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Luis Gutierrez Professor Eric Robertson English 1010 19 April 2014 An Immigrant I am an immigrant. Those who live in the United States are immigrants. If we go look back to a million years ago, we could argue that we come from the same species that migrated from Africa. At one point, our ancestors landed in the Americas and produced offspring. That offspring is you. Therefore, we are not native to this land that we call today the United States of America. The United States is a melting pot. It is filled with all kinds of ethnicities. Yet, we are trying to stop migration to the U.S. Should we stop it? Giving people easier access to immigration to the U.S is beneficial because it allows for a better economy and a better way of life for them. The U.S. has always been, and is still viewed as the land of opportunity. My father migrated to the U.S 29 years ago. He migrated from Guatemala, a very poor, suffering country to live in. He migrated at the age of 18 with the hopes of being able to become a citizen and prosper. Just like many of us he wanted to prosper in life. He migrated with little cash, and no grasp of the English language. Without having citizenship and no knowledge of the English language, he found work within a week. He didnt get a job filing paperwork behind a desk for eight hours a day, forty hours a week. His first job was doing warehouse work, lifting heavy loads of cloth and loading them into fifty three foot trailers. His only goal was to earn cash and learn the English language. Within a month he was working full time at a warehouse in Los

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Angeles and attending night classes at a community college, learning how to speak English. What was the reason for his hard work and dedication? He had left behind his wife and newborn daughter back in Guatemala. It took my father four lonely years, filled with poverty but motivated by ambition to unite my family. As an immigrant, my father suffered a lot. He earned less than minimum wage. He had to work more than sixty hours a week and still go to school at night. He had to help my grandmother financially since she couldnt work as much due to illegal immigration. He needed to save enough money to file paperwork and have his wife and daughter migrate to the United States legally. It wasnt easy for an eighteen year old immigrant to prosper but he took advantage of the land of opportunity. Once he had his wife and daughter by his side, he prospered to have the American dream. At the age of twenty-five he bought his first home. It wasnt a fancy two story home as many folks have nowadays. It wasnt located in the nicest and safest of all cities, but it was a palace compared to how he lived in Guatemala. At the age of thirty-six he opened his first business and retired from it at the age of forty-four. He is now a computer programmer for a clothing company. He has no college degree and he sure doesnt have his GED. He only moved to the U.S to live the American dream and prosper for his family. The funniest part of his story is that he didnt become a U.S Citizen until the age of forty-six, in 2012. A lot of immigrants, dont get the same opportunity as my father did. They are forced to migrate to the U.S illegally. This can cause a lot of trouble. The only way to migrate to the U.S legally now takes decades to achieve. We have parents that migrate illegally to the U.S not by themselves, but with their children. Those children are brought here by their parents that only want better for them. Those children are then raised in the U.S with the belief that they will be

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able to go to college, earn a degree and compete in the workforce as their peers. That is not the case for a young teenager that migrated to the U.S at an early age. According to a survey in 2008 about fifty percent of Americans perceived immigration as a problem rather than as an opportunity (Giovanni 35). This survey was done as America was falling into a recession that affected most of us. The idea that immigrants take American jobs, depress national wages, and threaten the U.S economy has become even more rooted, as often happens during economic recessions (Giovanni 35). Its very easy to point the finger and blame others when things go wrong but immigration only benefits an economy. For economists, in short, migration has the formidable ability of increasing total world income and productivity, generating huge global economic opportunities. The reason is very simple. By allowing people to move to the country where they can produce four to five times more value per hour of work on average than in their country of origin, migration allows the deployment of world human resources in a massively more efficient way. (Giovanni 37) As U.S citizens we have so many opportunities that we take for granted. Immigrants dont. They do the jobs that I dont and wouldnt want to do. At the age of eighteen, I worked at a warehouse, having to load merchandise into trailers. All of my coworkers, were not citizens and had been employed there for years. I didnt last a year there because I thought I was too good to be working in the blue collar workforce. These people had families, some had grandchildren. After a couples of years, I learned that the majority of those employees, were arrested and deported back to their country. Thats the penalty for breaking the law and migrating to the U.S, illegally. When I moved to Salt Lake City, I had to find any job I could. I worked for two local

