploy National Guard contingents to the southern border, several governors refused. Others, including Texas’s Greg Abbott, embraced Trump’s views, continuing to expand the border wall and seeking to boost the role of state and local law enforcement in carrying out federal immigration policy. In the Biden era, Abbott has sought to impose stronger enforcement at the Texas-Mexico border despite federal opposition. The governor signed a law in December 2023 making it a state crime to cross the border into Texas illegally and authorizing law enforcement to arrest and deport migrants. The bill remains on hold amid legal challenges; several other states are attempting to enact similar legislation.

Recommended Resources

This CFR Backgrounder explains who is responsible for securing the U.S. border.

This timeline traces changes to U.S. postwar immigration policy.

The Washington Post ’s Eduardo Porter and Youyou Zhou argue that the United States’ efforts to limit immigration a century ago actually helped diversify the country .

In this CFR webinar, experts discuss how immigration is shaping political conversations ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

On this episode of The President’s Inbox , the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind breaks down the situation at the southern border .

The Migration Policy Institute’s Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh look at Biden’s immigration record at his term’s three-year mark.

• Central America

Emily Lieberman, Nathalie Bussemaker, Samuel Parmer, and Danielle Renwick contributed to this Backgrounder. Will Merrow created the graphics.

• How many immigrants are in the U.S.?
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• What was Trump’s approach?
• What is Biden’s approach?
• What’s happening at the state and local levels?

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Immigration - Essay Examples And Topic Ideas For Free

Immigration refers to the movement of individuals from one country to another, often in search of better opportunities or to escape adversities. Essays on immigration could delve into the various causes of immigration, its impact on host and origin countries, and the policies governing immigration. Additionally, discussions might extend to the experiences of immigrants, and the global debates surrounding immigration and asylum. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Immigration you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

The Effects of Illegal Immigration

Introduction Immigrants from all over look to the United States' as a possible new home in hopes at a chance at a better life. The United States is seen as a chance for economic prosperity and as an escape from a life of many disappointments and fears, so many immigrants will do whatever it takes to get themselves and their families here, even if it does include breaking the law. The United States' population includes approximately 43.7 million immigrants, which […]

Cons of Illegal Immigration

Millions of immigrants come to the United States. Illegal immigration has been an ongoing issue for many years. They may come here for a better life, job opportunities, better life, and many more reasons. These undocumented immigrants leave everything they have at home to come here. They risk a lot. They come for the better for themselves and their families. These immigrants come here for a purpose whether financial issues or the better. Many come for better education and job […]

Prejudice Towards Illegal Immigrants

Thesis: The Illegal immigrant are sometimes judged as harmful people who come to America and destroy this country. However, most of them are very hardworking people looking for a better life to support their families. Illegal immigrants come to the United States to keep their families safety Immigrants contribute to the United States workforce About 90 percent of undocumented immigrants in the nation work 2. If employers can keep wages down by hiring illegal immigrants, then these savings are presumably […]

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Illegal Immigration and its Effects on Society

Illegal immigration is a growing problem in the United States which causes many issues for citizens, such as job loss and higher taxes. It is undoubtedly an issue that needs to be addressed[1]. Illegal immigration leads to the drug trade in the United States and takes away many jobs from legal citizens[2]. Welfare is also something to consider when discussing illegal immigrants, considering that they can't legally be paid, so they are granted welfare, which also costs taxpayers more money[3]. […]

Illegal Immigration: Search of a Good Life

Illegal immigration to the United States is thriving due to the support of people needing to find a better life for themselves and families. The movement of immigration can be a positive impact on the politics and culture and economy wise. Yes it is more people coming into our country, but not all of its bad as everyone thinks it is. People of immigration bring new perspectives, experiences, and ideas to the communities. Immigrants start businesses, also earn income, and […]

Illegal Immigrants Deserve Civil Rights

Citizenship in the United States comes with a very significant and powerful advantage; civil rights. Under these rights, your freedom is protected from several infringements by the government. Many individuals are entitled to these rights, such as those born in the United States, while many individuals may not be granted all of these rights, such as illegal immigrants. There is a huge controversial debate surrounding illegal immigrants and whether they should have civil rights and liberties, and this debate is […]

What are the Effects of Illegal Immigration?

The United States of America is facing many challenges in regards to illegal immigration. By draining public funds, creating unfair competition for jobs (thereby lowering wages and working conditions), and by imposing unwanted strains on services designed to provide assistance to Americans, illegal immigration causes harm to legal residents. We are one of the only countries in the world where, in your stay, you retain many benefits, and are taken care of while you're here. Countless amount of people believe […]

Immigration Reform

Immigration reforms have been very controversial in United States of America. Way back in 1965, the United States made a law on issues of immigration which was aimed at allowing immigrants into United States. It was, however, stated that immigrants with possible skills to bring United States economy more benefits would be highly considered. With time even so, more immigrants began to come to United States with family chains being the main issue of concern. Once an individual is able […]

Illegal Immigrants: Huge Controversial in the United States

Year after year, numerous news stories emerge about illegal immigrants. The first prominent case involved two illegal immigrants who were arrested for speeding by two sheriff's deputies. The deputies ended up severely beating them, even though the arrested individuals were unarmed. ("Who does not like Immigrants?", n.d.) Many people empathized with them, while others showed no sympathy due to their illegal entry into the U.S. ("Who does not like Immigrants?", n.d.) This marked the beginning of escalating tensions. A significant […]

Managing Illegal Immigration to the United States

Basically, the goal to protect the country and its people has not changed and still lives on within the modern policies. As in the late 1800s, almost any given foreigner has the ability to become a legal resident, or a person (who lawfully lives in a country, state, etc.) of the United States. However, the process by which an individual can become a legal resident is much more complicated than it has been in years prior. In order to become […]

Illegal Immigration: Economy’s Boost

Many of us know that America is known as a great country because of its diversity. The cause of this diversity is the fact that America allowed immigrants to move to this country from their home countries which had an influence on our economy. However, not everyone in America is a legal immigrant. In October 1996, there were about five million illegal immigrants living in the United States, and the population of those immigrants was growing by about two hundred […]

Illegal Immigrant Population of the United States

As of 2018, according to FactCheck.org there are 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the US. Immigration is not bad for a country if the country can support the people. Diversity lets us experience different cultures and be more open to different views. However, the problem with immigration is illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is a tough problem because finding the right solution for it can be so hard. Dealing with immigration is hard because you want to help the people […]

Illegal Immigration and President Donald Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy

Illegal immigration, according to the Unites States of America is defined as when people who are foreigners and or immigrants try to enter the United States without the proper documentation needed to enter. During the summer of 2018, illegal immigration reached an all-time high due to President Donald Trump's zero tolerance policy. This crisis and the collapse of the border policy caused the Trump Administration to be very frustrated because this was an issue that was not going to be […]

Analyzing the Definition of Illegal Immigration and how Immigration has Affected American Value

Values The focus of our group for this project is illegal immigration and how it has shaped the mindset of people in America today. Our research question following the topic is, "To what extent has immigration affected American values and how do people define immigration?" For the purpose of this paper, this definition will serve as a guideline: Immigration is the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country. Embedded in this definition is the questionable interpretation of […]

