legal immigration essay

• Social Justice
• Environment
• Health & Happiness
• Get YES! Emails
• Teacher Resources

• Give A Gift Subscription
• Teaching Sustainability
• Teaching Social Justice
• Teaching Respect & Empathy
• Student Writing Lessons
• Visual Learning Lessons
• Tough Topics Discussion Guides
• About the YES! for Teachers Program
• Student Writing Contest

Follow YES! For Teachers

Eight brilliant student essays on immigration and unjust assumptions.

Read winning essays from our winter 2019 “Border (In)Security” student writing contest.

For the winter 2019 student writing competition, “Border (In)Security,” we invited students to read the YES! Magazine article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the “Constitution-Free Zone” by Lornet Turnbull and respond with an up-to-700-word essay. 

Students had a choice between two writing prompts for this contest on immigration policies at the border and in the “Constitution-free zone,” a 100-mile perimeter from land and sea borders where U.S. Border Patrol can search any vehicle, bus, or vessel without a warrant. They could state their positions on the impact of immigration policies on our country’s security and how we determine who is welcome to live here. Or they could write about a time when someone made an unfair assumption about them, just as Border Patrol agents have made warrantless searches of Greyhound passengers based simply on race and clothing.

The Winners

From the hundreds of essays written, these eight were chosen as winners. Be sure to read the author’s response to the essay winners and the literary gems that caught our eye.

Middle School Winner: Alessandra Serafini

High School Winner: Cain Trevino

High School Winner: Ethan Peter

University Winner: Daniel Fries

Powerful Voice Winner: Emma Hernandez-Sanchez

Powerful Voice Winner: Tiara Lewis

Powerful Voice Winner: Hailee Park

Powerful Voice Winner: Aminata Toure

From the Author Lornet Turnbull

Literary Gems

Middle school winner.

Alessandra Serafini

Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

Broken Promises

“…Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These words were written by Emma Lazarus and are inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. And yet, the very door they talk about is no longer available to those who need it the most. The door has been shut, chained, and guarded. It no longer shines like gold. Those seeking asylum are being turned away. Families are being split up; children are being stranded. The promise America made to those in need is broken.

Not only is the promise to asylum seekers broken, but the promises made to some 200 million people already residing within the U.S. are broken, too. Anyone within 100 miles of the United States border lives in the “Constitution-free zone” and can be searched with “reasonable suspicion,” a suspicion that is determined by Border Patrol officers. The zone encompasses major cities, such as Seattle and New York City, and it even covers entire states, such as Florida, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. I live in the Seattle area, and it is unsettling that I can be searched and interrogated without the usual warrant. In these areas, there has been an abuse of power; people have been unlawfully searched and interrogated because of assumed race or religion.

The ACLU obtained data from the Customs and Border Protection Agency that demonstrate this reprehensible profiling. The data found that “82 percent of foreign citizens stopped by agents in that state are Latino, and almost 1 in 3 of those processed are, in fact, U.S. citizens.” These warrantless searches impede the trust-building process and communication between the local population and law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, this lack of trust makes campaigns, such as Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something,” ineffective due to the actions of the department’s own members and officers. Worst of all, profiling ostracizes entire communities and makes them feel unsafe in their own country.

Ironically, asylum seekers come to America in search of safety. However, the thin veil of safety has been drawn back, and, behind it, our tarnished colors are visible. We need to welcome people in their darkest hours rather than destroy their last bit of hope by slamming the door in their faces. The immigration process is currently in shambles, and an effective process is essential for both those already in the country and those outside of it. Many asylum seekers are running from war, poverty, hunger, and death. Their countries’ instability has hijacked every aspect of their lives, made them vagabonds, and the possibility of death, a cruel and unforgiving death, is real. They see no future for their children, and they are desperate for the perceived promise of America—a promise of opportunity, freedom, and a safe future. An effective process would determine who actually needs help and then grant them passage into America. Why should everyone be turned away? My grandmother immigrated to America from Scotland in 1955. I exist because she had a chance that others are now being denied.

Emma Lazarus named Lady Liberty the “Mother of Exiles.” Why are we denying her the happiness of children? Because we cannot decide which ones? America has an inexplicable area where our constitution has been spurned and forgotten. Additionally, there is a rancorous movement to close our southern border because of a deep-rooted fear of immigrants and what they represent. For too many Americans, they represent the end of established power and white supremacy, which is their worst nightmare. In fact, immigrants do represent change—healthy change—with new ideas and new energy that will help make this country stronger. Governmental agreement on a humane security plan is critical to ensure that America reaches its full potential. We can help. We can help people in unimaginably terrifying situations, and that should be our America.

Alessandra Serafini plays on a national soccer team for Seattle United and is learning American Sign Language outside of school. Her goal is to spread awareness about issues such as climate change, poverty, and large-scale political conflict through writing and public speaking.

  High School Winner

Cain Trevino

North Side High School, Fort Worth, Texas

Xenophobia and the Constitution-Free Zone

In August of 2017, U.S. Border Patrol agents boarded a Greyhound bus that had just arrived at the White River Junction station from Boston. According to Danielle Bonadona, a Lebanon resident and a bus passenger, “They wouldn’t let us get off. They boarded the bus and told us they needed to see our IDs or papers.” Bonadona, a 29-year-old American citizen, said that the agents spent around 20 minutes on the bus and “only checked the IDs of people who had accents or were not white.” Bonadona said she was aware of the 100-mile rule, but the experience of being stopped and searched felt “pretty unconstitutional.”

In the YES! article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’” by Lornet Turnbull, the author references the ACLU’s argument that “the 100-mile zone violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.” However, the Supreme Court upholds the use of immigration checkpoints for inquiries on citizenship status. In my view, the ACLU makes a reasonable argument. The laws of the 100-mile zone are blurred, and, too often, officials give arbitrary reasons to conduct a search. Xenophobia and fear of immigrants burgeons in cities within these areas. People of color and those with accents or who are non-English speakers are profiled by law enforcement agencies that enforce anti-immigrant policies. The “Constitution-free zone” is portrayed as an effective barrier to secure our borders. However, this anti-immigrant zone does not make our country any safer. In fact, it does the opposite.

As a former student from the Houston area, I can tell you that the Constitution-free zone makes immigrants and citizens alike feel on edge. The Department of Homeland Security’s white SUVs patrol our streets. Even students feel the weight of anti-immigrant laws. Dennis Rivera Sarmiento, an undocumented student who attended Austin High School in Houston, was held by school police in February 2018 for a minor altercation and was handed over to county police. He was later picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and held in a detention center. It is unfair that kids like Dennis face much harsher consequences for minor incidents than other students with citizenship.

These instances are a direct result of anti-immigrant laws. For example, the 287(g) program gives local and state police the authority to share individuals’ information with ICE after an arrest. This means that immigrants can be deported for committing misdemeanors as minor as running a red light. Other laws like Senate Bill 4, passed by the Texas Legislature, allow police to ask people about their immigration status after they are detained. These policies make immigrants and people of color feel like they’re always under surveillance and that, at any moment, they may be pulled over to be questioned and detained.

During Hurricane Harvey, the immigrant community was hesitant to go to the shelters because images of immigration authorities patrolling the area began to surface online. It made them feel like their own city was against them at a time when they needed them most. Constitution-free zones create communities of fear. For many immigrants, the danger of being questioned about immigration status prevents them from reporting crimes, even when they are the victim. Unreported crime only places more groups of people at risk and, overall, makes communities less safe.

In order to create a humane immigration process, citizens and non-citizens must hold policymakers accountable and get rid of discriminatory laws like 287(g) and Senate Bill 4. Abolishing the Constitution-free zone will also require pressure from the public and many organizations. For a more streamlined legal process, the League of United Latin American Citizens suggests background checks and a small application fee for incoming immigrants, as well as permanent resident status for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients. Other organizations propose expanding the green card lottery and asylum for immigrants escaping the dangers of their home countries.

Immigrants who come to the U.S. are only looking for an opportunity to provide for their families and themselves; so, the question of deciding who gets inside the border and who doesn’t is the same as trying to prove some people are worth more than others. The narratives created by anti-immigrant media plant the false idea that immigrants bring nothing but crime and terrorism. Increased funding for the border and enforcing laws like 287(g) empower anti-immigrant groups to vilify immigrants and promote a witch hunt that targets innocent people. This hatred and xenophobia allow law enforcement to ask any person of color or non-native English speaker about their citizenship or to detain a teenager for a minor incident. Getting rid of the 100-mile zone means standing up for justice and freedom because nobody, regardless of citizenship, should have to live under laws created from fear and hatred.

Cain Trevino is a sophomore. Cain is proud of his Mexican and Salvadorian descent and is an advocate for the implementation of Ethnic Studies in Texas. He enjoys basketball, playing the violin, and studying c omputer science. Cain plans to pursue a career in engineering at Stanford University and later earn a PhD.  

High School Winner

Ethan Peter

Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

I’m an expert on bussing. For the past couple of months, I’ve been a busser at a pizza restaurant near my house. It may not be the most glamorous job, but it pays all right, and, I’ll admit, I’m in it for the money.

I arrive at 5 p.m. and inspect the restaurant to ensure it is in pristine condition for the 6 p.m. wave of guests. As customers come and go, I pick up their dirty dishes, wash off their tables, and reset them for the next guests. For the first hour of my shift, the work is fairly straightforward.

I met another expert on bussing while crossing the border in a church van two years ago. Our van arrived at the border checkpoint, and an agent stopped us. She read our passports, let us through, and moved on to her next vehicle. The Border Patrol agent’s job seemed fairly straightforward.

At the restaurant, 6 p.m. means a rush of customers. It’s the end of the workday, and these folks are hungry for our pizzas and salads. My job is no longer straightforward.

Throughout the frenzy, the TVs in the restaurant buzz about waves of people coming to the U.S. border. The peaceful ebb and flow enjoyed by Border agents is disrupted by intense surges of immigrants who seek to enter the U.S. Outside forces push immigrants to the United States: wars break out in the Middle East, gangs terrorize parts of Central and South America, and economic downturns force foreigners to look to the U.S., drawn by the promise of opportunity. Refugees and migrant caravans arrive, and suddenly, a Border Patrol agent’s job is no longer straightforward.

I turn from the TVs in anticipation of a crisis exploding inside the restaurant: crowds that arrive together will leave together. I’ve learned that when a table looks finished with their dishes, I need to proactively ask to take those dishes, otherwise, I will fall behind, and the tables won’t be ready for the next customers. The challenge is judging who is finished eating. I’m forced to read clues and use my discretion.

Interpreting clues is part of a Border Patrol agent’s job, too. Lornet Turnbull states, “For example, CBP data obtained by ACLU in Michigan shows that 82 percent of foreign citizens stopped by agents in that state are Latino, and almost 1 in 3 of those processed is, in fact, a U.S. citizen.” While I try to spot customers done with their meals so I can clear their part of the table, the Border Patrol officer uses clues to detect undocumented immigrants. We both sometimes guess incorrectly, but our intentions are to do our jobs to the best of our abilities.

These situations are uncomfortable. I certainly do not enjoy interrupting a conversation to get someone’s dishes, and I doubt Border Patrol agents enjoy interrogating someone about their immigration status. In both situations, the people we mistakenly ask lose time and are subjected to awkward and uncomfortable situations. However, here’s where the busser and the Border Patrol officer’s situations are different: If I make a mistake, the customer faces a minor inconvenience. The stakes for a Border Patrol agent are much higher. Mistakenly asking for documentation and searching someone can lead to embarrassment or fear—it can even be life-changing. Thus, Border Patrol agents must be fairly certain that someone’s immigration status is questionable before they begin their interrogation.

To avoid these situations altogether, the U.S. must make the path to citizenship for immigrants easier. This is particularly true for immigrants fleeing violence. Many people object to this by saying these immigrants will bring violence with them, but data does not support this view. In 1939, a ship of Jewish refugees from Germany was turned away from the U.S.—a decision viewed negatively through the lens of history. Today, many people advocate restricting immigration for refugees from violent countries; they refuse to learn the lessons from 1939. The sad thing is that many of these immigrants are seen as just as violent as the people they are fleeing. We should not confuse the oppressed with the oppressor.

My restaurant appreciates customers because they bring us money, just as we should appreciate immigrants because they bring us unique perspectives. Equally important, immigrants provide this country with a variety of expert ideas and cultures, which builds better human connections and strengthens our society.

Ethan Peter is a junior. Ethan writes for his school newspaper, The Kirkwood Call, and plays volleyball for his high school and a club team. He hopes to continue to grow as a writer in the future. 

