US Immigration and Global Immigration Patterns

US Immigration and Global Immigration Patterns

Immigration is one of the most controversial issues of the modern world. Border nations such as Mexico and the US, Turkey and Syria, and others highlight the levels of conflict that neighboring nations could experience when they failed to control illegal immigration. Global patterns in immigration indicate a rise in the population of immigrants around the world from 1999 to present, and suggest that most of the traffic of immigration flows to the industrialized nations of Europe and, most significantly, into the US. Illegal immigration has been one of the major concerns of different political regimes in the US for a long time. In fact, numerous reforms that hoped to seal illegal immigrants out of the US have been adopted, but it appears that such strategies have not born fruits.

President Trump is one of the most recent administrators to express concern for the rates of immigration into the nation. His administration has considered that most of the illegal immigrants into the US come through the Mexican border and that they have been harmful to the economy of the US. For this reason, his most significant approach has been to build a wall along the US-Mexico border to wade off potential illegal immigration. This essay examines the plausibility of such a move by the President. The paper first highlights the global patterns in immigration, which identify the US as the most sought after destination before explaining why America’s approach could be misadvised. The paper reports that while the move could be useful in cutting down the rates of illegal immigration into the US, it may not succeed in doing so because illegal immigrants enter the US through legal means.

Global Immigration Patterns

Migration and remitances patterns of the globe have shifted within the recent years, even while both the volumes of immigrants as well as the amounts of money that they spend have increased (Czaika and Haas, 2014). A growing share of the migrants on the international scene now resides in the high-income nations of the modern house such as Germany and the US, while a rising proportion was born in the middle-income countries of today such as Mexico and India, which the analysis finds. Such shifts have happened as the numbers of international migrants increased to 232 million in 2013 from 154 million in 1990 (Connor, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2013). However, it should be noted that the same numbers remained steady as a three percent of the share of the population of the entire globe. The US remained the most preferred destinations nation of the world during the same period by far and improved in its share of the total migrations of the world. Presently, one in every five migrants around the world live in the US, which is compared to one in of every six in 1990 (Connor, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2013). This statistics, as Czaika and Haas (2014), note, translates to a rise from 23 million to 46 immigrants in the US.

The US is not the only country among the wealthy ones that has realized an increase in the number of immigration. All told, an approximated 160 million, which is sixty-nine percent of immigrants on the international scene now reside in nations with high income, which represents a rise from fifty-seven percent in 1990 ( Hartung, 2017 ). Such high-income nations, most of them within Europe and North America, are apparently growing more attractive to the immigrants, whose primary objective is to better their economic opportunities. Most of the migrants around the world come from what is designated by the World Bank as the middle-income nations (Connor, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2013). It should be noted that six in ten, which translates to 135 million of all the immigrants around the world originate from such nations compared with less than half (seventy-four percent) of such immigrants in 1990. It is also imperative noting that the same span of time shows a decline in the number of immigrants that were born in medium and low-income nations (Stockton, 2017).

Illegal Immigration in the US

The global migration trends suggest that the US is one of the most preferred nations by immigrants because of the opportunities it promises them in terms of economic improvement. As a result, the nation has been struggling polices that would ensure the number of immigrants is limited. One reason for doing so has been a consideration that such immigration strains the American public through raising the levels of competition for the limited opportunities as well as the chance of occurrence of crime (Fox News, 2017; Hartung, 2017 ). Almost each political regime in the country has been committed to dealing with this issue, and the Trump administration of the most recent. The President was clear and consistent in his campaigns that he would found a more formidable legislative framework for illegal immigration into the country ( Hartung, 2017 ). For this reason, he moved promptly to deliver on his promises when he signed a bill that would seal illegal immigration into the US through the southern border with Mexico recently (CBS News, 2017).