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franchises. My coworkers, illegal immigrants. I now have a corporate job. The only illegal immigrant there walks around at night, picking up our trash and sweeping the floor. If we put a stop to immigration tomorrow, could our generation take over the jobs of agriculture, apple picking, or orange picking? Could our generation take over the positions at our local fast food restaurants and provide fast food service to our everyday folks? Who will load merchandise into a truck that has to be delivered to the local grocery store that you will purchase? Could we take over the jobs that many of us do not appreciate doing, yet immigrants are willing to do for less than $7 an hour? In an article, 8 Arguments against Immigration Reform, written by Tom Head, the writer describes 8 misconceptions that legal Americans think of immigration to the United States. One of these misconceptions is that, American workers could lose jobs to immigrants. Americans lose their jobs for many reasons. Underperformance, lack of knowledge, being late all the time, or company policy violations. As I mentioned earlier, most illegal immigrants have the jobs that most citizens dont like doing. The majority of immigrants coming to the land of opportunity usually work in unskilled labor industries. Those industries would be agriculture, construction and service oriented businesses, especially restaurants. From a business perspective, it is most cost effective to hire illegal immigrants and pay them minimum wage or less. As a result, these jobs tend to have lower salaries than others. The savings from the businesses are then passed down to the consumer. If we eliminate all illegal immigrants and send them all back to their home land, we will technically create more jobs for citizens. As a result, the businesses that hired immigrants will have higher labor costs. Who will pay for these high labor costs? The consumer. Those that want

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to stop immigration to the United States. The cost of food would go up. A simple bowl of chicken at Panda Express would cost you ten dollars and infrastructure would be so expensive to build. Let me also remind you that most citizens do not like doing these kinds of jobs. Business owners would have to probably pay someone to flip burgers at $13 an hour. We would then pay the price for eliminating immigrants. Our economy would suffer from having to eliminate immigrants from this so called land of opportunity. When looking at the kind of jobs that immigrants have, we argue that these are the jobs that we are taking away from citizens. However, the kind of jobs that immigrants have are unattractive to us. That is the reason why my father was able to find work so quickly when he arrived to the states. Those jobs dont require a high school diploma and there isnt much interest from citizens wanting those jobs that my father acquired. Immigrants are not taking our jobs. We are benefiting from having them work those jobs that we underappreciate. We benefit from having cheaper groceries. We benefit from having to pay less at your local fast food restaurants. Over all as a country, we benefit from allowing immigrants come to this country in pursue of a better life than what they are running away from. You may ask, if immigration helps the economy in a more efficient way, what about citizens? There are some jobs that require a person to work under unsuitable conditions. Those jobs for example are picking fruit, building walls, driving vehicles, mowing lawns, cleaning homes, taking care of young children, assisting the elderly, and working in the sun pouring concrete. In contrast to these jobs there are others that citizens can benefit from. Such jobs require an education. We need nurses, doctors, engineers, police officers, fire fighters, educators and business owners.

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If a business can cut costs in some productive tasks by hiring immigrants, this allows a business to expand production and employ more people in the complementary tasks, many of which are supplied by citizens. The availability of immigrants pushes firms to create more jobs to take advantage of the lower cost of hiring them. Some of these jobs go to citizens, whose unemployment rate can actually decrease as a result. (Giovanni 4) My father didnt come with the intention to take jobs from others. He came with the intention that many of us have. That intention is to have a better way of life. Many immigrants come to this land with nothing in their pockets. They run away from poverty. They run away from violence. They run away from a life, which many of us do not know about. The reason many come to the United States is to find work. If that job entails having to spend ten hours washing dishes at minimum wage, to us as citizens, its not worth it. To an immigrant coming from a country filled with poverty, its a blessing. Yet, we want to stop immigration. We want to get rid of all immigrants with no set plan as to who will take their jobs and keep the consumer happy. We have become naive to the fact that our ancestors came to this land as immigrants. They suffered to give us a better life. Yet we want to take that privilege away from people. We have ignored the fact that this nation is a melting pot with no official language. We ignore the fact that the statue of liberty represents the hopes and dreams of anyone from anywhere who wants to come to America in search of a better life. We have ignored that this country was founded by immigrants from all over the world. Immigrants only come to work and provide a better life for their family. To them having a job that we do not like having, means a lot to them. They just want to earn a living and provide for their family. They are not taking your job. They are not costing us a nickel. They are helping our economy. Some can argue that there are illegal immigrants doing wrong in our society and I

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agree. The majority though, only want the opportunity that we have. Is that a crime? Lets not be nave at the fact that we are all immigrants to this land. We all share the same goal. The opportunity to have a better way of living.

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Works Cited Giovanni, Perri. Immigration, Labor Markets, and Productivity. CATO Journal 32.1 (2012): 35-53. Web. 14 April 2014. Head, Tom. 8 Arguments Against Immigration Reform. About.com: Civil Rights. n.d. Web. 25 25 March 2014.