University Winner

Daniel Fries

Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

Detained on the Road to Equality

The United States is a nation of immigrants. There are currently 43 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. Millions of them are naturalized American citizens, and 23 million, or 7.2 percent of the population, are living here without documentation (US Census, 2016). One in seven residents of the United States was not born here. Multiculturalism is, and always has been, a key part of the American experience. However, romantic notions of finding a better life in the United States for immigrants and refugees don’t reflect reality. In modern history, America is a country that systematically treats immigrants—documented or not—and non-white Americans in a way that is fundamentally different than what is considered right by the majority.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment states,“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When a suspected undocumented immigrant is detained, their basic human rights are violated. Warrantless raids on Greyhound buses within 100 miles of the border (an area referred to by some as the “Constitution-free zone”) are clear violations of human rights. These violations are not due to the current state of politics; they are the symptom of blatant racism in the United States and a system that denigrates and abuses people least able to defend themselves.

It is not surprising that some of the mechanisms that drive modern American racism are political in nature. Human beings are predisposed to dislike and distrust individuals that do not conform to the norms of their social group (Mountz, Allison). Some politicians appeal to this suspicion and wrongly attribute high crime rates to non-white immigrants. The truth is that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, people born in the United States are convicted of crimes at a rate twice that of undocumented non-natives (Cato Institute, 2018).

The majority of immigrants take high risks to seek a better life, giving them incentive to obey the laws of their new country. In many states, any contact with law enforcement may ultimately result in deportation and separation from family. While immigrants commit far fewer crimes, fear of violent crime by much of the U.S. population outweighs the truth. For some politicians, it is easier to sell a border wall to a scared population than it is to explain the need for reformed immigration policy. It’s easier to say that immigrants are taking people’s jobs than explain a changing global economy and its effect on employment. The only crime committed in this instance is discrimination.

Human rights are violated when an undocumented immigrant—or someone perceived as an undocumented immigrant—who has not committed a crime is detained on a Greyhound bus. When a United States citizen is detained on the same bus, constitutional rights are being violated. The fact that this happens every day and that we debate its morality makes it abundantly clear that racism is deeply ingrained in this country. Many Americans who have never experienced this type of oppression lack the capacity to understand its lasting effect. Most Americans don’t know what it’s like to be late to work because they were wrongfully detained, were pulled over by the police for the third time that month for no legal reason, or had to coordinate legal representation for their U.S. citizen grandmother because she was taken off a bus for being a suspected undocumented immigrant. This oppression is cruel and unnecessary.

America doesn’t need a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants; it needs to seriously address how to deal with immigration. It is possible to reform the current system in such a way that anyone can become a member of American society, instead of existing outside of it. If a person wants to live in the United States and agrees to follow its laws and pay its taxes, a path to citizenship should be available.

People come to the U.S. from all over the world for many reasons. Some have no other choice. There are ongoing humanitarian crises in Syria, Yemen, and South America that are responsible for the influx of immigrants and asylum seekers at our borders. If the United States wants to address the current situation, it must acknowledge the global factors affecting the immigrants at the center of this debate and make fact-informed decisions. There is a way to maintain the security of America while treating migrants and refugees compassionately, to let those who wish to contribute to our society do so, and to offer a hand up instead of building a wall.

Daniel Fries studies computer science. Daniel has served as a wildland firefighter in Oregon, California, and Alaska. He is passionate about science, nature, and the ways that technology contributes to making the world a better, more empathetic, and safer place.

Powerful Voice Winner

Emma Hernandez-Sanchez

Wellness, Business and Sports School, Woodburn, Ore.

An Emotion an Immigrant Knows Too Well

Before Donald Trump’s campaign, I was oblivious to my race and the idea of racism. As far as I knew, I was the same as everyone else. I didn’t stop to think about our different-colored skins. I lived in a house with a family and attended school five days a week just like everyone else. So, what made me different?

Seventh grade was a very stressful year—the year that race and racism made an appearance in my life. It was as if a cold splash of water woke me up and finally opened my eyes to what the world was saying. It was this year that Donald Trump started initiating change about who got the right to live in this country and who didn’t. There was a lot of talk about deportation, specifically for Mexicans, and it sparked commotion and fear in me.

I remember being afraid and nervous to go out. At home, the anxiety was there but always at the far back of my mind because I felt safe inside. My fear began as a small whisper, but every time I stepped out of my house, it got louder. I would have dreams about the deportation police coming to my school; when I went to places like the library, the park, the store, or the mall, I would pay attention to everyone and to my surroundings. In my head, I would always ask myself, “Did they give us nasty looks?,” “Why does it seem quieter?” “Was that a cop I just saw?” I would notice little things, like how there were only a few Mexicans out or how empty a store was. When my mom went grocery shopping, I would pray that she would be safe. I was born in America, and both my parents were legally documented. My mom was basically raised here. Still, I couldn’t help but feel nervous.

I knew I shouldn’t have been afraid, but with one look, agents could have automatically thought my family and I were undocumented. Even when the deportation police would figure out that we weren’t undocumented, they’d still figure out a way to deport us—at least that was what was going through my head. It got so bad that I didn’t even want to do the simplest things like go grocery shopping because there was a rumor that the week before a person was taken from Walmart.

I felt scared and nervous, and I wasn’t even undocumented. I can’t even imagine how people who are undocumented must have felt, how they feel. All I can think is that it’s probably ten times worse than what I was feeling. Always worrying about being deported and separated from your family must be hard. I was living in fear, and I didn’t even have it that bad. My heart goes out to families that get separated from each other. It’s because of those fears that I detest the “Constitution-free zone.”

Legally documented and undocumented people who live in the Constitution-free zone are in constant fear of being deported. People shouldn’t have to live this way. In fact, there have been arguments that the 100-mile zone violates the Fourth Amendment, which gives people the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld these practices.

One question that Lornet Turnbull asks in her YES! article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’” is, “How should we decide who is welcome in the U.S and who is not?” Instead of focusing on immigrants, how about we focus on the people who shoot up schools, rape girls, exploit women for human sex trafficking, and sell drugs? These are the people who make our country unsafe; they are the ones who shouldn’t be accepted. Even if they are citizens and have the legal right to live here, they still shouldn’t be included. If they are the ones making this country unsafe, then what gives them the right to live here?

I don’t think that the Constitution-free zone is an effective and justifiable way to make this country more “secure.” If someone isn’t causing any trouble in the United States and is just simply living their life, then they should be welcomed here. We shouldn’t have to live in fear that our rights will be taken away. I believe that it’s unfair for people to automatically think that it’s the Hispanics that make this country unsafe. Sure, get all the undocumented people out of the United States, but it’s not going to make this country any safer. It is a society that promotes violence that makes us unsafe, not a race.

Emma Hernandez-Sanchez is a freshman who is passionate about literature and her education. Emma wan ts to inspire others to be creative and try their best. She enjoys reading and creating stories that spark imagination. 

  Powerful Voice Winner

Tiara Lewis

Columbus City Preparatory Schools for Girls,

Columbus, Ohio

Hold Your Head High and Keep Those Fists Down

How would you feel if you walked into a store and salespeople were staring at you? Making you feel like you didn’t belong. Judging you. Assuming that you were going to take something, even though you might have $1,000 on you to spend. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. This is because people will always judge you. It might not be because of your race but for random reasons, like because your hair is black instead of dirty blonde. Or because your hair is short and not long. Or just because they are having a bad day. People will always find ways to bring you down and accuse you of something, but that doesn’t mean you have to go along with it.

Every time I entered a store, I would change my entire personality. I would change the way I talked and the way I walked. I always saw myself as needing to fit in. If a store was all pink, like the store Justice, I would act like a girly girl. If I was shopping in a darker store, like Hot Topic, I would hum to the heavy metal songs and act more goth. I had no idea that I was feeding into stereotypes.

When I was 11, I walked into Claire’s, a well-known store at the mall. That day was my sister’s birthday. Both of us were really happy and had money to spend. As soon as we walked into the store, two employees stared me and my sister down, giving us cold looks. When we went to the cashier to buy some earrings, we thought everything was fine. However, when we walked out of the store, there was a policeman and security guards waiting. At that moment, my sister and I looked at one another, and I said, in a scared little girl voice, “I wonder what happened? Why are they here?”

Then, they stopped us. We didn’t know what was going on. The same employee that cashed us out was screaming as her eyes got big, “What did you steal?” I was starting to get numb. Me and my sister looked at each other and told the truth: “We didn’t steal anything. You can check us.” They rudely ripped through our bags and caused a big scene. My heart was pounding like a drum. I felt violated and scared. Then, the policeman said, “Come with us. We need to call your parents.” While this was happening, the employees were talking to each other, smiling. We got checked again. The police said that they were going to check the cameras, but after they were done searching us, they realized that we didn’t do anything wrong and let us go about our day.

Walking in the mall was embarrassing—everybody staring, looking, and whispering as we left the security office. This made me feel like I did something wrong while knowing I didn’t. We went back to the store to get our shopping bags. The employees sneered, “Don’t you niggers ever come in this store again. You people always take stuff. This time you just got lucky.” Their faces were red and frightening. It was almost like they were in a scary 3D movie, screaming, and coming right at us. I felt hurt and disappointed that someone had the power within them to say something so harsh and wrong to another person. Those employees’ exact words will forever be engraved in my memory.

In the article, “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’,” Lornet Turnbull states, “In January, they stopped a man in Indio, California, as he was boarding a Los Angeles-bound bus. While questioning this man about his immigration status, agents told him his ‘shoes looked suspicious,’ like those of someone who had recently crossed the border.” They literally judged him by his shoes. They had no proof of anything. If a man is judged by his shoes, who else and what else are being judged in the world?

In the novel  To Kill a Mockingbird , a character named Atticus states, “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let’em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.” No matter how much you might try to change yourself, your hairstyle, and your clothes, people will always make assumptions about you. However, you never need to change yourself to make a point or to feel like you fit in. Be yourself. Don’t let those stereotypes turn into facts.

Tiara Lewis is in the eighth grade. Tiara plays the clarinet and is trying to change the world— one essay at a time. She is most often found curled up on her bed, “Divergent” in one hand and a cream-filled doughnut in the other.

Hailee Park

 Wielding My Swords

If I were a swordsman, my weapons would be my identities. I would wield one sword in my left hand and another in my right. People expect me to use both fluently, but I’m not naturally ambidextrous. Even though I am a right-handed swordsman, wielding my dominant sword with ease, I must also carry a sword in my left, the heirloom of my family heritage. Although I try to live up to others’ expectations by using both swords, I may appear inexperienced while attempting to use my left. In some instances, my heirloom is mistaken for representing different families’ since the embellishments look similar.

Many assumptions are made about my heirloom sword based on its appearance, just as many assumptions are made about me based on my physical looks. “Are you Chinese?” When I respond with ‘no,’ they stare at me blankly in confusion. There is a multitude of Asian cultures in the United States, of which I am one. Despite what many others may assume, I am not Chinese; I am an American-born Korean.

“Then… are you Japanese?” Instead of asking a broader question, like “What is your ethnicity?,” they choose to ask a direct question. I reply that I am Korean. I like to think that this answers their question sufficiently; however, they think otherwise. Instead, I take this as their invitation to a duel.

They attack me with another question: “Are you from North Korea or South Korea?” I don’t know how to respond because I’m not from either of those countries; I was born in America. I respond with “South Korea,” where my parents are from because I assume that they’re asking me about my ethnicity. I’m not offended by this situation because I get asked these questions frequently. From this experience, I realize that people don’t know how to politely ask questions about identity to those unlike them. Instead of asking “What is your family’s ethnicity?,” many people use rude alternatives, such as “Where are you from?,” or “What language do you speak?”

When people ask these questions, they make assumptions based on someone’s appearance. In my case, people make inferences like:

“She must be really good at speaking Korean.”

“She’s Asian; therefore, she must be born in Asia.”

“She’s probably Chinese.”

These thoughts may appear in their heads because making assumptions is natural. However, there are instances when assumptions can be taken too far. Some U.S. Border Patrol agents in the “Constitution-free zone” have made similar assumptions based on skin color and clothing. For example, agents marked someone as an undocumented immigrant because “his shoes looked suspicious, like those of someone who had recently crossed the border.”

Another instance was when a Jamaican grandmother was forced off a bus when she was visiting her granddaughter. The impetus was her accent and the color of her skin. Government officials chose to act on their assumptions, even though they had no solid proof that the grandmother was an undocumented immigrant. These situations just touch the surface of the issue of racial injustice in America.

When someone makes unfair assumptions about me, they are pointing their sword and challenging me to a duel; I cannot refuse because I am already involved. It is not appropriate for anyone, including Border Patrol agents, to make unjustified assumptions or to act on those assumptions. Border Patrol agents have no right to confiscate the swords of the innocent solely based on their conjectures. The next time I’m faced with a situation where racially ignorant assumptions are made about me, I will refuse to surrender my sword, point it back at them, and triumphantly fight their ignorance with my cultural pride.