Immigration Policy of Donald Trump

On the 17th January 2017, at a campaign rally in Miami, President Donald Trump stated that A Trump administration will stop illegal immigration, deport all criminal aliens, and save American lives (poltifact.com). The president and his administration will do actions to keep the US clear and safe. Trump tried to deport about 11 million undocumented immigrants (Wessler). This is just so cruel to destroy people live by sending them back to totally strange country, to separate their family, and to […]

American Population and Illegal Immigration

America has always been known as the country who invites those less fortunate in, but at what cost? At what point will there be an end? There have been millions of people coming to the United States every year, fleeing from war torn countries and poverty, and the United States lets them in. They are supposed to be the country of freedom, but at a certain point it will need to stop. That point is now, the U.S. can no […]

Massive Influx of Illegal Immigrants in USA

There have been a large number of illegal immigrants entering the United States for many years. For the last few years in particular, there has been a massive influx of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border. Illegal immigration needs to be stopped because it places a huge burden on the economy od the United States. One reason is the illegal immigrants receive many free benefits. Another reason is the illegal immigrants work practices are causing wages in certain areas to […]

Termination of Racism and American Perception of Immigration Today

Robert F. Kennedy is deemed as an unusual rebel of the sorts. Kennedy came from a wealthy, politically oriented family and was strongly influenced by the administrative occupations held by his father Joe and brother Jack. Kennedy worked as the attorney general and senator for New York. He had a vast empathy for minorities. While running for President Kennedy was popular among the public as he perceived all people as human beings and had a family-man aura. Unfortunately, Kennedy's life […]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Illegal immigration has been occurring for many centuries and continues to take place today. When people cross the border without being authorized, this can lead to grave danger. There have been many incidents with illegal immigrants who were involved in identity theft and identity loans. Most importantly, it violates the IRCA (1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act). Although, illegal immigration might be beneficial to people crossing the border; it should not be tolerated at all. In this essay, I will […]

Is Illegal Immigration Good for our Country?

Illegal immigration is good because some immigrants are trying to give their children a better future than will have in the country that they came from. Some are immigrants might drug traffic. For example, mexico drug dealers bring drugs to the United States and sell them for possibly money, coke, ammo, or marijuana. Some other Immigrants who don't drug traffic to the United States of America are here to give them and their children a opportunity to succeed in their […]

Does Illegal Immigration Impact Texas?

How Illegal Immigration Impacts Texas Vincent M Messana Geography 1303 Lone Star College - Tomball Abstract This paper explores the impact of illegal immigration in the great state of Texas, the main topics will focus on the effects on the economy, why illegal immigrants come here/ why not come legally, are the illegal immigrants bringing crime, how are illegal immigrants affecting Texas culture how are there so many illegal immigrants still living in Texas and what is being done to […]

Are Immigrants Good for the Americans?

Illegal immigration is not beneficial to our country and we should not protect it. Legal immigration is alright but we should focus more on enforcing our laws rather than offer blanket forgiveness to those who have broken them. People coming to our country bring many issues along with them. While they are in search of better opportunities in this country, most of them come here illegally even though we have a system that they can apply for and enter legally. […]

Illegal Immigration and Crime

The United States border is always a topic when the subject is the illegal entry ( entering into a country ) in the United States. Some people defend that building a wall will reduce the criminal activities in the country, while others defend that to stop illegal entry, ( entering into a country) could lapse the United States economy (the process of people making, selling, and buying things). To state that whether criminal activities increases by illegal ( entering into […]

A Look into our Natio’s Criminal Justice System and Immigration Laws

Abstract This paper will take a look at how the criminal justice system, race, and immigration all relate to each other, and the outcomes of each, with examples from the films 13th and Documented. It will analyze mass incarceration within the criminal justice system and discuss why there are so many people locked up, and some locked up for crimes they did not even commit. It will then elaborate on race in the criminal justice system, and talk about the […]

International and U.S Helping IIlegal Immigration

The International and U.S aid are agencies that help out civilian foreign aid especially those countries who are considered 3rd world countries. Which have less than a 1st world country has, such as more job opportunities, money, education and overall less crime. The overall issue for 3rd world countries is that the crime rate is very high as well as the homicide rate. And as of now it is increasing. The U.S aid is part of the government, and helps […]

Illegal Immigration and Human Trafficking

Human trafficking comes in many different forms such as sex trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Sex exploitation is based on the interaction between a trafficker selling an individual, victim being smuggled to customers for sexual services. Labor trafficking includes situations of debt bondage, forced labor, and involuntary child labor. Labor trafficking uses violence, threats, lies, and other forms of coercion to force people to work against their will in which most cases have no knowledge on the activities […]

Biggest Problem in the United States of America is Illegal Immigrants

One of the biggest problems that is being discussed in the United States of America is illegal immigrants. An illegal immigrant is someone who lives or works in another country when they do not have the legal right to do so, this is according to the Cambridge dictionary. Now you made wonder why someone would just want to get up and leave their country to just work and live? Or why is this such a big issue in the United […]

Positive Effects of Immigration

In the past few years, the topic of immigration has been a cause for much conversation and debate. While many people have discussed the morals of immigration, many have also assessed how exactly immigration affects the United States at both smaller and larger levels. Currently, there is much debate among scholars, politicians, economists and citizens regarding immigration and the economic effects that arise from it. Immigration has been discussed at great lengths for the past few years, and based off […]

Benefits of Immigration Essay

Combined picture of five years Syrian boy Omran injured during the airstrike in Aleppo and unbreathing body, faced down of three years old Alan Kurdi founded drowned in Mediterranean sea become a symbol of emigrant crisis1. This artwork of Syrian artist Rehman Siddiq very spectacularly and emotionally illustrated dilemma of every immigrant - stay or run. Immigration crisis become a social phenomenon that keep spreading all over the world. From mass media we can hear basically about two main streams […]

Mexican Immigration

At the wake of 1930, the Great Depression hit the United States hard. There was a serious job crisis as well as food shortages that affected the Mexican immigrants as well as all American dwellers. During this time, most of the Mexican immigrants and the Mexicans Americans were subjected to additional threats and hostility as the American migrants believed the Mexicans were taking their jobs (Gratton & Merchant, 2013). The American government came up strongly with deportation threats and they […]

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How To Write an Essay About Immigration

Understanding the intricacies of immigration.

Writing an essay on how to write an essay about immigration requires a deep understanding of the multifaceted nature of immigration itself. Immigration is a complex topic, encompassing legal, economic, cultural, and humanitarian aspects. It's essential to recognize that essays about immigration should address its diverse implications – from the challenges faced by immigrants to the impacts on host countries. This foundational understanding is crucial for guiding the exploration of how to approach various narratives, policies, and theories related to immigration. Consider including aspects such as the reasons behind immigration, the experiences of immigrants, the policies of different countries, and the societal reactions to immigration.

