THE IMMIGRATION RAGE IN THE UNITED STATES!

THE IMMIGRATION RAGE IN THE UNITED STATES!

(Council on Foreign Relations, Brianna Lee, Associated Press)

(Paul J. Weber, Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, Heaven’s Door, George Borjas)

(Immigration Time Bomb, Richard Lamm, Gary Imhoff, Mark Cooper, James T. Fawcett)

(Brookings Institute, Nancy Foner, Lisa Lowe, Alejandro Portes, Robert L. Bach, Frazer Chronicle)

 

An immigration rage in the United States, let’s take a quick look at the word RAGE and the meaning of the word…..my handy dandy spell-checker has the following to say: “extreme anger, angry outburst, object or fad, force or intensity, strong passion or enthusiasm, act with or feel rage, the word is a noun, and can be an intransitive verb.” Wow, am I glad that I don’t delve much into the English language, I’d get lost really fast.

Seems to me as if the long and the short of whatever debate is RAGING on Capitol Hill with regards to the question of immigration isn’t complicated, and the subject doesn’t really divide either political party, it’s really not a divisive issue at all. The question of illegals has been around for years, whenever American industry needs a bumper crop of cheap labor, both parties turn to other more divisive topics…..until the need for cheap labor is gone, that’s when the question comes up as a topic of divisiveness.

Immigration to the United States has happened in four epochs: during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, when almost everybody could have been considered to be immigrant, and the American Indian the only true native to the country. The middle 19^th century, the start of the 20^th century, and post 1965 rounded out the major influx of foreign born people. Each period brought distinct national groups, races, and ethnicities to America.

Most of those people that arrived literally by the boat load, in the middle 1860’s were Japanese and Chinamen and were recruited to build the great railroads of not only the western states, but the Upper Mid-Western states of Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan for the new iron mining industry and the steel mills. To a lesser degree the East Coast, which already had thousands of miles of railway did take advantage of the oriental workforce to add another valuable railway system that opened up much new coal mining territory.

Around the turn of the 20^th century, more than 1,200,000 persons entered the United States, and by 1910 more than 13.5 million immigrants were living in the United States, working all kinds of mining, construction and mill jobs, It got so bad that in 1921 Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924.

There hadn’t been an immigration act, or law passed in the United States since the Page Act of 1875, all of these acts and laws were enacted to curtail the booming foreign immigration to the U.S. that had flooded the labor market with thousands of cheap laborers. In 1929, 279,678 immigrants were recorded and admitted into the country, however by 1933 only 23,068 admitted. In fact during the depression years (1930-1939) more Americans immigrated to other countries than were admitted into the U.S.

CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION INTO THE UNITED STATES

There are/were all sorts of ramifications attached to immigration to the United States, for not only the immigrants but American citizens as well. Years ago, early in the 20^th century, economic instability brought the pressure on the poor to offer up their children for labor in the agriculture industry, the coal and iron mines as well as the still mills.

Some kids as young as 5 were expected to carry their own weight, helping to supplement the rest of the family’s income. There was a whole new generation of illicit and poorly educated children that got their educating through learning how to count the number of coal clinkers that they removed from coal or how many buckets of slag that they removed from the iron ore piles.

Until the 1930’s most legal immigrants were male, this trend continued until the 1990’s when women accounted for half of the legal immigration to the U.S. and it was during these times, the 1990’s, when people between 15 and 34 were substantially overrepresented. After about 1980 immigrants were more likely to be married with families than at any time during either the legal or illegally immigrated to the U.S.

Without a doubt an influx of immigration workers competed for lower end jobs across the industrial spectrum, and brought the minimum wage down, directly benefiting U.S. business in the agriculture fields, as well as light manufacturing, warehouse work, temporary service organizations, and the food service from dishwashing to a breakfast and lunch cook.

Immigration population gravitates to their own kind, living in areas where people of their heritage and background have settled. The problem herein is that these people living with people who share the same background, speak the same language and worship the same deity fail to gain an education with regards to English, laws, and the rules and regulations that govern our society.

By the 1970’s immigrants accounted for 4.7% of U.S. population, by 1980, 6.2%, and by 2000, immigrants made up an estimated 12.5% of the population. As of 2010, a quarter of the residents of the United States under the age of 18 are immigrants, or immigrants’ children. 8% of all babies born in the United States by 2010 belonged to illegal immigrants.

Legal immigration in the United States increased from 250,000 in the 1930’s to 2.5 million in the 1950’s to 4.5 million in the 70’s to more than 7.3 million in the 1980’s to leveling off at about 10 million in the 1990;s. The immigration glut in the 1990’s lead to a 57.4% increase in foreign born population by 2000.

WE HAVE A PROBLEM

To say the least, the United States has a problem that by now can’t be taken care of by immigration laws that are already on the books. Immigration laws have been in place for decades, lawmakers simply didn’t want to enforce them, and now we have this problem…..one that won’t go away, one that is effecting lower end employment, not only wages, but workplace safety, health issues, and believe it or not, child labor infractions.

We need our lawmakers to sit down, and hammer new and realistic criteria that’ll rule immigration laws here in the United States. People on both sides of the political spectrum need to come together, people that are living, working, and collecting any kind of benefits without going through proper channels here in the United States have absolutely no rights…..of any kind, they’re illegal, and by being here are breaking the laws of the United States. I could care less how anybody feels about the laws that are being broken, they are the laws of our land, so don’t cry to me about the poor immigrant who’s being taken advantage of by his country as well as mine.

GET LEGAL

HAVE A NICE DAY!