Hailee Park is an eighth grader who enjoys reading many genres. While reading, Hailee recognized the racial injustices against immigrants in America, which inspired her essay. Hailee plays violin in her school’s orchestra and listens to and composes music. 

Aminata Toure

East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

We Are Still Dreaming

As a young Muslim American woman, I have been labeled things I am not: a terrorist, oppressed, and an ISIS supporter. I have been accused of planning 9/11, an event that happened before I was born. Lately, in the media, Muslims have been portrayed as supporters of a malevolent cause, terrorizing others just because they do not have the same beliefs. I often scoff at news reports that portray Muslims in such a light, just as I scoff at all names I’ve been labeled. They are words that do not define me. 

In a land where labels have stripped immigrants of their personalities, they are now being stripped of something that makes them human: their rights. The situation described in Lornet Turnbull’s article, “Two-Thirds of Americans are Living in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’,” goes directly against the Constitution, the soul of this country, something that asserts that we are all equal before the law. If immigrants do not have protection from the Constitution, is there any way to feel safe?

Although most insults are easy to shrug off, they are still threatening. I am ashamed when I feel afraid to go to the mosque. Friday is an extremely special day when we gather together to pray, but lately, I haven’t been going to the mosque for Jummah prayers. I have realized that I can never feel safe when in a large group of Muslims because of the widespread hatred of Muslims in the United States, commonly referred to as Islamophobia. Police surround our mosque, and there are posters warning us about dangerous people who might attack our place of worship because we have been identified as terrorists.

I wish I could tune out every news report that blasts out the headline “Terrorist Attack!” because I know that I will be judged based on the actions of someone else. Despite this anti-Muslim racism, what I have learned from these insults is that I am proud of my faith. I am a Muslim, but being Muslim doesn’t define me. I am a writer, a student, a dreamer, a friend, a New Yorker, a helper, and an American. I am unapologetically me, a Muslim, and so much more. I definitely think everyone should get to know a Muslim. They would see that some of us are also Harry Potter fans, not just people planning to bomb the White House.

Labels are unjustly placed on us because of the way we speak, the color of our skin, and what we believe in—not for who we are as individuals. Instead, we should all take more time to get to know one another. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. To me, it seems Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is a dream that should be a reality. But, for now, we are dreaming.

Aminata Toure is a Guinean American Muslim student. Aminata loves spoken-word poetry and performs in front of hundreds of people at her school’s annual poetry slam. She loves writing, language, history, and West African food and culture. Aminata wants to work at the United Nations when she grows up.

From the Author 

Dear Alessandra, Cain, Daniel, Tiara, Emma, Hailee, Aminata and Ethan,

I am moved and inspired by the thought each of you put into your responses to my story about this so-called “Constitution-free zone.” Whether we realize it or not, immigration in this country impacts all of us— either because we are immigrants ourselves, have neighbors, friends, and family who are, or because we depend on immigrants for many aspects of our lives—from the food we put on our tables to the technology that bewitches us. It is true that immigrants enrich our society in so many important ways, as many of you point out.

And while the federal statute that permits U.S. Border Patrol officers to stop and search at will any of the 200 million of us in this 100-mile shadow border, immigrants have been their biggest targets. In your essays, you highlight how unjust the law is—nothing short of racial profiling. It is heartening to see each of you, in your own way, speaking out against the unfairness of this practice.

Alessandra, you are correct, the immigration system in this country is in shambles. You make a powerful argument about how profiling ostracizes entire communities and how the warrantless searches allowed by this statute impede trust-building between law enforcement and the people they are called on to serve.

And Cain, you point out how this 100-mile zone, along with other laws in the state of Texas where you attended school, make people feel like they’re “always under surveillance, and that, at any moment, you may be pulled over to be questioned and detained.” It seems unimaginable that people live their lives this way, yet millions in this country do.

You, Emma, for example, speak of living in a kind of silent fear since Donald Trump took office, even though you were born in this country and your parents are here legally. You are right, “We shouldn’t have to live in fear that our rights will be taken away.”

And Aminata, you write of being constantly judged and labeled because you’re a Muslim American. How unfortunate and sad that in a country that generations of people fled to search for religious freedom, you are ashamed at times to practice your own. The Constitution-free zone, you write, “goes directly against the Constitution, the soul of this country, something that asserts that we are all equal before the law.”

Tiara, I could personally relate to your gripping account of being racially profiled and humiliated in a store. You were appalled that the Greyhound passenger in California was targeted by Border Patrol because they claimed his shoes looked like those of someone who had walked across the border: “If a man is judged by his shoes,” you ask, “who else and what else are getting judged in the world?”

Hailee, you write about the incorrect assumptions people make about you, an American born of Korean descent, based solely on your appearance and compared it to the assumptions Border Patrol agents make about those they detain in this zone.

Daniel, you speak of the role of political fearmongering in immigration. It’s not new, but under the current administration, turning immigrants into boogiemen for political gain is currency. You write that “For some politicians, it is easier to sell a border wall to a scared population than it is to explain the need for reformed immigration policy.”

And Ethan, you recognize the contributions immigrants make to this country through the connections we all make with them and the strength they bring to our society.

Keep speaking your truth. Use your words and status to call out injustice wherever and whenever you see it. Untold numbers of people spoke out against this practice by Border Patrol and brought pressure on Greyhound to change. In December, the company began offering passengers written guidance—in both Spanish and English—so they understand what their rights are when officers board their bus. Small steps, yes, but progress nonetheless, brought about by people just like you, speaking up for those who sometimes lack a voice to speak up for themselves.

With sincere gratitude,

Lornet Turnbull

Lornet Turnbull is an editor for YES! and a Seattle-based freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter  @TurnbullL .

We received many outstanding essays for the Winter 2019 Student Writing Competition. Though not every participant can win the contest, we’d like to share some excerpts that caught our eye:

After my parents argued with the woman, they told me if you can fight with fists, you prove the other person’s point, but when you fight with the power of your words, you can have a much bigger impact. I also learned that I should never be ashamed of where I am from. —Fernando Flores, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

Just because we were born here and are privileged to the freedom of our country, we do not have the right to deprive others of a chance at success. —Avalyn Cox, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

Maybe, rather than a wall, a better solution to our immigration problem would be a bridge. —Sean Dwyer, Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

If anything, what I’ve learned is that I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to change our world. I don’t know how to make a difference, how to make my voice heard. But I have learned the importance of one word, a simple two-letter word that’s taught to the youngest of us, a word we all know but never recognize: the significance of ‘we.’ —Enna Chiu, Highland Park High School, Highland Park, N.J.

Not to say the Border Patrol should not have authorization to search people within the border, but I am saying it should be near the border, more like one mile, not 100. —Cooper Tarbuck, Maranacook Middle School, Manchester, Maine.

My caramel color, my feminism, my Spanish and English language, my Mexican culture, and my young Latina self gives me the confidence to believe in myself, but it can also teach others that making wrong assumptions about someone because of their skin color, identity, culture, looks or gender can make them look and be weaker. —Ana Hernandez, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

We don’t need to change who we are to fit these stereotypes like someone going on a diet to fit into a new pair of pants. —Kaylee Meyers, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

If a human being with no criminal background whatsoever has trouble entering the country because of the way he or she dresses or speaks, border protection degenerates into arbitrariness. —Jonas Schumacher, Heidelberg University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany

I believe that you should be able to travel freely throughout your own country without the constant fear of needing to prove that you belong here . —MacKenzie Morgan, Lincoln Middle School, Ypsilanti, Mich.

America is known as “the Land of Opportunity,” but this label is quickly disappearing. If we keep stopping those striving for a better life, then what will become of this country? —Ennyn Chiu, Highland Park Middle School, Highland Park, N.J.

The fact that two-thirds of the people in the U.S. are living in an area called the “Constitution-free zone” is appalling. Our Constitution was made to protect our rights as citizens, no matter where we are in the country. These systems that we are using to “secure” our country are failing, and we need to find a way to change them. —Isis Liaw, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

I won’t let anyone, especially a man, tell me what I can do, because I am a strong Latina. I will represent where I come from, and I am proud to be Mexican. I will show others that looks can be deceiving. I will show others that even the weakest animal, a beautiful butterfly, is tough, and it will cross any border, no matter how challenging the journey may be. —Brittany Leal, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

Get Stories of Solutions to Share with Your Classroom

Teachers save 50% on YES! Magazine.

Inspiration in Your Inbox

Get the free daily newsletter from YES! Magazine: Stories of people creating a better world to inspire you and your students.

Immigration - Essay Examples And Topic Ideas For Free

Immigration refers to the movement of individuals from one country to another, often in search of better opportunities or to escape adversities. Essays on immigration could delve into the various causes of immigration, its impact on host and origin countries, and the policies governing immigration. Additionally, discussions might extend to the experiences of immigrants, and the global debates surrounding immigration and asylum. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Immigration you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

The Effects of Illegal Immigration

Introduction Immigrants from all over look to the United States' as a possible new home in hopes at a chance at a better life. The United States is seen as a chance for economic prosperity and as an escape from a life of many disappointments and fears, so many immigrants will do whatever it takes to get themselves and their families here, even if it does include breaking the law. The United States' population includes approximately 43.7 million immigrants, which […]

Cons of Illegal Immigration

Millions of immigrants come to the United States. Illegal immigration has been an ongoing issue for many years. They may come here for a better life, job opportunities, better life, and many more reasons. These undocumented immigrants leave everything they have at home to come here. They risk a lot. They come for the better for themselves and their families. These immigrants come here for a purpose whether financial issues or the better. Many come for better education and job […]

Prejudice Towards Illegal Immigrants

Thesis: The Illegal immigrant are sometimes judged as harmful people who come to America and destroy this country. However, most of them are very hardworking people looking for a better life to support their families. Illegal immigrants come to the United States to keep their families safety Immigrants contribute to the United States workforce About 90 percent of undocumented immigrants in the nation work 2. If employers can keep wages down by hiring illegal immigrants, then these savings are presumably […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

Illegal Immigration and its Effects on Society

Illegal immigration is a growing problem in the United States which causes many issues for citizens, such as job loss and higher taxes. It is undoubtedly an issue that needs to be addressed[1]. Illegal immigration leads to the drug trade in the United States and takes away many jobs from legal citizens[2]. Welfare is also something to consider when discussing illegal immigrants, considering that they can't legally be paid, so they are granted welfare, which also costs taxpayers more money[3]. […]

Illegal Immigration: Search of a Good Life

Illegal immigration to the United States is thriving due to the support of people needing to find a better life for themselves and families. The movement of immigration can be a positive impact on the politics and culture and economy wise. Yes it is more people coming into our country, but not all of its bad as everyone thinks it is. People of immigration bring new perspectives, experiences, and ideas to the communities. Immigrants start businesses, also earn income, and […]

Illegal Immigrants Deserve Civil Rights

Citizenship in the United States comes with a very significant and powerful advantage; civil rights. Under these rights, your freedom is protected from several infringements by the government. Many individuals are entitled to these rights, such as those born in the United States, while many individuals may not be granted all of these rights, such as illegal immigrants. There is a huge controversial debate surrounding illegal immigrants and whether they should have civil rights and liberties, and this debate is […]

What are the Effects of Illegal Immigration?