Structuring the Immigration Essay

The structure of your essay about writing an essay on immigration is key. Start with a compelling introduction that highlights the importance of accurately and empathetically discussing immigration. The thesis statement here should reflect the purpose of your guidance – whether to inform, argue, or analyze different aspects of immigration. The body of your essay should then be divided into coherent sections, each focusing on a key aspect of writing about immigration. Discuss how to construct an argument, the importance of using reliable data and sources, and the need for presenting a balanced view that considers both the challenges and contributions of immigrants. Ensure each part of the essay seamlessly connects to create a cohesive guide.

Addressing Challenges and Offering Strategies

In this part of the essay, focus on the challenges writers may face when crafting an essay on immigration and propose strategies to overcome these. One major challenge is the politicization of immigration, requiring a careful and unbiased approach. Another is the sensitivity of the topic, as it often involves vulnerable populations. Offer advice on maintaining objectivity while being empathetic, and stress the importance of cultural sensitivity. Suggest methods for thorough research and analysis, emphasizing the need to understand immigration laws and policies, as well as the socio-economic factors involved. Discuss the importance of acknowledging diverse perspectives and experiences in the essay to provide a comprehensive view of immigration.

Concluding with Purpose

The conclusion of your essay should do more than summarize the main points about writing an essay on immigration. It's an opportunity to reflect on the importance of understanding and discussing immigration in a responsible and informed manner. Emphasize the role of such essays in shaping public opinion and policy. Encourage writers to approach the topic of immigration with a commitment to fairness, accuracy, and empathy. A strong conclusion will not only wrap up your essay effectively but also inspire and guide future writers to approach the topic of immigration with the depth and respect it deserves.

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• | May 23, 2018

The Benefits of Immigration: Addressing Key Myths

• Daniel Griswold
• Download Publication PDF

America’s historical openness to immigration has enriched its culture, expanded economic opportunity, and enhanced its influence in the world. Immigrants complement native-born workers and raise general productivity through innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants continue to integrate successfully into American society.

America is a nation of immigrants. That is not a cliché but a simple fact. Almost all Americans today either immigrated themselves or descended from immigrants, whether from England and Germany in the colonial era, Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or Latin America and Asia in more recent decades. Today one out of every four people residing in the United States are either first- or second-generation immigrants. Immigration has enriched the United States throughout its history, economically as well as culturally and socially.

Contrary to what some of our leaders and pundits tell us, immigrants strengthen the US economy by filling key jobs in important industries, starting businesses, filing patents, creating new products, and keeping America demographically younger. A large majority of immigrants embrace America’s culture of freedom and opportunity. Immigration is both a sign and a source of American dynamism. US immigration policy should move toward welcoming more hard-working immigrants to build a stronger US economy.

Facts about Immigration

Immigrants come to the United States because of the freedom and opportunity it offers. They come to work and build a better life for themselves and their families. Immigrants fill niches in the labor market, typically at the higher and lower ends of the skill spectrum, where the supply of native-born workers tends to fall short of demand by US employers. Without immigrants our economy would be less productive and dynamic.

• Immigrants boost America’s economic growth and raise the general productivity of American workers by providing much-needed skills. Immigrant workers allow important sectors of the economy to expand, attracting investment and creating employment opportunities for native-born Americans. A recent study by the International Monetary Fund concluded, “Immigration significantly increases GDP per capita in advanced economies.”
• Immigrants fuel entrepreneurship. Immigrants are more likely to start a business than native-born Americans, whether it’s a corner shop or high-tech startup. Among startup companies that were valued at more than $1 billion in 2016, half were founded by immigrants. Among Fortune 500 companies, 40 percent were founded by immigrants or their children.
• Immigrants generate new products, ideas, and innovation. Immigrants make up 17 percent of the US workforce, while filing one-third of the patents and accounting for more than one-third of US workers with a PhD in one of the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math. One study found, “More than half of the high-skilled technology workers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are foreign born.”
• Without immigrants and their children, the United States would soon begin to experience demographic decline. The number of US-born workers with US-born parents is already declining, and will shrink by eight million from 2015 to 2035. Immigrants extend the sustainability of federal retirement programs by slowing the rise in the ratio of retirees to workers. Without a growing workforce, the US economy would begin to lose its dynamism and leadership role in the global economy.
• Three-quarters of immigrants in the United States reside here legally. The number of unauthorized immigrants has stabilized in recent years at 11 to 12 million. Most illegal immigrants arriving today enter the country legally but then overstay their visas; thus, a wall on the US-Mexican border will not stop most illegal immigration. The most cost-effective policy for reducing illegal immigration remains the expansion of opportunities for legal entry and work.

Five Myths and Realities of Immigration

1. Myth: America is being flooded with mass immigration.

Reality: The rate of US immigration today is well below its historical average and below that of many other advanced nations.

• According to the Census Bureau, the number of foreign-born residents of the United States was 43.7 million in 2016, or 13.5 percent of the total US population. Although growing in recent decades, the immigrant share of the US population is still below its peak of nearly 15 percent in 1910. In many other developed nations, such as Canada and Australia, the foreign-born are a much higher share of the population than in the United States.
• More importantly, the rate of net migration to the United States today is far below what it has been in previous historical periods. The United States accepts about 1.1 million permanent legal immigrants per year, which is a high number in nominal terms but is historically modest as a share of the US population. The current annual US net migration rate (both legal and illegal, minus emigration), is 3.3 per 1,000 US residents. That is less than half of the US migration rate in the peak years of the Great Atlantic Migration from 1880 to 1910 and below the historical US average since 1820 of 4.3 per 1,000.

2. Myth: Immigrants depress wages and take jobs from Americans.

Reality: There is no evidence that immigrants cause higher unemployment among Americans or depress average wages.

• Immigrants typically complement American workers rather than compete directly with them for jobs. As immigrants supply labor, they also increase demand for housing and other goods and services, creating employment opportunities for native-born workers. This is why, over time, there is no correlation between immigration and the general unemployment rate. In fact, the number of jobs and the size of the workforce tend to grow together.
• For those same reasons, empirical studies have found that immigration has only a small and generally positive impact on average wages. A study cited in the 2017 National Academy of Sciences report on the economic consequences of immigration found that the only native demographic group negatively impacted is adults without a high school diploma. The wage impact on this group is small, in the range of 1 to 2 percent, and the size of this group has declined to less than 10 percent of the working-age population. Evidence also shows that as immigrants move in, native-born Americans tend to stay in school longer and upgrade their education, raising their productivity and wages. For more than 90 percent of American workers, immigration either raises wages or has no impact.

3. Myth: Immigrants increase the danger of crime and terrorism.

Reality: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. The risks from immigrant terrorism are relatively low compared to other dangers. 

