OP/ED: "Undocumented" Immigration Killing America, page 1

President George W. Bush recently passed a bill allowing current illegal immigrants in the United States to stay in the country under certain conditions. The conditions are that these illegals prove that they can become financially independant within 3 years and to register as illegals with governmental agencies.

These illegals would then be allowed to move their families from Mexico to the United States as a condition of that financial stability. This is without mentioning that 35% of all illegals rely on welfare and other governmental aid programs. America says we need illegals to keep our economy going, but I say otherwise. These illegals are taking away jobs which would generally be given to individuals with limited education, but otherwise legal citizens. The unemployment rate in America is rather low at the time being, according to statistics, but the fact is many of these statistics don't include individuals who have given up on the job search.

While many of the jobs illegals have tend to be low paying, minimum wage type jobs the reason why some of these jobs are so low paying is because of the ease of companies to implement illegals into the workplace at a lower payroll cost. Illegal's will work for less money because they really don't have much choice in the matter. This equates to keeping these job's and many other jobs wages down to a minimum.

These illegals have taken away countless amounts of job's that legal American citizen's should be getting. Manufacturing which has been America's backbone for nearly a century has used these illegals as a way to lower payroll, to cut back on quality in order to increase production and keep the market stagnant for the last few years.

The problem with these illegals wouldn't be so bad if we followed what we did when our European immigrants entered the state's earlier in our countries history. These Europeans had to be implemented into our society slowly through governmental programs that helped them learn the English language, to teach them our countries history, and to teach them skills needed to succeed and to slowly become part of America. We currently let the immagrant's (legal/illegal) in without any implementation into our society. No language lessons, no help in finding jobs and no lessons teaching our history. These individuals that are immigrating to our country come here and complain that America is different from their culture. Some complaining that burka's should be allowed to wear when taking DL pictures, to argue that Spanish should be the official language of certain area's and complaining about our christian background.
These people need to understand, America already has a culture of our own, and it has worked great for over 200 years. If they want to come to our country, not only should they do so legally they should also take time to learn our culture, our language and our history. Because without the above knowledge, you will never be a true American.

And when did we decide that we will reward crime in America? Being an illegal in the United States is a crime, so why is the Bush administration rewarding them with the precious freedom that everyone else has to recieve legally. The fact of the matter is these illegals have kept wages down, left blue collar legal worker's in the dust and have held back the economy in more way's than one. America may be the land of the free, but we also a land of justice and Bush has just overlooked that portion of our nation so he can gain a few votes in California. When you buy your next "Made In America" item, just remember, its not really American's that made your item.

[Edited on 10-1-2004 by SkepticOverlord]