The United States of America is facing many challenges in regards to illegal immigration. By draining public funds, creating unfair competition for jobs (thereby lowering wages and working conditions), and by imposing unwanted strains on services designed to provide assistance to Americans, illegal immigration causes harm to legal residents. We are one of the only countries in the world where, in your stay, you retain many benefits, and are taken care of while you're here. Countless amount of people believe […]

Immigration Reform

Immigration reforms have been very controversial in United States of America. Way back in 1965, the United States made a law on issues of immigration which was aimed at allowing immigrants into United States. It was, however, stated that immigrants with possible skills to bring United States economy more benefits would be highly considered. With time even so, more immigrants began to come to United States with family chains being the main issue of concern. Once an individual is able […]

Illegal Immigrants: Huge Controversial in the United States

Year after year, numerous news stories emerge about illegal immigrants. The first prominent case involved two illegal immigrants who were arrested for speeding by two sheriff's deputies. The deputies ended up severely beating them, even though the arrested individuals were unarmed. ("Who does not like Immigrants?", n.d.) Many people empathized with them, while others showed no sympathy due to their illegal entry into the U.S. ("Who does not like Immigrants?", n.d.) This marked the beginning of escalating tensions. A significant […]

Managing Illegal Immigration to the United States

Basically, the goal to protect the country and its people has not changed and still lives on within the modern policies. As in the late 1800s, almost any given foreigner has the ability to become a legal resident, or a person (who lawfully lives in a country, state, etc.) of the United States. However, the process by which an individual can become a legal resident is much more complicated than it has been in years prior. In order to become […]

Illegal Immigration: Economy’s Boost

Many of us know that America is known as a great country because of its diversity. The cause of this diversity is the fact that America allowed immigrants to move to this country from their home countries which had an influence on our economy. However, not everyone in America is a legal immigrant. In October 1996, there were about five million illegal immigrants living in the United States, and the population of those immigrants was growing by about two hundred […]

Illegal Immigrant Population of the United States

As of 2018, according to FactCheck.org there are 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the US. Immigration is not bad for a country if the country can support the people. Diversity lets us experience different cultures and be more open to different views. However, the problem with immigration is illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is a tough problem because finding the right solution for it can be so hard. Dealing with immigration is hard because you want to help the people […]

Illegal Immigration and President Donald Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy

Illegal immigration, according to the Unites States of America is defined as when people who are foreigners and or immigrants try to enter the United States without the proper documentation needed to enter. During the summer of 2018, illegal immigration reached an all-time high due to President Donald Trump's zero tolerance policy. This crisis and the collapse of the border policy caused the Trump Administration to be very frustrated because this was an issue that was not going to be […]

Analyzing the Definition of Illegal Immigration and how Immigration has Affected American Value

Values The focus of our group for this project is illegal immigration and how it has shaped the mindset of people in America today. Our research question following the topic is, "To what extent has immigration affected American values and how do people define immigration?" For the purpose of this paper, this definition will serve as a guideline: Immigration is the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country. Embedded in this definition is the questionable interpretation of […]

Immigration Policy of Donald Trump

On the 17th January 2017, at a campaign rally in Miami, President Donald Trump stated that A Trump administration will stop illegal immigration, deport all criminal aliens, and save American lives (poltifact.com). The president and his administration will do actions to keep the US clear and safe. Trump tried to deport about 11 million undocumented immigrants (Wessler). This is just so cruel to destroy people live by sending them back to totally strange country, to separate their family, and to […]

American Population and Illegal Immigration

America has always been known as the country who invites those less fortunate in, but at what cost? At what point will there be an end? There have been millions of people coming to the United States every year, fleeing from war torn countries and poverty, and the United States lets them in. They are supposed to be the country of freedom, but at a certain point it will need to stop. That point is now, the U.S. can no […]

Massive Influx of Illegal Immigrants in USA

There have been a large number of illegal immigrants entering the United States for many years. For the last few years in particular, there has been a massive influx of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border. Illegal immigration needs to be stopped because it places a huge burden on the economy od the United States. One reason is the illegal immigrants receive many free benefits. Another reason is the illegal immigrants work practices are causing wages in certain areas to […]

Termination of Racism and American Perception of Immigration Today

Robert F. Kennedy is deemed as an unusual rebel of the sorts. Kennedy came from a wealthy, politically oriented family and was strongly influenced by the administrative occupations held by his father Joe and brother Jack. Kennedy worked as the attorney general and senator for New York. He had a vast empathy for minorities. While running for President Kennedy was popular among the public as he perceived all people as human beings and had a family-man aura. Unfortunately, Kennedy's life […]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Illegal immigration has been occurring for many centuries and continues to take place today. When people cross the border without being authorized, this can lead to grave danger. There have been many incidents with illegal immigrants who were involved in identity theft and identity loans. Most importantly, it violates the IRCA (1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act). Although, illegal immigration might be beneficial to people crossing the border; it should not be tolerated at all. In this essay, I will […]

Is Illegal Immigration Good for our Country?

Illegal immigration is good because some immigrants are trying to give their children a better future than will have in the country that they came from. Some are immigrants might drug traffic. For example, mexico drug dealers bring drugs to the United States and sell them for possibly money, coke, ammo, or marijuana. Some other Immigrants who don't drug traffic to the United States of America are here to give them and their children a opportunity to succeed in their […]

Does Illegal Immigration Impact Texas?

How Illegal Immigration Impacts Texas Vincent M Messana Geography 1303 Lone Star College - Tomball Abstract This paper explores the impact of illegal immigration in the great state of Texas, the main topics will focus on the effects on the economy, why illegal immigrants come here/ why not come legally, are the illegal immigrants bringing crime, how are illegal immigrants affecting Texas culture how are there so many illegal immigrants still living in Texas and what is being done to […]

Are Immigrants Good for the Americans?

Illegal immigration is not beneficial to our country and we should not protect it. Legal immigration is alright but we should focus more on enforcing our laws rather than offer blanket forgiveness to those who have broken them. People coming to our country bring many issues along with them. While they are in search of better opportunities in this country, most of them come here illegally even though we have a system that they can apply for and enter legally. […]

Illegal Immigration and Crime

The United States border is always a topic when the subject is the illegal entry ( entering into a country ) in the United States. Some people defend that building a wall will reduce the criminal activities in the country, while others defend that to stop illegal entry, ( entering into a country) could lapse the United States economy (the process of people making, selling, and buying things). To state that whether criminal activities increases by illegal ( entering into […]

A Look into our Natio’s Criminal Justice System and Immigration Laws

Abstract This paper will take a look at how the criminal justice system, race, and immigration all relate to each other, and the outcomes of each, with examples from the films 13th and Documented. It will analyze mass incarceration within the criminal justice system and discuss why there are so many people locked up, and some locked up for crimes they did not even commit. It will then elaborate on race in the criminal justice system, and talk about the […]

International and U.S Helping IIlegal Immigration

The International and U.S aid are agencies that help out civilian foreign aid especially those countries who are considered 3rd world countries. Which have less than a 1st world country has, such as more job opportunities, money, education and overall less crime. The overall issue for 3rd world countries is that the crime rate is very high as well as the homicide rate. And as of now it is increasing. The U.S aid is part of the government, and helps […]

Illegal Immigration and Human Trafficking

Human trafficking comes in many different forms such as sex trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Sex exploitation is based on the interaction between a trafficker selling an individual, victim being smuggled to customers for sexual services. Labor trafficking includes situations of debt bondage, forced labor, and involuntary child labor. Labor trafficking uses violence, threats, lies, and other forms of coercion to force people to work against their will in which most cases have no knowledge on the activities […]

Biggest Problem in the United States of America is Illegal Immigrants

One of the biggest problems that is being discussed in the United States of America is illegal immigrants. An illegal immigrant is someone who lives or works in another country when they do not have the legal right to do so, this is according to the Cambridge dictionary. Now you made wonder why someone would just want to get up and leave their country to just work and live? Or why is this such a big issue in the United […]

Positive Effects of Immigration

In the past few years, the topic of immigration has been a cause for much conversation and debate. While many people have discussed the morals of immigration, many have also assessed how exactly immigration affects the United States at both smaller and larger levels. Currently, there is much debate among scholars, politicians, economists and citizens regarding immigration and the economic effects that arise from it. Immigration has been discussed at great lengths for the past few years, and based off […]

Benefits of Immigration Essay

Combined picture of five years Syrian boy Omran injured during the airstrike in Aleppo and unbreathing body, faced down of three years old Alan Kurdi founded drowned in Mediterranean sea become a symbol of emigrant crisis1. This artwork of Syrian artist Rehman Siddiq very spectacularly and emotionally illustrated dilemma of every immigrant - stay or run. Immigration crisis become a social phenomenon that keep spreading all over the world. From mass media we can hear basically about two main streams […]

Mexican Immigration

At the wake of 1930, the Great Depression hit the United States hard. There was a serious job crisis as well as food shortages that affected the Mexican immigrants as well as all American dwellers. During this time, most of the Mexican immigrants and the Mexicans Americans were subjected to additional threats and hostility as the American migrants believed the Mexicans were taking their jobs (Gratton & Merchant, 2013). The American government came up strongly with deportation threats and they […]

Related topic

Additional example essays.

• Socioautobiography Choices and Experiences Growing up
• A Class Divided
• Gender Inequality in Education
• Homelessness in America
• End Of Life Ethical Issues
• The Oppression And Privilege
• Macbeth Downfall in the Context of Violence
• "Just Walk on" by Brent Staples Summary: Racial Stereotypes and Their Impact
• Essay About Theme for English B
• Logical Fallacies in Letter From Birmingham Jail
• How the Roles of Women and Men Were Portrayed in "A Doll's House"
• Dogs Are Better Than Cats Essay

How To Write an Essay About Immigration

Understanding the intricacies of immigration.

Writing an essay on how to write an essay about immigration requires a deep understanding of the multifaceted nature of immigration itself. Immigration is a complex topic, encompassing legal, economic, cultural, and humanitarian aspects. It's essential to recognize that essays about immigration should address its diverse implications – from the challenges faced by immigrants to the impacts on host countries. This foundational understanding is crucial for guiding the exploration of how to approach various narratives, policies, and theories related to immigration. Consider including aspects such as the reasons behind immigration, the experiences of immigrants, the policies of different countries, and the societal reactions to immigration.

Structuring the Immigration Essay

The structure of your essay about writing an essay on immigration is key. Start with a compelling introduction that highlights the importance of accurately and empathetically discussing immigration. The thesis statement here should reflect the purpose of your guidance – whether to inform, argue, or analyze different aspects of immigration. The body of your essay should then be divided into coherent sections, each focusing on a key aspect of writing about immigration. Discuss how to construct an argument, the importance of using reliable data and sources, and the need for presenting a balanced view that considers both the challenges and contributions of immigrants. Ensure each part of the essay seamlessly connects to create a cohesive guide.

Addressing Challenges and Offering Strategies

In this part of the essay, focus on the challenges writers may face when crafting an essay on immigration and propose strategies to overcome these. One major challenge is the politicization of immigration, requiring a careful and unbiased approach. Another is the sensitivity of the topic, as it often involves vulnerable populations. Offer advice on maintaining objectivity while being empathetic, and stress the importance of cultural sensitivity. Suggest methods for thorough research and analysis, emphasizing the need to understand immigration laws and policies, as well as the socio-economic factors involved. Discuss the importance of acknowledging diverse perspectives and experiences in the essay to provide a comprehensive view of immigration.

Concluding with Purpose

The conclusion of your essay should do more than summarize the main points about writing an essay on immigration. It's an opportunity to reflect on the importance of understanding and discussing immigration in a responsible and informed manner. Emphasize the role of such essays in shaping public opinion and policy. Encourage writers to approach the topic of immigration with a commitment to fairness, accuracy, and empathy. A strong conclusion will not only wrap up your essay effectively but also inspire and guide future writers to approach the topic of immigration with the depth and respect it deserves.

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

• Student Opportunities

About Hoover

Located on the campus of Stanford University and in Washington, DC, the Hoover Institution is the nation’s preeminent research center dedicated to generating policy ideas that promote economic prosperity, national security, and democratic governance. 

• The Hoover Story
• Hoover Timeline & History
• Mission Statement
• Vision of the Institution Today
• Key Focus Areas
• About our Fellows
• Research Programs
• Annual Reports
• Hoover in DC
• Fellowship Opportunities
• Visit Hoover
• David and Joan Traitel Building & Rental Information
• Newsletter Subscriptions
• Connect With Us

Hoover scholars form the Institution’s core and create breakthrough ideas aligned with our mission and ideals. What sets Hoover apart from all other policy organizations is its status as a center of scholarly excellence, its locus as a forum of scholarly discussion of public policy, and its ability to bring the conclusions of this scholarship to a public audience.

• Russell A. Berman
• Robert Service
• Arun Majumdar
• H.R. McMaster
• Justin Grimmer
• China's Global Sharp Power Project
• Economic Policy Group
• History Working Group
• Hoover Education Success Initiative
• National Security Task Force
• National Security, Technology & Law Working Group
• Middle East and the Islamic World Working Group
• Military History/Contemporary Conflict Working Group
• Renewing Indigenous Economies Project
• State & Local Governance
• Strengthening US-India Relations
• Technology, Economics, and Governance Working Group
• Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region

Books by Hoover Fellows

Economics Working Papers

Hoover Education Success Initiative | The Papers

• Hoover Fellows Program
• National Fellows Program
• Student Fellowship Program
• Veteran Fellowship Program
• Congressional Fellowship Program
• Media Fellowship Program
• Silas Palmer Fellowship
• Economic Fellowship Program

Throughout our over one-hundred-year history, our work has directly led to policies that have produced greater freedom, democracy, and opportunity in the United States and the world.

