This 2016 election cycle, one of the hot ticket topics was the United States immigration system. On the right party of politics, most people want to send people who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visa back to where they came from. In addition, they want to have better border security around the United States in any way possible. On the left, most people believe that the government anyone who is not a legal immigrant, but is living in the United States citizen should be given citizenship. Those along the middle of both parties, believe that there is a pathway somewhere in between the ideas of those on the right and those on the left. However one thing is for sure, everyone has their own opinion on how the country needs to deal with this issue. I am the great-grandchild of someone who possibly immigrated here illegally, but I agree with the Right. Now I know this may come as a surprise that I would hold this kind of an opinion, but hear me out first before you come to your judgment.
My great-grandfather was born in China and at some point made his way over to the United States. If you looked at me nowadays, you wouldn’t believe me if I were to say that. In 11th grade, I learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in history class, did a little bit of research in class, and did a little bit of math, but some numbers weren’t adding up. The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn’t repealed until 1943, so in doing my math, I came to the conclusion that my great-grandfather entered the United States during the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act. When my mom came home that day, I asked her about what she knew about him moving to the United States. She told me that he didn’t talk about it much, so she didn’t really know how he came into the United States. During the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act, there were two ways that you could enter the country legally: if you married someone who was a United States citizen or if you didn’t work in a field that didn’t involve some kind of labor. However, it was still hard for Chinese immigrants to prove to the United States, so the only way to be one hundred percent sure that you would be able to enter the country.
Now how is this different than immigration today you may be asking? The Chinese Exclusion Act was created not because the United States had millions of immigrants who were here legally; but rather, the residents of China, and other Asian countries, were kept out of this country out of fear that they would take over and rule the workforce. It was racist laws that kept people of Asian descent, like my great-grandfather, from immigrating into the United States. Our modern immigration laws are not racist in this same way that they were from the early 1880s to the early 1940s. You can immigrate from anywhere in the world that you want to as long as you meet the requirements that the United States and many other countries have in place. We don’t have quotas that only allow a certain number of people from a certain area to come into the United States. We are like any other country and we should handle our own immigration issues like every other country does. We should enforce the non-discriminatory immigration laws that we have, without being called racist, like any other country does.
