Monday, February 26, 2007

Illegal Immigration: How About Walk n a Tightrope?

If there were people who still believed in American dream, now would be the time to think again. The U.S government starts to chase illegal immigrants and people who hire them. Federal immigration officials carrying out raids in 17 states, including at locations in Southern California, have arrested almost 200 illegal immigrants working for a janitorial company and filed criminal charges against the firm's top three officials. It means more than crime charged for firm’s top three executives and 200 illegal immigrants arrested. There are about 10 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. 10 million people willingly submit to high risk, high expenses and even their lives in order to come to America only because they believe that they would have better chances and better life in America. However, America started to kill even the little hopes they have.

Simply America is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. For most illegal immigrants, the U.S has higher living condition and higher minimum wage compared to the countries that they come from. Even though they are all aware that it is illegal, many people are willing to take that risk because they are more valuable in the U.S, which means that more profit are guaranteed when they do the same job here. Therefore, most of 10 million people are willing to do the hardest work at minimum wage or less than minimum wage in America. Americans don’t have to do hard work at minimum wage.

The reason that America is able to have stable minimum wage for long time is due to the contribution of illegal immigrants. Economical contribution that illegal immigrants make to America is essential. What if these 10 million people stopped working, the moment they stopped, minimum wage would go up because unskilled workers are needed, but Americans would avoid hard and dirty work at minimum wage, and it would affect all the price of products and services produced in the U.S. Higher wage, which is higher cost for companies, would damage a lot of businesses. Many companies would have to exit the market (closed). Demand for education would decrease because high wage is guaranteed for the uneducated (unskilled), so it would affect schools, tuition and even educated people, and it would decrease the productivity of whole country. Internationally, the U.S would lose price competitiveness, and it would affect domestic economy as well.

There are things that we hate, but we simply cannot live without like bad experiences and memories. We even try to develop a pill to forget what we remember. If we could only remember things that we wish to remember, it would not be our whole life because bad memories are a part of our life. Whether we want or not, illegal immigrants are already a part of our society that we cannot live without.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting to know.