The United States is the homeland of economic opportunities to 11 million people and counting. People have entered the US each day to seek a better life, however, their lives fall under the immigration predicament where their “illegal” status can send them right to where they began. Many wonder why these people wrongfully cross our border when there is a system that is enforced. Well, our American immigration system in the past and and to this day, have made it overwhelmingly difficult for these people to ever gain citizenship. When analyzing these undocumented citizens and their cases, it can be seen that the odds of ever becoming a citizen are not in their favors.
In 1790, citizenship was restricted to all “aliens” except “free whites” by the Nationality Act. It wasn’t until 1952, when Congress enacted the McCarran-Walter Act, which allowed all “non-white immigrants” a path to citizenship. Since then, naturalization has been the process that can grant U.S. citizenship to a “foreign citizen or national” after they fulfill requirements by the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Although it’s great that we went from only whites being granted citizenship to all foreign citizens, only a small amount of citizens are able to live in the United States with legal status. This is because the process to fulfill the requirements of the Immigration and Nationality Act are hand-selected. They look at the country you were born in, level of education one has and more.
Being an undocumented citizen, it’s been difficult to live in a country where my life depends on pieces of paper. Under the new American immigration policy, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), it allows individuals who were brought here illegally at a young age a two-year period of deferred action of deportation. This policy has given me a social security and work authorization card but does not provide a path to permanent residency and up till today there is no law allowing an individual to apply for a green card on the basis of having DACA. (source)
There have been political leaders such as Obama, who have signed executive orders to create DACA, and there have been other leaders like Trump who want to abolish these types of immigration policies to prevent more people to come in.
On March 5th of 2018, Trump and his administration signed an executive order of the rescission of DACA, leaving seven thousand dreamers unprotected from deportation. However, the Supreme Court overruled it and postponed it. In The Hill article, Emma Winters argues that Trump, “has made strenuous efforts to impede the naturalization process and undermine citizenship to gain more secure and permanent legal status…” (Source) An example of this would be the termination of DACA, as well as raising the prices of US citizenship applications. “The administration has made it clear that anyone living in the country illegally, even for a very long time, and no matter how upstanding, is fair game for removal…” (Source)
As a country, we’ve been proud to tell our kids that this country was built by immigrants in the early 16th century, yet, in today’s society we don’t allow people to come in because our bigoted president has put them in a bad light and has indoctrinated us to feel a certain way about them. Our immigration system has made it difficult to embrace undocumented people, especially, when there are obstacles that administration has built to prevent them to achieve the American dream.
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