• Determining America’s Role in the World
• Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
• Empowering State and Local Governance
• Revitalizing History
• Confronting and Competing with China
• Revitalizing American Institutions
• Reforming K-12 Education
• Understanding Public Opinion
• Understanding the Effects of Technology on Economics and Governance
• Energy & Environment
• Health Care
• Immigration
• International Affairs
• Key Countries / Regions
• Law & Policy
• Politics & Public Opinion
• Science & Technology
• Security & Defense
• State & Local
• Books by Fellows
• Published Works by Fellows
• Working Papers
• Congressional Testimony
• Hoover Press
• PERIODICALS
• The Caravan
• China's Global Sharp Power
• Economic Policy
• History Lab
• Hoover Education
• Global Policy & Strategy
• Middle East and the Islamic World
• Military History & Contemporary Conflict
• Renewing Indigenous Economies
• State and Local Governance
• Technology, Economics, and Governance

Hoover scholars offer analysis of current policy challenges and provide solutions on how America can advance freedom, peace, and prosperity.

• China Global Sharp Power Weekly Alert
• Email newsletters
• Hoover Daily Report
• Subscription to Email Alerts
• Periodicals
• California on Your Mind
• Defining Ideas
• Hoover Digest
• Video Series
• Uncommon Knowledge
• Battlegrounds
• GoodFellows
• Hoover Events
• Capital Conversations
• Hoover Book Club
• AUDIO PODCASTS
• Matters of Policy & Politics
• Economics, Applied
• Free Speech Unmuted
• Secrets of Statecraft
• Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century
• Libertarian
• Library & Archives

Support Hoover

Learn more about joining the community of supporters and scholars working together to advance Hoover’s mission and values.

What is MyHoover?

MyHoover delivers a personalized experience at  Hoover.org . In a few easy steps, create an account and receive the most recent analysis from Hoover fellows tailored to your specific policy interests.

Watch this video for an overview of MyHoover.

Log In to MyHoover

Forgot Password

Don't have an account? Sign up

Have questions? Contact us

• Support the Mission of the Hoover Institution
• Subscribe to the Hoover Daily Report
• Follow Hoover on Social Media

Make a Gift

Your gift helps advance ideas that promote a free society.

• About Hoover Institution
• Meet Our Fellows
• Focus Areas
• Research Teams
• Library & Archives

Library & archives

Events, news & press.

The Debate in the United States over Immigration

These essays examine economic, political, social, and legal issues related to immigration into the United States—from compelling arguments for limited immigration to forceful arguments for open borders. They assess the benefits and costs of immigration and its impact on education, social welfare, and health care.

With the annual number of immigrants to the United States at an all-time high, the debate over immigration has reached a fevered pitch. Do today's immigrants come to this country just to go on welfare? Will immigration forever change America's ethnic, cultural, and political landscape? Some see unrestrained immigration as the lifeblood of the world's most successful society, while others have called for closing the borders entirely. After the introduction, which examines the historical debate over immigration, the book looks at the current spectrum of economic, political, social, and legal issues related to immigration into the United States—from compelling arguments for limited immigration to forceful arguments for open borders. As part of the program on American Institutions and Economic Performance, leading scholars and business experts convened at the Hoover Institution in October 1996. Amid swirling controversy over passage of California's Proposition 187, which denies welfare benefits to illegal immigrants, conference participants discussed current state and federal immigration policies and the strengths and weaknesses of proposed changes. Presented here is a powerful cross section of papers from that conference, each covering a major aspect of the overall immigration issue. The distinguished participants offer assessments of the benefits and costs of immigration, along with its impact on education, social welfare, and health care, and then presents appraisals of the widely publicized subject of undocumented immigration and employer sanctions. With immigration becoming a personal issue for millions of Americans, The Debate in the United States over Immigration illuminates fundamental, individual truths crucial to making policy decisions that will ultimately best serve American society.

Copyright 1997.

CLICK HERE TO BUY »

View the discussion thread.

Join the Hoover Institution’s community of supporters in ideas advancing freedom.

This website uses cookies to ensure the best user experience. Privacy & Cookies Notice Accept Cookies

Manage My Cookies

Manage Cookie Preferences

Confirm My Selections

• Monetary Policy
• Health Care
• Climate Change
• Artificial Intelligence
• All Chicago Booth Review Topics

Why the US Should Free Its Immigration Policies

The United States is made up of 3.5 million square miles, with 84 people per square mile. The United Kingdom has 650 people per square mile. If we let in 2 billion people, we’ll have no more population density than the UK.

• By John H. Cochrane
• November 05, 2014
• CBR - Fall 2014
• Share This Page

Stanford University’s Hoover Institution asked me to write an essay for its immigration journal, Peregrine , with the title, “What is the optimal number of immigrants to the US?”

My answer: 2,002,052,035. Seriously.

Recommended Reading

The economic case for accepting refugees.

Refugees may be the secret to long-term economic growth.

• CBR - Economics

Ancestry Can Pave the Way for Foreign Investment

Immigrants bring with them increased likelihood of foreign direct investment from their native countries.

Why the UK? Well, it seems like a really pretty country and none too crowded on Masterpiece Theater. The Netherlands is also attractive with 1,250 people per square mile, so maybe 4 billion. Okay, maybe more of the US is uninhabitable desert or tundra, so maybe only 1 billion. However you cut it, the US still looks severely underpopulated relative to many other pleasant, advanced countries.

As you can see by my playful calculation, asking what is the optimal number of immigrants is the wrong question.

What is the optimal number of imported tomatoes? Soviet central-planners tried to figure things out this way. Americans shouldn’t. We should decide on the optimal terms on which tomatoes can be imported, and then let the market decide the number. Similarly, we should debate what the optimal terms for immigration are—How will we let people immigrate? What kind of people?—so that the vast majority of such immigrants are a net benefit to the US. Then, let as many come as want to. On the right terms, the number will self-regulate.

Econ 101: figure out the price, then set the rules of the game; don’t decide the quantity, or determine the outcome. When a society sets target quantities, or sets quotas, as the US does now with immigration, the result is generally a calamitous waste. With an immigrant quota, an entrepreneur who could come to the US and start a billion-dollar business faces the same restriction as everyone else. The potential Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin has no way to signal just how much his contribution to our society would be.

Why fear immigrants? You might fear they will overuse social services. Morally, just why your taxes should support an unfortunate who happened to be born in Maine and not one who happened to be born in Guadalajara is an interesting question, but leave that aside for now. It’s easy enough to structure a deal that protects the finances of the welfare state. Immigrants would pay a bond at the border, say $5,000. If they run out of money, are convicted of a crime, don’t have health insurance, or whatever, the bond pays for their ticket home. Alternatively, the government could establish an asset and income test: immigrants must show $10,000 in assets and either a job within six months or visible business or asset income.

In any case, welfare is a red herring. Immigrants might go to France for a welfare state. The vast majority of immigrants to the US come to work, and pay taxes. Overuse of social services is simply not a problem. But if you worry about it, it’s easy to structure the deal.

You might fear that immigrants will compete for jobs, and drive down American wages. Again, this is not demonstrably a serious problem. If labor does not move in, capital—factories and farms—moves out and wages go down anyway. Immigrants come to work in wide-open industries with lots of jobs, not those where there are few jobs and many workers. Thus, restrictions on immigration do little, in the long run of an open economy such as the US, to “protect” wages.

To the extent wage-boosting immigration restrictions can work, the higher wages translate into higher prices to American consumers. The country as a whole—especially low-income consumers who tend to shop at Walmart and benefit the most from low-priced goods—is not better off.

As a concrete example, we keep doctors and nurses out. And we bemoan how expensive health care has become. Well, immigration restrictions are designed to keep American wages up, and there they are, working as promised. But keeping doctor wages up means keeping your health costs up.

Wage-boosting arguments are particularly hypocritical for conservatives. If you recognize the failure of minimum wages, unions, occupational licensing, hours limitations, protectionism against imported goods, and other misguided policies to try to raise the well-being of American workers, then you have no business supporting immigration limits to the same end.

And finally, if it did work, restricting immigration benefits some American workers by hurting Mexican workers. Is it really America’s place in the world to take opportunities from poor Mexicans to subsidize our workers’ standard of living? We are a strange country that, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, rigorously prohibits employment discrimination “because of birthplace, ancestry, culture, linguistic characteristics common to a specific ethnic group, or accent . . .” and then requires such discrimination because of, well, birthplace.

But if that’s a worry, fine. The government could license protected occupations such that only US citizens can hold the protected occupational licenses. Too intrusive? Well, that’s what we’re trying to do by keeping people out, and good policy is not produced by putting nice appearances on nasty policies.

More seriously, one can worry that our society quickly absorbs educated people: engineers, programmers, venture capitalists, MBAs, and professors, but does not quickly absorb people with less education. If the low-skill, low-assimilation objection has merit, let in anyone with specific skills and credentials. Let’s talk about the terms, not the numbers.

Maybe you worry about social values. One can easily demand that immigrants speak English, and have a vague understanding of American institutions, history, and law, though we don’t require this of our native citizens. Fine. Let’s talk about the deal, not the numbers.

Maybe you worry, how will we build homes and find jobs for all these people? “We” don’t. They will. Markets, not the government, already provide homes and jobs for citizens. And anyway, aren’t we supposed to be worried about our stagnant economy? Everyone wants more housing construction in the US, yet there are only so many people who need only so many houses. Imagine the construction boom from millions of additional immigrants each year. Our ancestors did not need the American Indian federal government to provide them jobs or build them houses. Neither do new immigrants.

A ridiculous number of talented people are forced to leave after coming to the US to get engineering or business-school diplomas from US universities. Anyone who gets a degree here should be able to stay. Instead, we kick them out.

Another 11 million people are here, working hard, paying taxes, owning property, but scurrying around in semilegal status. They can’t really sue if swindled. They certainly can’t vote on how the society they live in works. They can’t get a driver’s license. They live in constant fear. This is a national embarrassment. We criticize other nations for “apartheid” when they deny legal status to people who have been living there for decades, or even generations. Yet one in 20 people living within US borders suffers the same fate.

OK, they are “illegal.” But Jim Crow had the full force of law too. Does, “They should respect the law,” apply to segregation laws? Not all laws are good. And, “They should get in line and follow the law,” is empty—it is simply impossible for the average migrant from Mexico, China, or India to come legally to the US.

If you’ve been here x years, have a job, and have stayed out of trouble, then you should get to stay. If we let everyone else who wants to migrate on these same terms, then we don’t have to worry about the unfairness of letting illegals “jump the line.” Get the terms right, and there will be no lines and no unfairness.

Let’s talk about the deal, not the numbers. For every objection to open immigration, it’s easy enough to find terms of the deal to resolve the matter. The right terms will allow the optimal amount of immigration to settle itself, so that no apparatchik in Washington has to come up with a number. Once we get the terms right, every person who can benefit our society will come, and America will truly be a great nation of great immigrants again.

John H. Cochrane is AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. Previous versions of this essay appeared in Peregrine, and on Cochrane’s blog, The Grumpy Economist .

Works Cited

• John H. Cochrane, “After the ACA: Freeing the Market for Health Care,” Expanded version of remarks given at “The Future of Health Care Reform in the United States” conference, University of Chicago Law School, October 2012. Revised June 2014.
• “Facts about National Origin Discrimination,” US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website (eeoc.gov/eeoc/publications/fs-nator.cfm), Accessed July 2014.

More from Chicago Booth Review

Do you really get more conservative as you age.

Chicago Booth’s Sam Peltzman talks about his research on political ideology.

• CBR Podcast

A Good Boss Can Boost Team Productivity

A study of two multibillion-dollar retail chains homes in on managers.

• CBR - Management

Why South Korea’s Housing Market Is So Vulnerable

Rising rates have exposed landlords’ significant interest-rate risk.

Related Topics

• CBR - Immigration

More from Chicago Booth

Your Privacy We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. Please review Chicago Booth's privacy notice , which provides information explaining how and why we collect particular information when you visit our website.

Legal Immigration Essays

Immigration challenges, values, and pragmatic solutions, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

Handout A: Background Essay – The History of Immigration Law in the United States

Background Essay—The History of Immigration Law in the United States

Directions: Read the background essay and answer the critical thinking questions at the end. In addition, formulate your own questions about the content discussed.

In the modern era, nation-states are defined by their unique laws, forms of government, and distinct national cultures within the borders that make them sovereign nations. Since the early years of the United States’ history, the federal government has sought, with varying degrees of success, to control and define the nature and scale of immigration into the country. In the first seventy years of the nation’s history, immigration was left largely unrestricted. Congress focused its attention on defining the terms by which immigrants could gain the full legal rights of citizenship. Beginning in the 1880s, however, Congress began to legislate on the national and ethnic makeup of immigrants. Lawmakers passed laws forbidding certain groups from entering the country, and restricted the number of people who could enter from particular nations. In the 1920s, Congress enacted quotas based upon immigrants’ national origin, limiting the number of immigrants who could enter from non-Western European countries. In the 1960s, immigration policy was radically transformed , and the policies of the preceding generations were abolished.  

Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution empowers the Congress to “Establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization.” This means that Congress has the power to determine the rules and processes under which people from other countries may become citizens of the United States. The first national law concerning immigration was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that any free white person who had resided in the U.S. for at least two years could apply for full citizenship. Congress also required applicants to demonstrate “good character” and swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. Enslaved Blacks forcibly brought to the country in the international slave trade were ineligible for citizenship.  

In 1795, naturalization standards were changed to require five years’ prior residence in the U.S., and again in 1798 to require 14 years’ residence. The 1798 revision was passed amidst the anti-French fervor of the Quasi-War and sought to limit the influence of foreign-born citizens in federal elections. During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the 1798 standards were repealed to require five years’ residence once more. As immigration patterns changed over time, especially in the late 1840s and early 1850s when Irish and Germans replaced the British as the primary immigrant groups, federal immigration law remained largely unchanged. Despite anti-immigrant agitation in the 1850s and the rise of nativist political groups, no limits or quotas were imposed on immigration.  

  Questions still lingered about the nature of citizenship for Black Americans. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery in all of the states. Were emancipated slaves citizens, or not? Through the end of the Civil War, enslaved people had not been considered citizens and possessed none of the rights of their white countrymen. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 established that freedmen were indeed citizens. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution confirmed the position set forth in the Civil Rights Act. The amendment stated that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The amendment prohibited the states from curtailing the privileges of federal citizenship. The construction of the citizenship clause indicates that anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen, and this is what federal law has maintained ever since. However, some disagreement simmered as to the meaning of the citizenship clause, and whether it was intended to clarify the status of emancipated slaves, or whether it was written to apply to all peoples regardless of context.  

  During the congressional ratification debates, members made clear the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. Senator and Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens argued in 1866 that the Fourteenth Amendment was the final fulfillment of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, a law designed to ensure equal rights for all Americans no matter their race or prior status under the law. Senator Jacob Howard, one of the chief authors of the citizenship clause, reassured Congress by saying the amendment “will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens” or had been born to foreign diplomats. Senator John Bingham echoed his colleague’s remarks and said the citizenship clause reasserts “that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of our Constitution itself, a natural-born citizen.” In 1868, the amendment was ratified, and the interpretation that favors the interpretation that all individuals born in the United States are naturalized citizens has prevailed.  

After the Civil War, the American economy boomed as industry grew and the American West was settled and organized into new states. On the Pacific coast, the high demand for labor drew thousands of Chinese immigrants into the country to work in a variety of capacities. Most often, they worked building railroads or in mines. Others farmed or ran businesses in California’s growing cities. By the late 1870s, opposition to Chinese laborers had grown substantially, stemming from a combination of racism and the belief that Chinese laborers unfairly competed with white American laborers and stole their economic opportunities. Eventually, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barring virtually all new immigration from China. The act was extended in 1892 and on a permanent basis beginning in 1902. Other laws further restricted the rights and privileges of Chinese immigrants already in the United States. The Scott Act of 1888, for example, forbade Chinese immigrants who left the United States from returning, even if they were gone for a short period of time. It was not until World War II, when China was a military ally of the United States, that the ban on Chinese immigration was lifted.  

For most of the 1800s, the main sources of immigrants to the United States were British, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Central European peoples. By the 1880s, immigration patterns shifted toward Eastern and Southern European groups, especially Italians, Poles, Russians, and other Slavic peoples. Most were pulled to the United States by the promise of better opportunities and improved quality of life. The dramatic change in the ethnic makeup of this “new wave” of immigrants caused alarm among nativists who saw the new immigrants as inferior, criminals, and Catholics with little allegiance to republican ideals.   

  This same latent anti-immigrant hostility also erupted during both World Wars. Anti-immigrant antagonism has not always been racially motivated. In World War I, German-Americans (even those born in the United States) were subjected to discrimination and harassment for their national background. In some communities, German-Americans were lynched by mobs while others had their businesses boycotted or closed. Americans born in Germany were forced to register with the government as “enemy aliens,” and some states prohibited the use of the German language in school instruction. Most Lutheran churches ceased conducting services in the German language and adopted English instead.  

One piece of legislation that emerged from this period was the Immigration Act of 1917 which created the Asiatic Barred Zone, a vast area of Asia from which no person could immigrate to the U.S. The prohibited areas included most of the Middle East, South Asian countries like Persia and British-ruled India, as well as central Asia and Southeastern Asia.  

Nativist fears of the growing number of immigrants arriving from Eastern and Southern European countries also led Congress to pass the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, which placed limits on the number of people entering the country based upon prescribed quotas. The law used the 1910 Federal Census to determine existing numbers of foreign-born citizens already living in the U.S. It then required that a number equivalent to only 3% of the already resident population from a certain country could be admitted. Therefore, for example, if 100,000 Bulgarians already lived in the U.S., only 3,000 Bulgarian immigrants could enter annually thereafter. This scheme became known as the National Origins Formula. While the stated goal of federal policy sought to ensure that new waves of immigrants from outside western and central Europe could slowly integrate into American society and so could better embrace American notions of civic virtue, self-government, and productivity, its roots in nativism and insularism mark it as a dark moment in American history.  

The Immigration Act of 1921 was followed a few years later by the Immigration Act of 1924 which decreased the quota from 3% to 2% and used the 1890 census instead of the 1910 census as the reference point for its quotas. Because Congress chose to utilize the 1890 census, which showed a higher proportion of residents from what were seen as more desirable European countries like Germany and Great Britain, the law created artificially low quotas for the new immigrants. Furthermore, it placed low caps on arrivals from majority non-white nations, like those in Africa and the Middle East. In the first year of its enactment, the law permitted 51,000 German immigrants, for example, but only 100 from the Arabian Peninsula.  

During World War II, JapaneseAmericans were subjected to even worse treatment and were forced into internment camps for the duration of the war. In February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which forced Japanese Americans to move away from the Pacific coast because of the fear they would support a Japanese invasion or engage in acts of sabotage. Fred Korematsu challenged the legality of Roosevelt’s directive, but in  Korematsu v. U.S.  (1944) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the internment of Japanese Americans was constitutional.  

  The quotas and restrictions of the 1920s remained largely in place until the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, when he and Congress undertook a sweeping reform project of many of the most important public policy sectors. As part of his reform agenda, Johnson signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended use of the National Origins Formula. Under the new law, 120,000 immigrants were to be admitted annually from Western Hemisphere nations in Latin and South America. 170,000 people per year would be admitted from Asia, Africa, and Europe combined. The reforms of 1965 initiated a substantial change in the ethnic and national origin of immigrants with immigration today being dominated by non-European peoples from all parts of the world. Further, the 1965 reform provided an avenue for immigrants’ families to come to the United States after them, as family immigration is usually not counted in the overall quota. With minor revisions, the standards set forth in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 remain in effect today and still determines from which countries the United States draws its new citizens.  

CRITICAL THINKING OR HOMEWORK QUESTIONS  

• Describe the Naturalization Act of 1790. According to this law, who could become citizens of the United States? What racial boundaries to citizenship did the law define? What were the conditions of gaining full citizenship?  
• What is naturalization and why were law makers in the years around 1800 concerned with defining how long citizens must be in the country to become naturalized?  
• Describe the debate over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. How do most Americans in the present day interpret the law? How did its framers explain the law at the time?  
• What were some of the reasons that the Chinese were forbidden to immigrate? When were these immigration restrictions lifted?  
• Describe the challenges faced by immigrants and the descendants of recent immigrants during World War I and World War II. What did the Supreme Court rule in  Korematsu v. U.S. ?  
• What were the primary changes brought about in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? How was this law different from the laws enacted in 1921 and 1924?  

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Immigration Reform — Argumentative Essay On Immigration

Argumentative Essay on Immigration

• Categories: Immigration Reform

About this sample

Words: 638 |

Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 638 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Social Issues

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

6 pages / 2544 words

2 pages / 882 words

1 pages / 350 words

2 pages / 991 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Immigration Reform

Police brutality is a pressing issue in contemporary society that demands urgent attention and effective solutions. Over the years, numerous incidents of excessive use of force by law enforcement officers have sparked unrest, [...]

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a groundbreaking book written by scholar and activist Gloria Anzaldúa. Published in 1987, the book explores the concept of the border, both physical and metaphorical, as experienced by [...]

Joppke, Christian. 'The Content of Citizenship Tests: How Liberal?' Citizenship Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2012, pp. 179-193.Groenendijk, Kees, and Monique Kremer. 'A Touchstone of Belonging or a Barrier to Entry? The Role of [...]

Illegal immigration has been a hotly debated topic in the United States for many years, and it continues to be a contentious issue today. The influx of undocumented immigrants into the country has sparked heated discussions on [...]

When immigrants come of age many grew up feeling like outcasts in contrast to citizens. Immigration is a considerably large importance in the U.S, especially because it was originally founded and forged by immigrants. The land [...]

David Brooks’ A Nation of Mutts, claims that the United States is becoming a “nation of mutts” and that the immigration reform is speeding up the process. Brooks supports his claim by giving background on immigration along with [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Immigration

Unmasking the boston police department’s gang database: how an arbitrary system criminalizes innocent conduct, a.b. 1766, 2021-2022 leg., reg. sess. (cal. 2022) (enacted).

California Makes ID Cards Available to Undocumented Residents.

The Unpragmatic Family Law of Marginalized Families

• Mariela Olivares

NIMBYism at the Border

• Haiyun Damon-Feng

Separation of Powers and Thuraissigiam : The Entry Fiction as Judicial Aggrandizement

• Brandon Hallett Thomas

Courts in Name Only: Repairing America’s Immigration Adjudication System

Biden v. texas, patel v. garland, geo group, inc. v. newsom.

Ninth Circuit Strikes Down as Preempted California Law Prohibiting Private Immigration Detention Within the State

Ndambi v. CoreCivic, Inc.

Fourth Circuit Holds That Detained Immigrant Workers Are Not “Employees” Under the Fair Labor Standards Act

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

Key facts about U.S. immigration policies and Biden’s proposed changes

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, his administration has acted on a number of fronts to reverse Trump-era restrictions on immigration to the United States. The steps include plans to boost refugee admissions , preserving deportation relief for unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and not enforcing the “ public charge ” rule that denies green cards to immigrants who might use public benefits like Medicaid.

Biden has also lifted restrictions established early in the coronavirus pandemic that drastically reduced the number of visas issued to immigrants. The number of people who received a green card declined from about 240,000 in the second quarter of the 2020 fiscal year (January to March) to about 79,000 in the third quarter (April to June). By comparison, in the third quarter of fiscal 2019, nearly 266,000 people received a green card.

Biden’s biggest immigration proposal to date would allow more new immigrants into the U.S. while giving millions of unauthorized immigrants who are already in the country a pathway to legal status. The expansive legislation would create an eight-year path to citizenship for the nation’s estimated 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants , update the existing family-based immigration system, revise employment-based visa rules and increase the number of diversity visas . By contrast, President Donald Trump’s administration sought to restrict legal immigration in a variety of ways, including through legislation that would have overhauled the nation’s legal immigration system by sharply reducing family-based immigration.

The Biden administration has proposed legislation that would create new ways for immigrants to legally enter the United States. The bill would also create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants living in the country.

To better understand the existing U.S. immigration system, we analyzed the most recent data available on federal immigration programs. This includes admission categories for green card recipients and the types of temporary employment visas available to immigrant workers. We also examined temporary permissions granted to some immigrants to live and work in the country through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status programs.

This analysis relies on data from various sources within the U.S. government, including the Department of Homeland Security, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of State, Federal Register announcements and public statements from the White House.

The Senate is considering several immigration provisions in a spending bill, the Build Back Better Act , that the House passed in November 2021. While passage of the bill is uncertain – as is the inclusion of immigration reforms in the bill’s final version – the legislation would make about 7 million unauthorized immigrants eligible to apply for protection from deportation, work permits and driver’s licenses.

Amid a record number of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, Biden reinstated in December 2021 a Trump-era policy that requires those who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border and seek asylum to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed. Biden had earlier ended the Migration Protection Protocols , or “Remain in Mexico” policy, and then restarted it after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lawsuit by Texas and Missouri that challenged the program’s closure. Asylum seekers do not receive a legal status that allows them to live and work in the U.S. until the claim is approved.

Overall, more than 35 million lawful immigrants live in the U.S.; most are American citizens. Many live and work in the country after being granted lawful permanent residence, while others receive temporary visas available to students and workers. In addition, roughly 1 million unauthorized immigrants have temporary permission to live and work in the U.S. through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status programs.

Here are key details about existing U.S. immigration programs, as well as Biden’s proposed changes to them:

Family-based immigration

In fiscal 2019, nearly 710,000 people received lawful permanent residence in the U.S. through family sponsorship. The program allows someone to receive a green card if they already have a spouse, child, sibling or parent living in the country with U.S. citizenship or, in some cases, a green card. Immigrants from countries with large numbers of applicants often wait for years to receive a green card because a single country can account for no more than 7% of all green cards issued annually.