• Immigrants are less prone to crime for a number of reasons. After surveying the available evidence, a major 2015 study on immigrant integration by the National Academy of Sciences concluded, “Far from immigration increasing crime rates, studies demonstrate that immigrants and immigration are associated inversely with crime. Immigrants are less likely than the native born to commit crimes, and neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants have much lower rates of crime and violence than comparable nonimmigrant neighborhoods.”
• Foreign-born terrorists have committed deadly attacks on US soil, most tragically on September 11, 2001. But the terrorists responsible for the deaths that day were temporary visitors in the United States on nonimmigrant tourist and student visas. Terrorist acts by permanent immigrants are much less of a theat. According to research by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, from 1975 to 2017, “. . . the chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack committed by a chain immigrant or a diversity visa recipient was about 1 in 723 million per year,” a risk far lower than death by domestic homicide.

4. Myth: Immigrants impose a fiscal burden on US taxpayers.

Reality: Most immigrants pay more in taxes over their lifetimes than they consume in government benefits.

• Immigrants on average are net contributors to government. Immigrants tend to produce more of a fiscal surplus, or less of a deficit, than similarly educated native-born Americans because they are eligible for fewer government benefit programs. The children of immigrants are also more beneficial for government budgets than the children of native-born Americans because they tend to achieve higher levels of education, earnings, and tax paying.
• Higher-skilled immigrants are especially beneficial to government finances. According to the 2017 National Academy of Sciences report, an immigrant arriving in the United States at age 25 with a four-year college degree will, over his or her lifetime, pay $514,000 more in taxes than government services consumed (at net present value). An immigrant with an advanced degree will pay a surplus of almost $1 million. Immigrants without a high school diploma impose a lifetime cost on government of $109,000, but the cost is much smaller than that of a native-born adult without a high school diploma.

5. Myth: Immigrants are no longer assimilating into American culture.

Reality: As with immigrant waves before them, today’s immigrants and their children are learning English and assimilating into American society.

• Immigrants are acquiring proficiency in English at comparable rates to immigrants in the past. Second- and third-generation immigrants are overwhelmingly fluent in English. As the 2015 National Academy of Sciences report concluded, “Today’s immigrants are learning English at the same rate or faster than earlier immigrant waves.”
• In other important ways, immigrants are adapting to and integrating into American society. The 2015 National Academy of Sciences report also found that immigrants are more optimistic than native-born Americans about achieving the American Dream. Rates of intermarriage between native-born Americans and immigrants have been rising, including among ethnic and racial minorities.

Related Content

• | Expert Commentary Expert Commentary

The Immigration Reality: We Need Workers, Not a Wall

• February 13, 2018
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Reforming the US Immigration System to Promote Growth

• October 31, 2017
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Net US Immigration Rate Well within Historical Norm

• March 16, 2017

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U.S. Immigration Timeline

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 23, 2022 | Original: December 21, 2018

The United States has long been considered a nation of immigrants, but attitudes toward new immigrants by those who came before have vacillated over the years between welcoming and exclusionary. Thousands of years before Europeans began crossing the vast Atlantic by ship and settling en masse, the first immigrants arrived in North America from Asia. They were Native American ancestors who crossed a narrow spit of land connecting Asia to North America at least 20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age .

By the early 1600s, communities of European immigrants dotted the Eastern seaboard, including the Spanish in Florida, the British in New England and Virginia, the Dutch in New York, and the Swedes in Delaware. Some, including the Pilgrims and Puritans, came for religious freedom. Many sought greater economic opportunities. Still others, including hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, arrived in America against their will.

Below are the events that have shaped the turbulent history of immigration in the United States since its birth.

White People of 'Good Character' Granted Citizenship

January 1776: Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet, “ Common Sense ,” that argues for American independence. Most colonists consider themselves Britons, but Paine makes the case for a new American. “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe,” he writes.

March 1790: Congress passes the first law about who should be granted U.S. citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1790 allows any free white person of “good character,” who has been living in the United States for two years or longer, to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents are denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in court.

August 1790: The first U.S. census takes place. The English are the largest ethnic group among the 3.9 million people counted, though nearly one in five Americans are of African heritage.

Irish Immigrant Wave

1815: Peace is re-established between the United States and Britain after the War of 1812 . Immigration from Western Europe turns from a trickle into a gush, which causes a shift in the demographics of the United States. This first major wave of immigration lasts until the Civil War .

Between 1820 and 1860, the Irish —many of them Catholic—account for an estimated one-third of all immigrants to the United States. Some 5 million German immigrants also come to the United States, many of them making their way to the Midwest to buy farms or settle in cities including Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati.

1819: Many of newcomers arrive sick or dying from their long journey across the Atlantic in cramped conditions. The immigrants overwhelm major port cities, including New York City , Boston , Philadelphia and Charleston. In response, the United States passes the Steerage Act of 1819 requiring better conditions on ships arriving to the country. The Act also calls for ship captains to submit demographic information on passengers, creating the first federal records on the ethnic composition of immigrants to the United States.

1849: America’s first anti-immigrant political party, the Know-Nothing Party forms, as a backlash to the increasing number of German and Irish immigrants settling in the United States.

1875: Following the Civil War, some states passed their own immigration laws. In 1875 the Supreme Court declares that it’s the responsibility of the federal government to make and enforce immigration laws.

Chinese Exclusion Act 

1880: As America begins a rapid period of industrialization and urbanization, a second immigration boom begins. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants arrive. The majority are from Southern, Eastern and Central Europe, including 4 million Italians and 2 million Jews . Many of them settle in major U.S. cities and work in factories.

1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which bars Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. Beginning in the 1850s, a steady flow of Chinese workers had immigrated to America.

They worked in the gold mines,and garment factories, built railroads and took agricultural jobs. Anti-Chinese sentiment grew as Chinese laborers became successful in America. Although Chinese immigrants make up only 0.002 percent of the United States population, white workers blame them for low wages.

The 1882 Act is the first in American history to place broad restrictions on certain immigrant groups.

1891: The Immigration Act of 1891 further excludes who can enter the United States, barring the immigration of polygamists, people convicted of certain crimes, and the sick or diseased. The Act also created a federal office of immigration to coordinate immigration enforcement and a corps of immigration inspectors stationed at principle ports of entry.

Ellis Island Opens

January 1892 : Ellis Island , the United States’ first immigration station, opens in New York Harbor. The first immigrant processed is Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork in Ireland. More than 12 million immigrants would enter the United States through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954.

1907 : U.S. immigration peaks, with 1.3 million people entering the country through Ellis Island alone.

Photos: Immigration at Ellis Island

February 1907: Amid prejudices in California that an influx of Japanese workers would cost white workers farming jobs and depress wages, the United States and Japan sign the Gentlemen’s Agreement. Japan agrees to limit Japanese emigration to the United States to certain categories of business and professional men. In return, President Theodore Roosevelt urges San Francisco to end the segregation of Japanese students from white students in San Francisco schools.

1910: An estimated three-quarters of New York City’s population consists of new immigrants and first-generation Americans.

New Restrictions at Start of WWI

1917: Xenophobia reaches new highs on the eve of American involvement in World War I . The Immigration Act of 1917 establishes a literacy requirement for immigrants entering the country and halts immigration from most Asian countries.

May 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 limits the number of immigrants allowed into the United States yearly through nationality quotas. Under the new quota system, the United States issues immigration visas to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States at the 1890 census. The law favors immigration from Northern and Western European countries. Just three countries, Great Britain, Ireland and Germany account for 70 percent of all available visas. Immigration from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe was limited. The Act completely excludes immigrants from Asia, aside from the Philippines, at the time an American colony.