The biggest question on the minds of most Americans concerns the levels of effectiveness of the proposed wall, which is estimated to cost approximately between eight and twelve billion dollars ( Hartung, 2017 ). The assumption of the present administration is that most of the immigrants enter the US through the southern border with Mexico and that they live on government subsidies while raising competition for opportunities for Americans unnecessarily. While this approach might realize some success, there is all reason to doubt its effectiveness. First, while it is considered that immigrants enter the country mostly through Mexico, it should be understood, as Hartung (2017) notes, that most of such people come into the country legally. Such immigrants fly into the US as visa holders and play tricks with the legislations because they do not want to return to their mother countries. The loopholes in the follow-up activities have often that such immigrants, who come from all over the world, stay in the nation illegally before they proceed to acquire legal immigration documents. Therefore, while the government will be busy building the wall, more immigrants will be penetrating the airports into the nation and refusing to go back home.

The American government plans to make Mexico to pay for the construction of the wall, which means that the administration identifies that only Mexicans have been penetrating its borders. However, research notes that this assumption is misguided since a greater proportion of those who penetrate the Mexican border come from Central America (Fox News, 2017; Hartung, 2017 ). The cited report suggests that Mexico has also been struggling to deal with immigrants from such countries as Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador and that it ninety-seven percent of its deportations are from the Central American nations. This move, therefore, might only fuel political animosity between the two neighboring countries like it has done between Turkey and Syria because of the existence of ISIL (CBS News, 2017). In fact, President Trump was forced to cancel a meeting he had intended to hold with the Mexican president because he did not intend to negotiate the construction of the wall. There are indicators that Washington does not care about the possibilities of a broken diplomatic relationship with Mexico City ( Hartung, 2017 ). Therefore, there are all reasons to argue that the decision to construct the wall might be ineffective.

The worst fear of the President is that immigrants are stealing more American jobs each year, and that their existence in the US has been costing the economy of the US billions of dollars each year. However, statistics dispels this fear since they indicate a constant number of illegal immigrants that that jobs in the US since 2006 ( Hartung, 2017 ). Specifically, the number of immigrants working around the US has remained at eight million for the entire period, and that all the new jobs that the economy has created has gone to legal immigrants and legitimate Americans. Why the present regime considers illegal immigration to be the reason why some Americans do not have jobs, therefore, is because they are misinformed. In fact, instead of blames, the present regime should seek more legislative approaches than the physical ones if it has to deal effectively with illegal immigration.

In conclusion, the global trends in immigration indicate that the US is the most sought after nation by immigrants. It suggests, therefore, that the government of the US has to ensure that it prepares to deal adequately with cases of illegal immigration. In fact, previous efforts have not been as effective as they should in addressing this issue. The Trump era is currently considering approaches to solving the problem, which is why it has proposed and passed the construction of a perimeter wall along the southern border with Mexico. While this approach could be effective, critics fear that it is unlikely to be effective. For example, the wall purposes to stop illegal immigration from the ground through Mexico when a larger proportion of such immigration occurs through air travels into the nation. It is also wrong to blame illegal immigrants for the perils of Americans since most new jobs go to its citizens and not every immigrant is Mexican.

References

CBS News (2017). Critics on why building a Mexico border wall won't be effective . Retrieved 17 October 2017, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-trump-executive-order-mexican-border-wall-impact/

Connor, P., Cohn, D., & Gonzalez-Barrera, A. (2013).  Changing Patterns of Global Migration and Remittances .  Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project . Retrieved 17 October 2017, from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/17/changing-patterns-of-global-migration-and-remittances/

Czaika, M., & Haas, H. (2014). The globalization of migration: Has the world become more migratory?  International Migration Review ,  48 (2), 283-323.

Fox News (2017). Analysis: Trump's border wall faces reality check . Retrieved 17 October 2017, from http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/01/26/analysis-trump-border-wall-faces-reality-check.html

Hartung, A. (2017). Why President Trump's Border Wall Is An Example Of Bad Leadership. Retrieved 17 October 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2017/01/28/why-president-trumps-border-wall-is-an-example-of-bad-leadership/#370470cc26cf

Stockton, N. (2017).  Where everyone in the world is migrating—in one gorgeous chart .  Quartz . Retrieved 17 October 2017, from https://qz.com/192440/where-everyone-in-the-world-is-migrating-in-one-gorgeous-chart/