In the past two years, President Donald Trump has enforced several unnecessarily harsh policies targeting both legal and illegal immigrants.
In addition to making it difficult for legal immigrants to obtain H-1B visas, which allow U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations, Trump has allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport illegal immigrants more easily under a zero tolerance policy. Although the president signed an executive order to repeal the family-separating act in June, appalling issues still remain. Instead of persecuting these immigrants, the government should focus on creating feasible ways for them to obtain citizenship.
These policies are simply brutal. Since the adoption of a new zero-tolerance policy, ICE has prosecuted as many border crossers as possible. Because the Justice Department can only prosecute migrant adults, many children were forcefully separated from their families. Families seeking refuge were torn apart, and hysterical parents spent weeks searching for their children. In fact, since October 2017, a total of 2,300 children have been separated from their parents. In extreme cases, some children cannot even recognize their own parents after being parted for several months. Additionally, separated children were often forcibly given psychotropic drugs without parental consent to maintain order in the facilities they were kept. Around 500 children still remain separated from their families despite promises to reunite them.
The Trump administration has tried to justify its actions by asserting that immigrants are dangerous. However, many of these allegedly threatening immigrants merely wish to escape from countries experiencing record levels of violence—notably, the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The United Nations Refugee Agency calculated that asylum requests increased by 25 percent between 2016 and 2017.
The government should enforce a policy that resembles Obama’s immigration policy: only dangerous individuals are to be detained and undocumented families must be released into the civil court system. This policy will be sufficient if the true intent of these new policies is to catch dangerous criminals.
Immigrants should be protected here, not just because it is right but also because they contribute to America’s success. In fact, they are crucial to America by furthering our economy. Studies have found that 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies, such as Google, were founded by immigrants or their children. The Obama White House Archives calculated that immigrants boost American workers’ earnings by a projected 1.8 percent. Furthermore, the American Immigration Council reported that immigrants had $926.9 billion in spending power in 2014. In light of this, the government should consider alternatives to deportation.
Although this immigration problem has recently become a controversial issue, xenophobia has always been present in America. However, everyone in the U.S. should be given equal opportunity to pursue the American dream. This idea, the principle on which America was founded, should be perpetually upheld.