1924 : In the wake of the numerical limits established by the 1924 law, illegal immigration to the United States increases. The U.S. Border Patrol is established to crack down on illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders into the United States. Many of these early border crossers were Chinese and other Asian immigrants, who had been barred from entering legally.

Mexicans Fill Labor Shortages During WWII

1942: Labor shortages during World War II prompt the United States and Mexico to form the Bracero Program , which allows Mexican agricultural workers to enter the United States temporarily. The program lasts until 1964.

1948: The United States passes the nation’s first refugee and resettlement law to deal with the influx of Europeans seeking permanent residence in the United States after World War II.

1952: The McCarran-Walter Act formally ends the exclusion of Asian immigrants to the United States.

1956-1957 : The United States admits roughly 38,000 immigrants from Hungary after a failed uprising against the Soviet Union . They were among the first Cold War refugees. The United States would admit over 3 million refugees during the Cold War.

1960-1962 : Roughly 14,000 unaccompanied children flee Fidel Castro ’s Cuba and come to the United States as part of a secret, anti-Communism program called Operation Peter Pan.

Quota System Ends

1965: The Immigration and Nationality Act overhauls the American immigration system. The Act ends the national origin quotas enacted in the 1920s which favored some racial and ethnic groups over others.

The quota system is replaced with a seven-category preference system emphasizing family reunification and skilled immigrants. Upon signing the new bill, President Lyndon B. Johnson , called the old immigration system “un-American,” and said the new bill would correct a “cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.”

Over the next five years, immigration from war-torn regions of Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia , would more than quadruple. Family reunification became a driving force in U.S. immigration.

April-October 1980 : During the Mariel boatlift , roughly 125,000 Cuban refugees make a dangerous sea crossing in overcrowded boats to arrive on the Florida shore seeking political asylum.

Amnesty to Undocumented Immigrants

1986: President Ronald Reagan signs into law the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which grants amnesty to more than 3 million immigrants living illegally in the United States.

2001 : U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) propose the first Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would provide a pathway to legal status for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States illegally by their parents as children. The bill—and subsequent iterations of it—don’t pass.

2012 : President Barack Obama signs Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which temporarily shields some Dreamers from deportation, but doesn’t provide a path to citizenship.

2017: President Donald Trump issues two executive orders aimed at curtailing travel and immigration from six majority Muslim countries (Chad, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia) as well as North Korea and Venezuela. Both of these so-called Muslim travel bans are challenged in state and federal courts.

2018: In April 2018, the travel restrictions on Chad are lifted. In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court uphold a third version of the travel ban on the remaining seven countries.

Immigration Timeline, The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation . LBJ on Immigration, LBJ Presidential Library . The Nation's Immigration Laws, 1920 to Today, Pew Research Center . 1986: Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Library of Congress .

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18 Essays About The Immigrant Experience You Need To Read

These stories illuminate what it takes, and what it means, to uproot your life in one country and begin it again in a new one.

BuzzFeed Staff

Growing Up American In Gaza Taught Me What We Owe To Refugees — Rebecca Peterson Zeccola

"In Palestine, we could so easily have been treated as the enemy, but we were welcomed like family."

I’m Not OK With Being One Of The Lucky Muslims — Romaissaa Benzizoune

"This weekend’s immigration order doesn’t apply to me or my family; I’ll be fine. But so many others I know and love will not."

I Grew Up In The Rust Belt, But I'm Not In Any Of The Stories About It — Alia Hanna Habib

"It’s strange to see the media turn its attention to places like my hometown in coal-country Pennsylvania and find that my experience there, as part of the non -white working class, is still invisible."

Here’s What I’m Telling My Brown Son About Trump’s America — Mira Jacob

"Sometimes I wish I could ask America when, exactly, it made its mind up about us. The myth, of course, is that it hasn’t, that there is still a chance to mollify those who dictate the terms of our experience here, and then be allowed to chase success unfettered by their paranoia. To live, as it’s more commonly known, the American dream."

There’s No Recipe For Growing Up — Scaachi Koul

"My mom’s Kashmiri cooking has always tethered me to home. So it’s no wonder she won’t give me (all) the secrets to doing it myself."

How I Learned That Beauty Doesn’t Have To Hurt — Sonya Chung

"Growing up in a Korean American family, I absorbed the idea that any feeling of pleasure comes at a cost. But as I get older, I’m realizing it doesn’t have to work that way."

Why Brexit Has Broken My Heart — Bim Adewunmi

"As a child of immigrants, I am deeply ashamed that this is who we are."

I Found A Home In Clubs Like Pulse, In Cities Like Orlando — Rigoberto González

"I cherish the time I have spent in clubs like Pulse in cities like Orlando, where gay Latinos — the immigrants, the undocumented, and the first-generation Americans alike — gravitate because we love men and we love our homelands, and that’s one of the places our worlds converge."

Making Great Pho Is Hard, But Making A Life From Scratch Is Harder — Nicole Nguyen

"After fleeing Vietnam, my parents turned to food to teach us about what it means to be Vietnamese."

When Home Is Between Different Countries And Genders — Meredith Talusan

"I moved to the U.S. from the Philippines when I was 15, where I had been raised as a boy. About a decade later, I started to live as a woman and eventually transitioned. I think of migration and transition as two examples of the same process – moving from one home, one reality, to another."

I Found The House My Grandparents Abandoned in 1947 — Ahmed Ali Akbar

"So many Americans go to India to find themselves. But I went to find the history my family lost in the subcontinent’s Partition."

How I Became A Southern-Fried Nigerian — Israel Daramola

"I once felt torn between Nigeria and Florida, between jollof rice and fried alligator, but there is no real me without both."

Learning To Mourn In My Father's Country — Reggie Ugwu

"After my brother died and my father was partially paralyzed, my family traveled 7,000 miles in search of an old home, a new house, and the things we’d lost on the road in between."

How To Get Your Green Card In America — Sarah Mathews

"When you perform the act of audacity that is consolidating an entire life into a couple of suitcases and striking out to make your way, what is not American about that? When you leave the old country so that your daughters can have a good education and walk down their streets without fear, what is not American about that? When you flee violence and poverty to come to a land of plenty, when you are willing to learn new languages, to haul ass, to do twice as much work, what is not American about that?"

A Childhood Spent Inside A Chinese Restaurant — Susan Cheng

"Being one of the few Asians in my school was hard enough. Working at my parents’ Chinese restaurant didn’t make it any easier."

How I Learned To Celebrate Eid Al Adha In America — Zainab Shah

"I bent over backward to explain myself. 'From Pakistan,' I would say. 'Not a terrorist,' I almost added. But I didn’t — the joke would only be funny if racial profiling didn’t exist."

Texts From My Parents: What It Was Like To Leave Vietnam — Nicole Nguyen

"They did it for us, and I'll spend the rest of my life trying to make the most of it."

