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Taylor WingateCheryl DuffusEnglish 10129 November 2012Argument Incorporating ResearchEric Ruark said, “There is no shortage of labor in the United States. There is instead a shortage of employers who are willing to pay a fair wage to American workers and too many employers who are willing to break the law to hire illegal aliens. This puts added pressure on business owners who want to treat their workers fairly and abide by the law because their competitors who hire illegal workers have an unfair competitive advantage.” This was written in a report that Ruark did for a program he works with called FAIR which stands for Federation for American Immigration Reform and they work to get immigration policies reformed so that they are in favor of the public. Like that of Ruark, I believe that there is not a lack of jobs in the U.S. but simply companies are getting away with hiring illegal immigrants and not having to worry about providing them with health insurance, while also paying them substantially less than what an American worker would be paid to do the same job. Though there have been many attempts at trying to regulate the illegal immigrant hire rate, most have failed and have only cause chaos rather than provide order in the workplace. For example, in Marc Rosenblum’s report, Alternatives to Migration in the United States: Policy Issues and Economic Impact, he talks about the ways that government has tried to regulate immigrants’ ability to take American’s jobs. He addresses the idea of giving companies incentives to hire American workers rather than immigrants. For example, a company could receive more federal monies to use at the their discretion if they have a proven track record of hiring only American workers over illegal immigrants. Furthermore, he goes on to propose the idea of providing other countries with similar jobs as we have in America, or having some sort of deterrence tactic that allows potential illegal immigrants to focus on the jobs they have in their country, rather than trying to move to the U.S. and work. Most Americans share the belief that if we are able to either keep these illegal immigrants in their own country or prevent them from working in American jobs when they get here, we are ultimately cutting down on the illegal immigration hire rate. Though this may not be entirely true in the sense that illegal immigrants will still try to come to America, the hope that they will be prevented from finding work when they get here stands, which ultimately gives them less incentive to travel in the first place. Since we as a nation are faced with illegal immigration issues, we have to examine the effects on society and decide whether it is a battle that we want to fight. In Linda McCauley’s, Immigrant Workers in the United States article, she discusses the effects that immigrants working in the U.S. have on our healthcare industry, as well as the reasons immigrants are hired over native workers. According to a study done by Mosisa in 2002, immigrants are paid 76 cents for every dollar that an American would be paid. Some companies will, knowing that they can take the cheap way out, hire an illegal immigrant over a qualified American citizen since they do not have to worry about the fines that are attached to doing so, and do not have to pay that worker as much as they would an American citizen. There are fines in place for companies that are found to have hired illegal immigrants without first checking all American workers to ensure that there is no one that could do that same job, though they are rarely enforced. There should be stricter enforcement of these fines but sadly there is not. On the healthcare aspect of the effects of illegal immigration, most immigrants are able to get their healthcare specifically through workers compensation incidents. Immigrants are able to easily slip through the system and get free medical care, by using a fake social security number as well as falsified documents. In McCauley’s article, the idea of America having to continually change it’s healthcare patterns in an effort to accommodate for the increase of illegal immigrants obtaining healthcare is expressed. It seems through this research that America is condoning illegal immigration but it is as well changing its policies to fit the comfort of the immigrants. Most Americans are aware that we are taxed to pay for government expenditures as well as healthcare. In order for the federal government to provide for illegal immigrants they raise taxes on the working class citizens. Though it is not the federal governments responsibility to provide for these immigrants, as a nation we feel an inherent responsibility to do so. Illegal immigrants are able to falsify information to get paychecks, and if they do not do so they are paid under the table. According to research done by Ramanujan Nadadur illegal immigrants do pay taxes, typically through taxes taken directly out of their paychecks, but they do not pay anywhere near the amount that they use of tax dollars each year. For example, “According to Passel (2005), 19 per cent of immigrant income and payroll taxes were paid by undocumented immigrants in 2004 while undocumented immigrants made up 29 per cent of the immigration population in that year” (Nadadur). Needless to say, illegal immigrants make up more than 25 percent of the population while less than 20 percent of that population pays taxes to the federal government. On the contrary, some research has found that there are economic benefits to illegal immigration. Statistics show that, “24.6 percent of adult immigrants are aged 25 to 34 and 28.3 percent are 35 to 44 years old” (West 433). To look on the positive side of illegal immigration, most young immigrants are more likely to work rather than need assistance from the government, which is of no cost to us as Americans. While older illegal immigrants typically rely on government assistance that can be rather costly to us. Older immigrants may require more hospitalization and ultimately more medical care which costs American tax dollars that could be used elsewhere to further education or build better roads. While most Americans would choose to disagree with this because they dwell on the ideas that illegal immigrants are taking away their jobs and their healthcare, some choose to accept that there will be illegal immigrants in America and try to look at the benefits of it, rather than only the costs of it. The idea that American’s are lazy stands through this argument. Employers choose the easier and cheaper of the two roads to take. They will typically hire illegal immigrants over native citizens in an effort to save a few dollars by not having to provide healthcare benefits and a “normal” pay. In an effort to ultimately prevent immigrants from coming to America I believe that having stricter laws on employers and actually enforcing them would allow for a new beginning. If there is not a change within the industries that continually hire illegal immigrants, Americans could potentially lose all or most of their jobs.Works CitedMcCauley, LA. "Immigrant Workers In The United States: Recent Trends, Vulnerable Populations, And Challenges For Occupational Health." AAOHN Journal 53.7 (2005): 313-319. CINAHL Plus with Full Text. Web. 8 Nov. 2012.Nadadur, Ramanujan. "Illegal Immigration: A Positive Economic Contribution To The United States." Journal Of Ethnic & Migration Studies 35.6 (2009): 1037-1052. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Nov. 2012.Rosenblum, Marc R. Alternatives to Migration in the United States: Policy Issues and Economic Impact. Rep. , 13 Apr. 2012. Web. 8 Nov. 2012.Ruark, Eric. Amnesty and the American Worker. Rep. FAIR HORIZON PRESS, Mar. 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2012.WEST, DARRELL M. "The Costs And Benefits Of Immigration." Political Science Quarterly 126.3 (2011): 427. MasterFILE Complete. Web. 8 Nov. 2012. ................
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