Time for a Mexican that comes from a family of pro-immigrant activists to chime in :P
And let’s just address the elephant in the room that “illegal immigrants” is just a dog whistle that means “Mexicans,” because how often do you see anyone talking about the problem of immigrants coming from Europe?
It’s not nearly as simple as “come in legally or don’t come at all.” First of all, almost half of all undocumented immigrants actually did come in legally and just overstayed their visas. Putting the difficulty of becoming a legal US citizen to the side, immigration courts are set up to fail and deportation just dumps people off in northern Mexico, regardless of their actual national origin (i.e: non-Mexican immigrants get deported to Mexico). There are even documented cases of actual US citizens getting deported because of misunderstandings.
There was a comedy movie from the 2000s called A Day Without a Mexican (here is the trailer), and it shows how the economy of California just collapses because no Mexicans are around to harvest crops, cook, wash dishes, or do any other jobs that nobody else wants to do. Along with several real-life events, this movie shows the hypocrisy of people who talk about how they wanna deport Mexican immigrants but still wanna use their slave cheap labor.
Also, here’s a fun fact: the US doesn’t recognize college degrees from most other countries, so there are tons of doctors, lawyers, social workers, scientists, etc who immigrated to the US and aren’t able to work in those fields. The US has a major shortage of doctors and nurses, but fuck all those Mexican doctors working in factories and restaurants.
The violent crime rate is also inversely related to the growth of the immigrant population (i.e: crime goes down as immigration goes up), they make up the backbone of our economy, and they deserve to not have their lives and families torn apart by immigration agents.
amandla
theartofmadeline
titsay
2087
ellievsbear