What It’s Like Speaking A Different Language From Your Parents — Zakia Uddin

"My parents and I communicate in an incomplete mash-up of Bengali and English. I sometimes wonder what we are missing."

Topics in this article

• Immigration

Column: We need immigrants more than ever. They keep hope in this country alive

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When I think about the American dream, I think of Julio Arana.

He was my student at Cal State Fullerton a decade ago, a crackerjack of a kid from Jalisco who didn’t know what he wanted to do with life but knew the United States was the place to do it in. Today, the 36-year-old is a real estate agent who owns seven properties, from Orange County to the Coachella Valley, and flips houses like a cook handles pancakes. But Arana prides himself most on helping young couples, Latinos and not, buy their first homes.

“I couldn’t have done this in Mexico,” he told me as we stood in front of his latest purchase, a beat-up 1925 Spanish Revival in Santa Ana just down the street from another house he owns. Long-haired, tanned and tattooed, Arana wore a stylish brown hat and a T-shirt with Emiliano Zapata drawn as the grinning skull logo of punk icons the Misfits . “The one thing this country still offers is that the little guy can get it.”

We were at his newest acquisition because he wanted me to see something: On the side of the house, on a wall behind a trellis near the driveway, was a bas-relief stucco swastika the size of an adult head. A previous owner was a World War II veteran, but Arana had no idea why the white-power emblem was there. A historical curio? Emblematic of the previous owner’s beliefs?

It didn’t matter: It was personal to Arana.

“The first property I bought, in Desert Hot Springs, I had to evict Nazis,” he said. “This is full circle.”

Drawing on an unprecedented poll, this series tells the stories of immigrant life in America today, putting their voices in the foreground.

Just a few moments earlier, we had spoken to his neighbor, Marco Chavez. Arana told him his story — he came to this country without papers as an 8-year-old — and the 61-year-old Chavez shared a bit of his: An immigrant from Morelos who bought his home in the early 2000s. His five children are college graduates. He just finished a living trust.

“My chamacos have come out good,” Chavez told us in Spanish, holding a coffee cup in one hand and a cigarette in another as he looked at his three vintage VW buses parked on the street. “We’ve all done good.”

Julio and I were getting ready to drive 10 minutes away, to a Santa Ana duplex where he was finishing up an ADU. “For us [immigrants] ... there’s all this opportunity around us. People leave their homelands out of despair, and their hope is gone. Here, there’s hope. I see it all around me.”

When my editor first told me that a nationwide L.A. Times/KFF poll found that immigrants are more optimistic about life in the United States than native-born Americans, my initial response was: story of my life.

I was raised in a run-down granny flat in Anaheim a stone’s throw from a lumberyard, the only place my immigrant parents could afford when they married in 1978. By the time I was 10 in 1989, my mother — a tomato canner — and my truck-driving dad had saved up enough to buy a post-World War II tract home in a better part of town.

World & Nation

In an increasingly pessimistic era, immigrants espouse a hallmark American trait — optimism

Immigrants to the U.S. face extensive challenges, but they still report high levels of optimism about their futures and trust in American institutions, a comprehensive survey has found.

Sept. 17, 2023

Within five years, our street went from majority white to almost exclusively Latino. Our former neighbors moved to Washington, Arizona and other states because, they told my parents, the neighborhood wasn’t “safe” anymore, and California was changing.

Thirty-five years later, my dad and youngest brother are still there, the mortgage paid off years ago . I own my own home. So does the sister that follows me.

My parents never explicitly told us about the American dream. Each grew up in wrenching poverty in Zacatecas, one of the poorest states in Mexico. They couldn’t give us much besides a roof over our heads and back-to-school clothes from Montgomery Ward, but their lives were an unspoken lesson: Life in this country is tough, but life back in the rancho was far harder. You’ve got a shot here — so make something of it, because we did.

The L.A. Times/KFF survey also revealed that Latino immigrants aren’t just optimistic, on some measures, they’re more optimistic than other immigrant groups. It’s a tendency that USC sociology professor Jody Agius Vallejo said “studies have found time and time again” — and that more than a few pundits find weird.

She has devoted her research to studying upper- and middle-class Latinos , whose stories of hope and achievement like that of my family and Julio are legion. That includes the family of her husband, immigrants from Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, who settled in Watts in the 1960s and established a pioneering Latino grocery chain .

“I do get frustrated when people are surprised that Latinos are optimistic,” Agius Vallejo said. “Why wouldn’t they [be]? We can’t discount the fact that Latinos have been subject to significant discrimination and segregation and still make something of themselves. It’s a point of pride for them.”

That’s why I roll my eyes when I hear Americans whine about how their country is ruined — and few are more histrionic than former President Trump. Just this July, he told a rapt crowd that “the American dream is being torn to shreds” and the country is “going to hell, and it’s going to hell very fast.”

Whiners: If you don’t like the U.S., leave. Leave it to immigrants.

When I think of the American dream, I think of my uncle, Ezequiel Miranda.

He, my late mother and three aunts came to the United States as children with my grandparents in the early 1960s. They picked crops near Hollister, Calif., before making their way down to Anaheim, where my grandfather, José Miranda, had picked and packed oranges in the 1920s in what was then a segregated city. My uncle dropped out of school in seventh grade, fearing what might happen after he beat up the white bully who had made his life hell for too long.

I still remember the granny flat in Anaheim that mi tío , his wife, Marbella, and five of his six children lived in when I was growing up in the 1980s. It was next to a muddy alley, in a barrio worse than ours. But my uncle, a member of Cement Masons Local 500 for more than 30 years who worked on projects including Disney California Adventure and what’s now called the Crypto.com Arena, lived the maxim he always told his children and us cousins: A trabajar . Get working.

He bought a small house in Anaheim, traded that one for a bigger one down the street and then settled into a two-story home with a swimming pool in Placentia, where he and Marbella still live. They’re finally empty-nesters: Last week, my cousin Placido, his wife and their two teenage daughters moved into a four-bedroom home in Anaheim after selling their condo during the pandemic and staying with his parents.

At 46, he’s the last of his siblings to own a home. His house is on the type of street where neighbors mistook mi tío for the gardener.

“When we bought it, it looked like the set of Jack Tripper’s apartment,” Plas said, referring to a character in the 1970s and ’80s sitcom “Three’s Company,” as he took me on a tour of his kitchen (I call my cousin Plas, and he calls me Gus. Assimilation!). He’s a delivery driver for Frito-Lay who didn’t go beyond community college but is probably the smartest person I know. He sells movie memorabilia and sneakers on EBay as a side hustle, once offering a slew of $1 white T-shirts online for $25 apiece.

New floorboards, cabinets, fixtures, lights and walls gleamed. The granite countertops were on their way.

“My dad came in, and he began to tear things out immediately,” Plas said. “My two handles for this drawer,” he continued, sheepishly shaking his head, “took an hour and a half to install.”

Ten languages, thousands of phone calls: Accurately polling immigrants posed unprecedented challenges

Carrying out the KFF/L.A. Times survey of immigrants required work far beyond the normal survey, but the result provides a unique source of information about America’s immigrant population.

