Foreign Policy, and Why It Must Change | Teen Ink

Foreign Policy, and Why It Must Change

November 8, 2013
By Anonymous

A very big problem facing the United States today is that of the foreign immigrants wanting to get into our wonderful country. As much as we’d love to welcome the whole world in, there’s simply not enough space, and so we have a little thing we like to call foreign policy, which dictates how we treat and accept foreign immigrants. This is very important because it affects people of all nationalities trying to get into America, not just Mexicans, contrary to popular belief. In order to enter the country, a hopeful has to apply for a visa to get into the country as a resident, and having lived there for ten years, can apply to become a citizen. This is a very time-consuming process, as is to be expected due to the volume of applicants to become residents of the US. After completing this process, you are a tax-paying, benefits-receiving citizen. However, illegal immigrants can take away jobs from rightful legal citizens, don’t pay taxes, and 9 times out of 10 are more of a drag on society than productive.

This is extremely relevant due to the fact that there are 6,650,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico alone. That’s 80% of the size of New York City. And none of those people are paying taxes, most of them aren’t even sending their children to school. This leads to lowering of the average intelligence and is bad for the country in every way. And although the US government deports some undocumented immigrants, they only deport those who have committed a crime, and are likely to ignore the vast majority of the ones just living their lives and minding their own business.

We need to do something about this to make it easier for immigrants to become official parts of our society, to contribute and be assisted, and all without a decade and a half long process to demotivate them. People want to come to the US to escape whatever horrible conditions they're living in, and the current process in place for that takes too long for them to wait. It's far easier to climb a fence and run than it is to fill out endless paperwork and wait.

There are many ways to get this stance on foreign policy to be changed. There are plenty of petitions out there, plenty of acts to support, such as DREAM and H.R. 4437. The issue is that in order for those to pass, politicians need to be voted into office to support them. And as the people who are affected by these the most cannot vote, it's up to legal citizens to get these laws passed.

There are also many organizations in place meant to support illegal immigrants, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, and the Fair Immigration Reform Movement. Hopefully, within our lifetimes, we shall see a satisfactory solution to the problem hanging heavily over all of our heads.


The author's comments:
This is something that personally affects me, as my family is immigrants. However both of my parents have gone through the naturalization process and I was born in America.

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