Chapt 17

In this reading, this chapter updates its reader with the latest data on immigration to the United States from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Out of all the other eras of people emigrating to this country, my impression of this one is that it's a relatively, unknown period of immigration consistency and inconsistency within the United States government. Up until this point, the most popular era of people coming to the United States is during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. A number of the issues discussed in this chapter are still faced today, especially the big one involving US-Mexican border. What was interesting to me was the distinct border systems between the United States's two neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

Bear in mind, this information is dated back from the very late 1980s to roughly 2001, so the data presented is representative of its own time, but still relevant to certain extant today. The US government's INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) has no track record of immigrants from either Canada and Mexico. Considering these two nations share our borders, it's amazing how it's not just the Mexican immigrants we losing count of, but we are doing as poor of a job keeping track of the many Canadian immigrants here as well. The one distinction between how we manage the entries of Canadians and Mexicans is clearly discriminatory. People from Canada can travel into the United States for business or pleasure without any restrictions for six months and no visa. Mexicans coming into this country must apply for border crossing cards and can continue to come here, as long as the immigrant is within twenty five miles of the border and doesn't stay longer than seventy two hours. The media in August 2001 provoked a message of anger and bitterness towards the discrimination targeted at Mexican trucks due to traffic regulations imposed by Congress, which differ greatly from the regulations placed on Canadian border crossers. To this day, we still don't know how many Canadian and Mexican immigrants are in this country.

This is just one of the INS's poor qualities of creating a just, legal immigration system that satisfies the United States government and the people entering this nation. In 1998, another issue provides testament to their ineffectiveness in the case of classifying certain people as immigrants and others nothing what so ever. At that time, opening the doors to certain immigrants was based only on their work preferences (later statistics indicate their families were not even admitted as immigrants and half of these workers were mostly trainees). These immigrants were divided up into two main groups: 1) Professionals who were greatly needed for jobs such as computer programming, medical work, and information sciences, and 2) Agricultural and service workers of various types, who have very little education and are less likely to assimilate into American society. Another sub group of immigrants that are overlooked quite a bit are the so-called millionaire immigrants, who obtain preference visas on the condition that they are allowed the choice to pick where they want their money invested. Usually, this money is spent in economically depressed areas where many immigrants reside. It's nice to know there are a few wealthy people in this world, who invest money into a worthy cause of helping your own people out of the slums.