Immigration is one of the biggest debates among the American government and public. One side is pro-immigration and the other, not so much. The biggest debate among the right is crime, jobs, and most of all money. Now, there are immigrants who come to this country who seek to bring drugs and crime, but the immigrants who have been targeted the most these past four years are the ones who came seeking asylum. That is because there is a huge generalization that undocumented immigrants are criminals. They commit crime and take our American jobs. The issue under the last administration is that the generalization led to the separation of families who came to trust the America that citizens love to pride themselves on. They believed they were coming to the “greatest country in the world.” It is important that we look at these arguments and figure out what is valid and what is not.

As much as America does not like to admit it, immigrants do the jobs that we have little to no interest in. That does not mean we are lazy, it just means that we, as citizens, have more opportunity to do the less physically demanding jobs. According to an article published by Brookings, an organization with over 300 leading experts in government and academia, Felbab Brown explains that immigrants are not really stealing any jobs and the impact “of immigrant labor on the wages is low.” Brown explains that undocumented workers often do the jobs that native-born workers do not want to do. The real question is why do people care that undocumented immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans have the privilege of not wanting to do, especially if according to the Center for Immigration Studies, “illegal immigrants never make a majority of any jobs.”

I do not know where most of the public is getting their information about welfare, but the majority of people on welfare are white people, not undoumented immigrants. I am all for helping those in need. America should never turn their backs on poorer Americans simply because they are poor.

The right is more about hard work and less about “government handouts.” Yet, they seem to care more about the American people who are on welfare when illegal immigrants are on it too. It should be obvious that illegal immigrants can not get government assistance simply because they are illegal. According to the National Immigration Forum, “undocumented immigrants, including DACA holders, are ineligible to receive most federal public benefits” and they put more money than they take out into these benefit programs because they use them at lower rates than “that of U.S. born citizens.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit that serves on a non-partisan source of facts, also stated that undocumented immigrants have a high risk of being uninsured “because they have limited access to coverage options.” The argument about undocumented immigrants on welfare is invalid from the right because they do not even support government assistance in the first place, but yet they feel the need to save welfare assistance for the American people because a minor amount of undocumented immigrants are using it.

The generalization that all illegal immigrants are criminals who bring drugs and crime is a dangerous view. In “Separated” written by Jacob Soboroff, he discusses the trip to the border where he was witnessing a guard removing drugs from a vehicle. The guard stated that most illegal drugs come through legal ports of entry. Even USA Today reported that same statement with evidence to back it up. “According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, 90% of heroin seized along the border, 88% of cocaine, 87% of methamphetamine, and 80% of fentanyl in the first 11 months of the 2018 fiscal year was caught trying to be smuggled in at legal crossing points” and the way these drugs get here have not changed. The people who do bring the drugs and the crime do not come to America to hang around. They come to do illegal business through legal entries and then leave. They work in Mexico and are not staying to get caught. The wall that the previous administration tried to build (which much of nothing got done)  kept out no one, but people fleeing dire situations. It may not be America’s job to take care of Mexico’s issues when it comes to their citizens, but the “greatest country in the world” should have a moral obligation to help those seeking it in our country especially if we are going to be an America that mainly prides itself on christian values. The drugs and the crime are not coming through at the border at the rates they are through legal entries, so what is America truly trying to keep out?

The Biden administration has a serious issue on its hands now. They have to reunite families separated at the border and get things done when it comes to immigration reform. The current immigration system we have is unproductive and needs changing. Coming to this country legally is not easy and some people do not have time to wait years to be able to get them and their family safe. That is what most illegal immigrants who cross the border are doing: the best option for them and their families and who is America to deny that right to anyone or punish them for doing so. Fixing immigration is less about deporting working immigrants and more about creating an immigration system that not only keeps Americans safe, but gives immigrants a way to be able to protect themselves and their families without taking away their rights. Besides if America really cared about illegal immigration, they would care most about visa overstay since more legal immigrants overstay visas than the illegal ones that cross the Mexico border