Immigrants

Immigrants

What is the chance of hailing a taxi, getting manicure done, stopping by convenience store and got served by immigrants from India, Korea, China or some countries you have never heard of before? The chances are quite high. Immigrants are everywhere. It is sometimes said that immigrants take jobs away from Americans. Being an international student has put me under “immigrant” status. That is why I wanted to find out more about the immigration issue by looking at the sources like the BBC, CQ Researcher, and US Census. Immigrants built his countries and the public is now debating whether this country still needs immigrants. As long as there are arguments which are in response to the accusation of immigrants taking jobs from Americans, contributing insignificantly to the country and the American moral standard, we need to make sure that immigrants take an important role in America history and they are contributing for this country day by day.

First, in response to the argument that immigrants take jobs from Americans, BBC said no and even pointed out the opposite. There are different groups of immigrants. For example, those who come from Europe and Asia tend to be highly intellectual and often have graduate degrees. Those people usually work as software engineers and there is always a high demand of labor in those industries that Americans alone will not meet. Immigrants without or with some minimal education take low paying jobs that Americans don’t want such as farming. According to the 2000 US Census, more than 36 percents of immigrant workers earned less than twenty-thousand dollars per year compared to only 21,3 percents of American workers. There is evidence of immigrants taking the worst jobs or the government has to hire workers from developing countries to do those jobs. A news article on BBC indicates that “there is a shockingly high rate of unemployment that will not take the jobs the illegal workers do.”

More importantly, a recent work by Howland and Nguyen, professors in University of Maryland, in 2006 showed that immigrants helped retain computer manufacturing, apparel, and electronics in the US from 1990 to 2000. According to the study, for every one thousand additional working Hispanic residents in the US in 1990, twenty-six jobs in apparel were added to the economy. Similarly, for every one thousand addition working Asians in the US in 1990, twenty-three additional jobs were added. With all those real facts, does it worth blaming the immigrants for causing unemployment, for taking the jobs that are never been considered by the Americans?

Second, I totally agree that immigrants’ contribution to this country must