Border Control

Border Control

Original Thesis Statement

The perpetual increase of illegal immigrants continues to be a major problem for the United States. Several States have deployed new technologies, and security forces to its borders with Mexico. However, we continue to determine the inadequacy of border security, and it remains a major challenge.

Revised Thesis Statement

By showing the decreased border security, the lack of finances to cover security, and lack of forces, the number of illegal immigrants entering the US will continue to increase.

Introduction

There is a limit to our powers of assimilation, and when it is exceeded the country suffers from something very like indigestion.

New York Times editorial

Statements like above are now being heard more often in newspapers, radio talk shows and state and national legislatures. Public opinion polls indicate that a strong and consistent majority of Americans feel the nation's immigration policy is too liberal and needs to be changed. Politicians from both major parties are developing and presenting proposals to increase security at the country's borders, streamline the cumbersome and often ineffective procedures for deporting illegal immigrants, and reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the country.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the issue of what sort of immigration policy was appropriate had taken center stage in the United States. The presence of large numbers of illegal immigrants, mostly from Latin America, aroused substantial concern that these people might be taking jobs from native-born Americans. Although it was technically illegal, even under the 1986 law, for employers to hire undocumented immigrants, illegal immigrants provided a substantial supply of labor for industries, the hotel, construction, and building maintenance industries in particular that had low margins and in which labor costs played crucial roles in profitability.

Defenders of immigrants asserted that many of the jobs they took were jobs Americans shunned. Books appeared supporting both sides of the issue, For example, George Borjas argued in Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy (1990) that statistical analysis showed that the presence of immigrants, including those illegally in the United States (Smith & Edmonston, pp. 344), had a very small negative effect on the wages of American citizens. On the other side, in Mass Immigration and the National Interest: Policy Directions for the New Century (2003), Vernon Briggs, Jr., argued that the presence of perhaps as many as 11 million illegal immigrants had a profound effect on the national economy.

Border Control

The present-day border was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48), and by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, a government purchase of roughly 30,000 acres of Mexican land in present-day Arizona and New Mexico. After the border was drawn, many Mexicans found themselves living in the U.S., where a number of them were treated as second-class citizens by white settlers. Consequently, many Mexican people and historians still regard the border as an artificial boundary imposed on a minority population.

The border was further fortified during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan (R, 1981-89) and George Bush (R, ...