We moved on to his backyard, where mi tío had trimmed hedges that the previous owner let overgrow. He’s now 70 but looks decades younger. I asked mi tío how he felt about how life turned out in the U.S.

“I go to one street, there’s one of my kids. Go to another, another,” he said in Spanish. He’s usually gregarious but now was soft-spoken. “I worked for 50 years. This is my dream.”

“The reason people don’t feel [the American dream] is attainable is because everything is just more expensive,” Plas said. “They almost resign themselves to saying, ‘I can’t buy a house.’

“But when you grow up with dirt floors and laminate roofs, that motivates you to reach for more. When we went to McDonald’s growing up, it was a special occasion. When my parents would buy ice cream, we’d all get just one spoonful and knew to appreciate it.”

“Now,” Plas concluded with his usual sly smile, “my daughters leave cereal in their bowl.”

The L.A. Times/KFF survey might not be news to you. It might even seem boring. But its findings are vital. It’s the template for how this country can move forward from the chaos and division that have afflicted us since the rise of Trump.

To adapt a phrase from Thomas Jefferson, the tree of liberty must be refreshed with immigrant hope.

The doom and gloom that too many Americans screech about on social media and in their personal lives — on both sides of the red-blue divide — is a betrayal of what brought their ancestors here, and what continues to attract people from across the world. Pessimism, not political differences, is what’s bringing down this country; the optimism of newcomers is our best shot to survive.

When I think about the American dream, I think about the bus that arrived Sept. 9 at Union Station from Brownsville, Texas . It’s the 13th such one-way trip since June arranged by the administration of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

He signed off on them shortly after L.A. declared itself a sanctuary city , meaning city personnel and resources can’t be used to help federal officials deport immigrants.

Abbott says he’s sending us migrants to protest the supposed lax security at the U.S.-Mexico border, but he’s really mocking the American dream . His moves are descended from Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for immigrants without legal status but was eventually ruled unconstitutional.

I grew up in that era, and its rank xenophobia propelled me to not just devote my life to fight back, but also to look for the good in this country instead of the bad. Because if my parents could do it, why not me?

Proposition 187 had the same effect on Angelica Salas , the longtime head of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her group is part of a coalition of nonprofits and faith groups called L.A. Welcomes Collective , which has helped to connect the migrants Abbott has kicked out of Texas with housing and relatives in the United States.

“They are the most patriotic individuals in our country because they’re always hoping that America’s ideals and purported values will happen in their lives,” Salas said of the immigrants she works with. “If it doesn’t, then they hope it happens in the lives of their children. And if it doesn’t for them? Then their grandchildren. Their tenacity to not give up is contagious. ”

That’s the spirit Americans need anew. Immigrants now, immigrants tomorrow, immigrants forever.

More to Read

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Aug. 29, 2024

Kids of Immigrants founder Daniel Buezo’s 5 favorite Latino businesses in L.A.

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New rental developments are changing the American dream of suburban homeownership

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Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, covering Southern California everything and a bunch of the West and beyond. He previously worked at OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for 15 years and editor for six, wrote a column called ¡Ask a Mexican! and is the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.” He’s the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.

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• Immigration and Migration

by Hasia Diner

• The Development of the West
• Populism and Agrarian Discontent
• The Gilded Age
• Empire Building

The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles, machines, steel, oil, rubber, and tools, among other finished products. They also ate foods grown in American soil and relied upon America’s iron ore, coal, and lumber, all transported from the hinterlands to the great shipping ports by American-built railroads. This frenzy of production transformed the United States in the decades following the Civil War, making it the most dynamic economic engine in the world.

None of this could have happened without a work force that sewed the clothing, dug the coal, forged the steel, operated the railroads, and stoked the fires of the many thousands of factories, mills, mines, and workshops that spread over the United States. The industrialization of America stimulated the vast expansion of its own domestic business and agricultural sectors as well. Workers in factories and mines needed food, housing, and a range of consumer goods. As factory employment grew and the population expanded, businesses responded by selling their wares to the workers, enabling them to then go out and work and keep the economy on its course. Not limited to the Northeast, which had been the center of industry earlier in the nineteenth century, industrialization transformed America, in no small measure as a result of massive immigration.

Those newcomers came primarily from Europe and constituted the bulk of the laborers who made industrialization possible. Statistics tell part of the story. In the decade from 1871 until 1880 more than 2,800,000 arrived, while the following ten-year period brought in over 5,000,000. In the subsequent two decades well over thirteen million arrived, with the period from 1901 to 1910 being the single largest decade of immigration. Clearly with numbers like this immigration was a serious issue in American life and became the focus of much political debate and contention. These numbers have to be thought of in percentage terms as well. As a point of contrast, in 1850, the foreign born made up 9.7 percent of the American population; by 1890 that figure stood at 14.7 percent.

The story of immigration to the United States in the industrial era also should be thought of in terms of where the immigrants came from. In the 1870s migration tended to come primarily from central and northern Europe, the countries of Scandinavia, Germany, England, Ireland (which although part of Great Britain had a unique and separate immigration history), and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By 1900 migration gradually shifted to the east and the south and most immigrants hailed from Italy, the Czarist empire, Roumania, and other places in southern and eastern Europe. Catholics predominated, with a significant influx of Eastern Orthodox also adding to America’s religious diversity. Immigration of the industrial era also saw the size of America’s Jewish population grow exponentially. In 1870 about 250,000 Jews lived in the United States, but the new migration that extended into the 1920s brought in an additional 3,000,000 Jews.

Not only Europeans made their way to the United States in these decades. Immigrants from Mexico, even from its more remote regions, began to arrive in the late nineteenth century, primarily to work on the railroads, and they created small enclaves as far north as Chicago before the beginning of the twentieth century. Women and men from Syria and Lebanon, mostly Christians, also arrived in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Few of them flocked to industrial work, but as peddlers and small shopkeepers they provided consumer goods to industrial workers and farmers, both native born and immigrant. Immigrants from the Punjab region, primarily Sikhs, arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s as well, and they joined railroad crews and logging camps. Some became farmers. Small numbers of immigrants also came from the Philippines, Japan, and various islands of the Caribbean.

The two largest non-European immigrant groups in this period included French Canadians, streaming south into New England from Quebec and the Maritime Provinces, and the Chinese. The two groups resembled each other in some ways. They each gravitated to a specific geographic region in the United States, the former to New England with its textile industry and the latter to California, and formed visible ethnic enclaves. But they had very different histories in the United States. French Canadian immigration was never restricted and even after the imposition of quotas in the 1920s, they could come and go as they chose across a largely porous border.

The Chinese story followed a very different course. The Chinese in fact were the only immigrants to ever be excluded specifically by nationality. When Congress enacted across-the-board immigration restriction in the 1920s, it did not exclude any one group. When Japanese immigration came to an end in 1908, it happened through a diplomatic agreement known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement.