Biden’s proposal would expand access to family-based green cards in a variety of ways, such as by increasing per-country caps and clearing application backlogs. Today, family-based immigration – referred to by some as “ chain migration ” – is the most common way people gain green cards, in recent years accounting for about two-thirds of the more than 1 million people who receive green cards annually.

Refugee admissions

The U.S. admitted only 11,411 refugees in fiscal year 2021, the lowest number since Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act for those fleeing persecution in their home countries. The low number of admissions came even after the Biden administration raised the maximum number of refugees the nation could admit to 62,500 in fiscal 2021 . Biden has increased the refugee cap to 125,000 for fiscal 2022, which started on Oct. 1, 2021.

The low number of admissions in recent years is due in part to the ongoing pandemic. The U.S. admitted only about 12,000 refugees in fiscal 2020 after the country suspended admissions during the coronavirus outbreak . This was down from nearly 54,000 in fiscal 2017 and far below the nearly 85,000 refugees admitted in fiscal 2016, the last full fiscal year of the Obama administration.

The recent decline in refugee admissions also reflects policy decisions made by the Trump administration before the pandemic. Trump capped refugee admissions in fiscal 2020 at 18,000 , the lowest total since Congress created the modern refugee program in 1980.

Employment-based green cards

In fiscal 2019, the U.S. government awarded more than 139,000 employment-based green cards to foreign workers and their families. The Biden administration’s proposed legislation could boost the number of employment-based green cards, which are capped at about 140,000 per year . The proposal would allow the use of unused visa slots from previous years and allow spouses and children of employment-based visa holders to receive green cards without counting them against the annual cap. These measures could help clear the large backlog of applicants. The proposed legislation also would eliminate the per-country cap that prevents immigrants from any single country to account for more than 7% of green cards issued each year.

Diversity visas

Each year, about 50,000 people receive green cards through the U.S. diversity visa program , also known as the visa lottery. Since the program began in 1995, more than 1 million immigrants have received green cards through the lottery, which seeks to diversify the U.S. immigrant population by granting visas to underrepresented nations. Citizens of countries with the most legal immigrant arrivals in recent years – such as Mexico, Canada, China and India – are not eligible to apply.

The Biden administration has proposed legislation to increase the annual total to 80,000 diversity visas. Trump had sought to eliminate the program .

In fiscal 2019, more than 188,000 high-skilled foreign workers received H-1B visas . H-1B visas accounted for 22% of all temporary visas for employment issued in 2019. This trailed only the H-2A visa for agricultural workers, which accounted for nearly a quarter (24%) of temporary visas. In all, nearly 2 million H-1B visas were issued from fiscal years 2007 to 2019.

The Biden administration is expected to review policies that led to increased denial rate s of H-1B visa applications under the Trump administration. In addition, Biden has delayed implementing a rule put in place by Trump that sought to prioritize the H-1B visa selection process based on wages, which would have raised the wages of H-1B recipients overall. Biden also proposed legislation to provide permanent work permits to spouses of H-1B visa holders. By contrast, the Trump administration had sought to restrict these permits. The Trump administration also created an electronic registration system that led to a record number of applicants for fiscal 2021.

Temporary permissions

A relatively small number of unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. under unusual circumstances have received temporary legal permission to stay in the country. One key distinction for this group of immigrants is that, despite having received permission to live in the U.S., most don’t have a path to gain lawful permanent residence. The following two programs are examples of this:

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

About 636,000 unauthorized immigrants had temporary work permits and protection from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, as of Dec. 31, 2020. One of Biden’s first actions as president was to direct the federal government to take steps to preserve the program , which Trump had tried to end before the Supreme Court allowed it to remain in place . DACA recipients, sometimes called “Dreamers,” would be among the undocumented immigrants to have a path to U.S. citizenship under Biden’s immigration bill. Senators have also proposed separate legislation that would do the same.

Temporary Protected Status

Overall, it is estimated that more than 700,000 immigrants from 12 countries currently have or are eligible for a reprieve from deportation under Temporary Protected Status, or TPS , a federal program that gives time-limited permission for some immigrants from certain countries to work and live in the U.S. The program covers those who fled designated nations because of war, hurricanes, earthquakes or other extraordinary conditions that could make it dangerous for them to live there.

The estimated total number of immigrants is based on those currently registered, in addition to those estimated to be eligible from Myanmar – also called Burma – and Venezuela.

Immigrants from Venezuela and Myanmar are newly eligible for TPS under changes made after Biden took office in January 2021 by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the program. The government must periodically renew TPS benefits or they will expire. The department extended benefits into 2022 and beyond for eligible immigrants from nine nations: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. In addition, the Biden administration expanded eligibility for immigrants from Haiti based on recent turmoil.

Biden and congressional Democrats have proposed granting citizenship to certain immigrants who receive TPS benefits. Under Biden’s large immigration bill, TPS recipients who meet certain conditions could apply immediately for green cards that let them become lawful permanent residents. The proposal would allow TPS holders who meet certain conditions to apply for citizenship three years after receiving a green card, which is two years earlier than usual for green-card holders. By contrast, the Trump administration had sought to end TPS for nearly all beneficiaries, but was blocked from doing so by a series of lawsuits.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published March 22, 2021.

• Citizenship
• Family Reunification
• High-Skilled Immigration
• Immigration & Migration
• Legal Immigration
• Political Issues
• Refugees & Asylum Seekers
• Visas & Employment

Jens Manuel Krogstad is a senior writer and editor at Pew Research Center .

Ana Gonzalez-Barrera is a former senior researcher focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics at Pew Research Center .

How Temporary Protected Status has expanded under the Biden administration

After declining early in the covid-19 outbreak, immigrant naturalizations in the u.s. are rising again, most americans are critical of government’s handling of situation at u.s.-mexico border, most latinos say u.s. immigration system needs big changes, naturalized citizens make up record one-in-ten u.s. eligible voters in 2020, most popular.

901 E St. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

© 2024 Pew Research Center

• Foreign Affairs
• CFR Education
• Newsletters

Climate Change

Global Climate Agreements: Successes and Failures

Backgrounder by Lindsay Maizland December 5, 2023 Renewing America

• Defense & Security
• Diplomacy & International Institutions
• Energy & Environment
• Human Rights
• Politics & Government
• Social Issues

Myanmar’s Troubled History

Backgrounder by Lindsay Maizland January 31, 2022

• Europe & Eurasia
• Global Commons
• Middle East & North Africa
• Sub-Saharan Africa

How Tobacco Laws Could Help Close the Racial Gap on Cancer

Interactive by Olivia Angelino, Thomas J. Bollyky , Elle Ruggiero and Isabella Turilli February 1, 2023 Global Health Program

• Backgrounders
• Special Projects
• United States

Reagan: His Life and Legend

Book by Max Boot September 10, 2024

• Centers & Programs
• Books & Reports
• Independent Task Force Program
• Fellowships

Oil and Petroleum Products

Academic Webinar: The Geopolitics of Oil

Webinar with Carolyn Kissane and Irina A. Faskianos April 12, 2023

• Students and Educators
• State & Local Officials
• Religion Leaders
• Local Journalists

NATO's Future: Enlarged and More European?

Virtual Event with Emma M. Ashford, Michael R. Carpenter, Camille Grand, Thomas Wright, Liana Fix and Charles A. Kupchan June 25, 2024 Europe Program

• Lectureship Series
• Webinars & Conference Calls
• Member Login

The U.S. Immigration Debate

• The United States is home to more foreign-born residents than any other country in the world. In 2022, immigrants composed almost 14 percent of the U.S. population.
• Congress has failed for decades to agree on how to address immigration challenges, leaving many policy questions up to the courts and executive branch.
• President Joe Biden has reversed many of the Donald Trump administration’s restrictive policies, even while implementing his own in response to a historic influx of migrants.

Introduction

Immigration has been a touchstone of the U.S. political debate for decades, as policymakers have weighed economic, security, and humanitarian concerns. However, Congress has continued to disagree on comprehensive immigration reform, effectively moving some major policy decisions into the executive and judicial branches of government and fueling debate in the halls of state and municipal governments.

Former President Donald Trump has put efforts to reshape asylum, border, and deportation policy at the center of his political movement. President Joe Biden had pledged to reverse Trump’s first-term actions and reform the system, but the end of pandemic-related border restrictions and a historic surge in migration have complicated his plans.

What is the immigrant population in the United States?

• Immigration and Migration
• Border and Port Security
• Donald Trump

Immigrants composed an estimated 13.9 percent of the U.S. population in 2022, amounting to roughly 46 million people out of a total of almost 335 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released in April 2024. Together, immigrants and their U.S.-born children made up about 27 percent of U.S. inhabitants, per the Current Population Survey. Though the share of the population that is foreign born has steadily risen since 1970, when there were fewer than ten million immigrants in the country, recent figures still fall below the record high of 14.8 percent in 1890. 

As of 2022, Mexico was the top country of origin for U.S. immigrants, with Mexicans constituting 23 percent of the total immigrant population. Other major countries of origin include India (6 percent); China, including Hong Kong and Macau (5 percent); and the Philippines (4 percent).

Undocumented immigration. The U.S. government estimated the undocumented population to be some eleven million people in 2022. This total represents a slight decrease from 11.8 million before the 2008 economic crisis [PDF], which led some immigrants to return to their home countries and discouraged others from coming to the United States. In fiscal year 2023 (FY 2023), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) apprehended nearly 2.5 million people trying to illegally cross the southern U.S. border, a record high.

Until 2013, almost all of those trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border were Mexican citizens, and most were individuals seeking work. Between 2013 and 2021, most immigrants came from Asia, particularly China and India. Mexico has since regained its status as the top country of origin, and Central Americans have made up an increasingly larger share of migrants at the southern U.S. border. Generally, they are coming not for work but to make asylum claims, and many of them are unaccompanied children. Some of these immigrants have different legal rights from Mexican nationals in the United States: Under a 2008 anti–human trafficking law, unaccompanied minors from noncontiguous countries have a right to a hearing before being deported to their home countries. The increase in Central American migration has strained the U.S. immigration system. At the end of FY 2023, there were nearly 2.8 million cases pending in immigration courts, the most on record.

Though many of the policies that aim to reduce unlawful immigration focus on enforcement at the border, individuals who arrive in the United States legally and overstay their visas comprise a significant portion of the undocumented population. A Center for Migration Studies report found that, between 2010 and 2018, individuals who overstayed their visas far outnumbered those who arrived by crossing the border illegally.

Legal immigration. The United States granted more than one million individuals [PDF] legal permanent residency in FY 2022, close to pre-pandemic levels. Some 58 percent of them were admitted on the basis of family reunification. Other categories included: employment-based preferences (27 percent), refugees (3 percent), diversity (4 percent), and asylees (5 percent). As of late 2023, more than four million applicants were on the State Department’s waiting list [PDF] for family- and employer-related immigrant visas, nearly a third of whom were from Mexico.

Hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals work legally in the United States under various types of nonimmigrant visas. In FY 2023, the United States granted more than  265,000 visas for high-skilled workers  [PDF], known as H1B visas, and over 310,000 visas for temporary workers in agriculture and other industries, or H2A visas. H1B visas are capped at 85,000 per fiscal year, with exceptions for certain fields .

Immigrants made up 18.6 percent of the U.S. civilian workforce [PDF] in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 18.1 percent the previous year. Compared to those born in the United States, greater shares of immigrants worked in service fields (21.8 percent of all foreign-born people); production, transportation, and material moving (15.2 percent); and natural resources, construction, and maintenance (13.8 percent). 

How do Americans feel about immigration?

A February 2024 poll by Gallup showed that 28 percent of surveyed Americans considered immigration to be the top problem facing the United States. In a separate Gallup poll conducted that same month, the majority of respondents felt that illegal immigration was a “critical” threat to U.S. national security.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted in April found that some 60 percent of the registered voters surveyed believed that undocumented immigrants currently in the United States should be allowed to stay, with 36 percent of respondents saying that undocumented immigrants should have the opportunity to apply for citizenship. In addition, a large majority of Americans still consider immigration to be overall good for the country.

How has Congress tried to address the issue?

The most recent push for an immigration policy overhaul was in 2013, following a decade in which Congress debated numerous immigration reforms, some considered comprehensive and others piecemeal. (Comprehensive immigration reform refers to omnibus legislation that attempts to address the following issues: demand for high- and low-skilled labor, the legal status of the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country, border security, and interior enforcement.) The last major legislation to make it through Congress was under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, when his administration granted legal amnesty to some three million undocumented residents; in 1990, President George H.W. Bush further expanded legal immigration by increasing the cap for immigrant visas from 270,000 to 700,000, though he lowered the quota to 675,000 after several years. In 2007, President George W. Bush worked with congressional Democrats to reach a compromise on a new comprehensive bill, but it ultimately failed to win enough support in the Senate.

