Despite its partisan tendencies, Congress finally passed a clean Homeland Security funding bill, which means we won’t have a government shutdown.
President Obama issued an executive order at the end of 2014 essentially offering amnesty — with strings attached — to illegal immigrants in America, leading to a disagreement of Homeland Security funding.
If you paid taxes, had no major criminal record and lived in America for the past five years, the Obama administration won’t deport you. The executive order would allow about 5 million undocumented immigrants to stay in America.
Spoiler alert: The Republicans weren’t happy about this executive order. They felt Obama was crossing the boundary of his authority, and they planned to combat this gross presidential overreach by passing a Homeland Security funding bill that would undo his executive order.
After Democratic filibusters and veto threats, the GOP caved and decided it would be in America’s best interest to fund Homeland Security. The alternative would have been a partial government shutdown. Thankfully they learned their lesson from the last shutdown in 2013.
The GOP’s reluctance to fund a bill keeping Obama’s executive order intact reflects an overall American distaste for immigrants.
Americans argue immigrants take their jobs for lower wages. Immigrants come into our country illegally and don’t pay their fair share of taxes. They take our jobs and money and offer us nothing in return.
Whether that’s true, the simplest and most logical answer would be to make immigration easier in America.
Making immigration into the U.S. easier would boost our tax revenue while also securing jobs for Americans. Employers wouldn’t be able to get away with paying illegal immigrants lower wages, so they’d instead hire the most efficient workers.
If there was a quick pathway to citizenship, more immigrants would come to the U.S. through the system as opposed to coming here illegally. Once they’re legal citizens or legal working residents, they’d have to work at the same wages as Americans and pay American taxes.
We have a problem in America: Our debt grows every year, and we have fewer people to pay off that debt because our birth rate is declining.
People are dying faster than they’re being born in this country, and people are having fewer babies than before. Some might argue we’re already overpopulated, so the low birth rate is a good thing.
But fewer young people in America means fewer workers. With a smaller working population, fewer people can pay into Social Security and Medicare, which means those programs aren’t being replenished fast enough. We basically won’t get to retire.
And say goodbye to programs like TOPS and Pell Grants. Because fewer people are working, the government won’t be able to sustain those programs anymore. It’ll be too worried about taking care of an aging generation.
This trend is happening all over Western Europe. The key difference, however, lies in immigration.
The U.S. still dominates the world when it comes to taking in immigrants. That’s the only thing keeping our population at a sustainable level.
America as we know it was founded by immigrants. They used to be our largest source of citizens. According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 41.3 million immigrants live in the United States, which is higher than any other nation.
Closing our borders completely and deporting all immigrants would remove about 13 percent of the US population. If you deport their children and grandchildren with them, you’re removing 80 million people, or about a quarter of America’s population.
Obviously, there are violent and destructive people that come into our country, and we should definitely not let those people stay.
However, it would be counterproductive to deny citizenship to all immigrants because of a violent minority. Most people come here for opportunities to work and get ahead in life, you know — the American Dream.
We need more working people in this country so we can pay off our debt and pay into our social safety net programs. So if Congress is going to pass an immigration law, it should pass one that allows more people to come into this country.
Cody Sibley is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Opelousas, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter at @CodySibley.