The history of the Chinese stands in a class of its own. Between the end of the Civil War and 1882, about 300,000 Chinese immigrants had entered the United States. Anti-Chinese sentiment had been running high in California since the 1850s, and in 1882 the United States Congress passed the first piece of immigration restriction, of any kind, in the history of the nation. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States, although there were a few exempted categories, including students, merchants, and the children of naturalized citizens. The imposition of such a restriction ushered in a new era in American history, one in which the federal government moved, slowly, toward curtailing the uncapped flood of newcomers from abroad.

To many native-born Americans the influx of so many millions of foreigners, mostly Catholics and Jews, and most relatively poor and speakers of myriad languages, seemed threatening to the way of life they considered authentically American. A quick summary of the major developments of the years from the middle of the 1870s until 1900 shows how much the concern over immigration came to dominate national politics.

The trend toward government action vis-à-vis immigration may be said to have started with a US Supreme Court case in 1875, Henderson v. the Mayor of New York , as the opening salvo in a debate that raged in America over immigration. In that case the Court ruled that the various states could not regulate immigration individually from abroad as they chose, but that this power lay in the hands of Congress. Thus, the long-established practice of leaving immigration to the states it was overturned. Congress soon passed the first act of restriction, banning convicts and prostitutes from entering the United States. The first, and only, restriction of a specific group on the basis or national origin or race came in 1882 with the passage of a temporary Chinese Exclusion Act, which became permanent in 1900 by congressional act. In 1885 Congress passed the Foran Act, which prohibited the migration of contract labor, that is, women and men hired abroad and whose fare had been paid by an American employer. In order for these restrictions and regulations to work Congress had to create a bureaucracy and in 1891, under the aegis of the Treasury Department, it founded the Bureau of Immigration. So, too, in 1892 the immigrant-receiving station at Ellis Island opened its doors (with smaller stations in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Galveston, and San Francisco) making visible the regulatory process.

The 1890s saw not only the march toward regulation coordinated by the government, but also the emergence of organized citizen action against immigration. In 1895 a group of elite women and men in Boston founded the Immigration Restriction League with the goal of preserving the historic ethnic make-up of America—as defined by this group. They pushed for a literacy test, which passed in Congress in 1896, although President Grover Cleveland vetoed the measure. In the early twentieth century during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a few more categories of potential immigrants got added to the list of the undesirables, including the "feeble-minded," "imbeciles," carriers of various diseases, and anarchists.

This last category, anarchists, had a very specific origin, and tells us much about the rise of industrial America. In 1901 Leon Czolgosz, the son of immigrants and an anarchist, assassinated President William McKinley. This shocking event stoked American fears about political turbulence and radicalism, which they saw as a threat to the basic stability of the nation, and one associated with foreigners. As more and more Americans worked for industrial employers who could force their employees to endure whatever conditions the boss wanted, at whatever rate of pay the market could bear, more and more workers sought forms of action and organization to address their plight.

One event from each decade of this era can demonstrate the escalation of labor and radical action. In 1877—dubbed "the year of violence"—tens of thousands of workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, and elsewhere shut down the rail system for more than forty days in the Great Railway Strike. Local police across the strike regions used force to quell the strikes, and President Rutherford B. Hayes called in the Army to assist in this effort. A decade later, on May 4, 1886, a gathering in Haymarket Square in Chicago ended when a bomb was tossed into a group of police officers trying to break up the crowd. The police fired into the crowd and in the process created a group of martyrs to the cause of labor. In 1892 a strike at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mills of Carnegie Steel pitted the police and armed Pinkerton detectives against workers who had taken over the plant.

While immigrants alone did not participate in these strikes and in the labor and radical movements, many Americans in fact equated the two, and growing numbers of them and their political representatives were convinced that continued immigration harmed the country, threatening the coherence and stability of the nation.

Not all Americans, however, put the blame on the immigrants; some saw unbridled capitalism as the source of the social unrest. While some in the Progressive movement harbored anti-immigrant sentiment, many in the movement believed that the fault lay with the system and not with the women and men who had come to the United States to make a living and who fueled the nation’s industrial output and made its wealth possible.

In 1890 a New York journalist, himself an immigrant from Denmark, Jacob Riis, castigated the greed of landlords and employers for immiserating the lives of the city’s cigar workers, garment shop employees, and other laborers. His expose How the Other Half Lives , on conditions among the poor in New York City, complete with photographs, was widely read and led to legislative action in New York . A year earlier two women in Chicago, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, had opened up a settlement house, Hull House, in the packinghouse district where large numbers of Polish, Italian, and eastern European Jews lived and labored. Starr and Addams experimented with various ways to both improve the lives of the immigrant poor and advocate for them. Settlement houses like Hull House sprang up in Boston, Baltimore, New York, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and in all the large cities to which immigrants had gone, drawn by the magnet of the jobs available in American industry. Those immigrant workers and the others across the country played a pivotal role in providing the labor necessary to create industrial America.

Hasia Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. Among her publications are From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the US in a Global Age (2007) and We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (2009).

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Guest Essay

I’m the Republican Governor of Ohio. Here Is the Truth About Springfield.

By Mike DeWine

Mr. DeWine, a Republican, is the governor of Ohio.

I was born in Springfield, Ohio. My wife, Fran, and I have lived our entire lives less than 10 miles from this city.

When we were dating in high school, we would go there to see movies at the Regent or State Theater or to eat fried clams at Howard Johnson’s. I remember Fran taking the bus about eight miles from our hometown, Yellow Springs, to Springfield to shop at Wren’s Department Store. Over the years, we’ve eaten countless doughnuts from Schuler’s Bakery, worshiped at St. Raphael Catholic Church and we logged many work hours there when I represented Springfield in the U.S. House and Senate.

Springfield has a rich history of providing refuge for the oppressed and being a place of opportunity. As a stop on the Underground Railroad, the Gammon House, which still stands, was a safe haven for escaped slaves seeking freedom. And, as a stop on the Old National Road, America’s first east/west federal highway, Springfield attracted many settlers both before and after the Civil War. Immigrants from Ireland, Greece, Germany, Italy and other countries helped build the city into what it is today.

For a long time, commerce and manufacturing flourished in Springfield, which earned the title “Champion City” after the founding there of the agriculture implement giant Champion Machine Company.

But the city hit tough times in the 1980s and 1990s, falling into serious economic decline as manufacturing, rail commerce and good-paying jobs dwindled. Now, however, Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation. Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs.

They are there legally. They are there to work.

It is disappointing to me that Springfield has become the epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy, because it has long been a community of great diversity. Fran and I were reminded of this when we attended Mass at St. Raphael this past Sunday and stopped at the nearby Groceryland on our way home. We talked with community members from many backgrounds who are understandably concerned about the negative things being said about their city in news reports and on social media.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Immigration to America — Immigrant Experience and Challenges

Immigrant Experience and Challenges

• Categories: Immigration to America Overcoming Challenges Personal Experience

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Published: Aug 24, 2023

Words: 661 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Leaving home, embracing the unknown, challenges of adaptation and cultural transition, the pursuit of education: bridging cultures, preserving cultural identity, overcoming stereotypes and building bridges, the american dream: a journey of possibilities, a message of hope for the future, conclusion: a journey of identity and aspiration.

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