President Barack Obama pressed hard for a comprehensive bill that would pair a path to legalization for undocumented residents with stronger border security provisions. The Democrat-led Senate passed this legislation in 2013, but the bill stalled in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Both Presidents Trump and Biden put forward their own plans, which were not seriously considered by Congress.  

What was the Obama administration’s approach?

With legislation thwarted, Obama focused on executive action, a tactic that his successors continued. In 2012, his administration began a program known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals , which offered renewable, two-year deportation deferrals and work permits to undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children and had no criminal records. 

Obama characterized the move as a “ stopgap measure ” and urged Congress to pass the DREAM Act , or Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors—legislation first introduced in 2001 that would have benefited many of the same people. Since then, more than 830,000 people have participated in DACA, and it’s estimated that almost 1.2 million more were eligible as of 2023. Obama attempted to extend similar benefits to undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents through a program known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), but the Supreme Court effectively killed it in 2016.

In 2014, Obama also grappled with a surge of more than sixty thousand unaccompanied minors at the southern border, mostly from Central America. He directed $750 million in aid to the region to improve conditions there. Meanwhile, his administration faced criticism for its enforcement policies, including detaining children in poor conditions and overseeing the deportation of more people— approximately three million —than either the Bill Clinton or George W. Bush administrations had.

What was the Trump administration’s approach?

Immigration remains a signature issue for Trump. He blames previous administrations for failing to secure the southern border, and in his first term, he advocated for sharply reducing both legal and illegal immigration. He repeatedly used executive action to reshape asylum, deportation, and border policy.

Border security and enforcement . Trump vowed to expand the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which he claimed would stop drugs and gangs from entering the country. He was unsuccessful in securing funding from Congress, leading to a federal government shutdown in 2019 and a subsequent declaration of a national emergency , which allowed him to divert funds to build the wall.

Other enforcement measures under Trump included increasing border personnel; sending thousands of active-duty troops to the border; threatening Mexico with tariffs if it did not increase its own border enforcement; and attempting to cut federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities, or jurisdictions that refuse to enforce federal immigration directives.

Trump also ratcheted up previous administrations’ deterrence efforts. He implemented a zero-tolerance policy, under which authorities arrested and prosecuted everyone caught crossing the southern border without authorization. This caused thousands of family separations , since by law children must be held apart from parents facing criminal prosecution. (Presidents Bush and Obama likewise faced criticism for child detention, but they did not make separations a matter of policy.)

DACA . Trump sought to end DACA, calling it unconstitutional. The move spurred multiple legal challenges and, in June 2020, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s plan . A December 2020 federal court ruling forced the Trump administration to resume accepting new applicants.

Travel bans and refugee cap . Trump aimed to sharply reduce the number of refugees and other immigrants granted legal entry into the United States. In 2017, he instituted a ban on immigration and travel from several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, Somalia, and Yemen. The original order was rejected by the courts, but the Supreme Court upheld a more limited version. Trump also lowered the cap on the number of refugees the United States accepts each year to less than fifteen thousand for FY 2021—the lowest figure in the history of the U.S. refugee program . Additionally, he ended temporary protected status (TPS)—a program that allows migrants from certain crisis-stricken nations to live and work in the United States for a limited period—for several countries.

Asylum policy . Trump implemented new restrictions on asylum seekers. In 2018, the administration began “metering” asylum applications, or only accepting a limited number [PDF] each day. The next year, it launched the Migrant Protection Protocols , also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases were processed in U.S. courts. At the same time, it sought “safe third country” agreements with several Latin American countries, which would have allowed U.S. authorities to send asylum seekers who traveled through those countries back there. Only an agreement with Guatemala was implemented before that country terminated it in 2021. Additionally, the Trump administration invoked Title 42, previously a rarely used public health law, to deny asylum on health-related grounds amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Comprehensive reform effort . Like his immediate predecessors, Trump proposed broad immigration reform . His would have created a merit-based system to replace the current one,  which prioritizes family reunification. It also included an expansion of the border wall and an employment verification system known as E-Verify, but it did not address the status of current undocumented residents. Congress ultimately did not take up the proposal.

What has been Biden’s approach?

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Biden campaigned on overturning almost all of Trump’s immigration policies. Since then, the Biden administration has reduced immigration enforcement within the United States, ended the travel bans, expanded green-card access for certain undocumented immigrants, and ended the controversial Title 42 policy, though it did initially maintain many pandemic-related restrictions. The administration also initially halted construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, though it has since moved forward with plans to build additional sections; expanded TPS protections; terminated the Remain in Mexico program (with Supreme Court approval); and raised the refugee cap to 125,000 for fiscal years 2022–24. 

However, Biden’s efforts to undo Trump-era policies have been challenged by a historic influx of migrants at the southern border. The record surge in border crossings has prompted the administration to implement several new restrictions since 2023, including a so-called transit ban allowing the government to deny asylum to migrants who did not previously apply for protection in a third country. In addition, the administration can temporarily bar asylum requests when the number of illegal crossings exceeds a certain threshold; since the start of 2024, illegal crossings have slowed . 

Meanwhile, Biden has worked with Latin American leaders to increase aid to refugee populations, improve border management, and better coordinate emergency responses, even as his own comprehensive immigration reform bill and other border security legislation have failed in Congress. His administration has also launched efforts to accelerate the reunification of migrant families, including by reinstating the Central American Minors (CAM) program, which reunites children in the so-called Northern Triangle countries with their parents in the United States, and by creating a family-reunification task force. Additionally, Biden has pledged to invest $4 billion to address the drivers of migration from Central America, and he has sought to revive DACA; the Department of Homeland Security continues to accept and process renewal requests amid ongoing legal challenges to the program.

Daily News Brief

A summary of global news developments with cfr analysis delivered to your inbox each morning.  weekdays., the world this week, a weekly digest of the latest from cfr on the biggest foreign policy stories of the week, featuring briefs, opinions, and explainers. every friday., think global health.

A curation of original analyses, data visualizations, and commentaries, examining the debates and efforts to improve health worldwide.  Weekly.

How are state and local authorities handling these issues?

States vary widely in how they treat unauthorized immigrants. Some, including California and Massachusetts, allow undocumented immigrants to apply for drivers’ licenses, receive in-state tuition at universities, and obtain other benefits. At the other end of the spectrum are states such as Texas, where the legislature passed a law [PDF] mandating that local governments and law enforcement agencies cooperate with federal immigration officers.

The federal government is generally responsible for enforcing immigration laws, but it delegates some immigration-related duties to state and local law enforcement. However, the degree to which local officials are obliged to cooperate with federal authorities is a subject of intense debate: dozens of counties across thirteen states are home to so-called sanctuary cities that limit cooperation with immigration enforcement.

The degree to which local officials are obliged to cooperate with federal authorities is a subject of intense debate.

President Trump decried these sanctuary jurisdictions and reinstated a controversial Obama-era program known as Secure Communities, in which the FBI shares fingerprints of suspects collected by state and local law enforcement with federal immigration authorities. Under the program, state and local agencies also hand over individuals presumed to be in the country illegally. Biden terminated the program shortly after taking office. 

A range of court rulings during the Trump era increased pressure on states. In 2018, the Justice Department launched a lawsuit against California over sanctuary jurisdictions, which was ultimately dismissed by the Supreme Court. It filed similar suits against New Jersey and Washington, and a federal court ruled in 2020 that the Trump administration could withhold federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions, including New York City. Under Biden, the Justice Department reversed this stance, leading the Supreme Court to dismiss several pending cases .

The ongoing border crisis has driven increasing controversy over local responses. After Trump called on states to deploy National Guard contingents to the southern border, several governors refused. Others, including Texas’s Greg Abbott, embraced Trump’s views, continuing to expand the border wall and seeking to boost the role of state and local law enforcement in carrying out federal immigration policy. In the Biden era, Abbott has sought to impose stronger enforcement at the Texas-Mexico border despite federal opposition. The governor signed a law in December 2023 making it a state crime to cross the border into Texas illegally and authorizing law enforcement to arrest and deport migrants. The bill remains on hold amid legal challenges; several other states are attempting to enact similar legislation.

Recommended Resources

This CFR Backgrounder explains who is responsible for securing the U.S. border.

This timeline traces changes to U.S. postwar immigration policy.

The Washington Post ’s Eduardo Porter and Youyou Zhou argue that the United States’ efforts to limit immigration a century ago actually helped diversify the country .

In this CFR webinar, experts discuss how immigration is shaping political conversations ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

On this episode of The President’s Inbox , the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind breaks down the situation at the southern border .

The Migration Policy Institute’s Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh look at Biden’s immigration record at his term’s three-year mark.

• Central America

Emily Lieberman, Nathalie Bussemaker, Samuel Parmer, and Danielle Renwick contributed to this Backgrounder. Will Merrow created the graphics.

• How many immigrants are in the U.S.?
• What has Congress done?
• What was Obama’s approach?
• What was Trump’s approach?
• What is Biden’s approach?
• What’s happening at the state and local levels?

More From Our Experts

How Will the EU Elections Results Change Europe?

In Brief by Liana Fix June 10, 2024 Europe Program

Iran Attack Means an Even Tougher Balancing Act for the U.S. in the Middle East

In Brief by Steven A. Cook April 14, 2024 Middle East Program

Iran Attacks on Israel Spur Escalation Concerns

In Brief by Ray Takeyh April 14, 2024 Middle East Program

Top Stories on CFR

The Israel-Hezbollah Conflict: Where It Stands

Expert Brief by Steven A. Cook August 29, 2024 Middle East Program

The IMF’s Latest External Sector Report Misses the Mark

Blog Post by Brad W. Setser August 26, 2024 Follow the Money

Democratic Republic of Congo

DRC-Rwanda Talks Underway, But Lasting Peace Remains Elusive

Blog Post by Michelle Gavin August 20, 2024 Africa in Transition

tags: AVEF , Immigration 101 , AVEF , Blog

Immigration 101: Why Can’t Immigrants Just “Get Legal”, “Get in Line” and Get Their Papers?

by Americas's Voice on July 25, 2017

Share This:

Here’s a basic question we often come across: why can’t undocumented immigrants just “get in line”, “get legal”, “get right with the law” — i.e. obtain the legalization and citizenship that would allow them to become full-fledged Americans and protect them from deportation?

The short answer is: they can’t.

One misconception about undocumented immigration is that obtaining legal papers is as simple as, say, changing your address at the post office, and that immigrants remain undocumented due to a lack of trying. But nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, there are millions of immigrants who have lived in the US for decades, who have worked hard and paid taxes and bought homes, who have US-citizen children, who make valuable community contributions — who have been deported, and forcibly separated from their whole lives in America, because they weren’t able to “get legal”. Many of them have spent years and tens of thousands or more in legal fees trying to find pathways to legalization and citizenship for themselves. If there were a way to “get right with the law”, they would have done it. There isn’t.

As immigration attorney David Leopold wrote at Medium recently:

Immigration law generally requires that for an immigrant to adjust or change status to temporary worker or green card holder, he or she must have lawfully entered the United States…immigrants who entered the country without inspection — even as young children — generally cannot apply for a green card [while] inside the United States under any circumstances, including if they marry a U.S. citizen.

The question of why immigrants come to the US without papers, from a logistical standpoint, boils down to two things: the fact that there’s no “line” for the vast majority of people around the world to get into, and the fact that there’s no way to correct undocumented status.

Why don’t immigrants just get in line? There is no line

As the American Immigration Council explained , there is no single “line” for would-be immigrants to come into the United States. People can visit, of course, using tourist or student visas. But immigration , the process that leads to a green card, legal permanent residency, and/or American citizenship, is not an option for the vast majority of people living around the world.

Generally speaking, there are only three paths through which people can immigrate*:

Employer-based immigration

For an employer to sponsor a foreign worker to come to the US, the worker must generally have a job lined up with an eligible employer who will sponsor them. This typically requires advanced skills and longtime professional experience, and is used to bring in scientists, professors, and multinational executives. This type of visa can only be used for a limited number of foreign workers, and the worker must stay with the employer who sponsored them — which has led to many reports of exploitation and abuse by employers. There are also temporary, seasonal visas for agricultural workers — but there are also very limited in number, onerous to obtain, and costly for employers.

Family-based immigration

US citizens can petition for their spouses, parents, children, and siblings to join them in the United States. (Legal permanent residents can petition for spouses and unmarried children.) But there are lines for each of these. According to the American Immigration Council, the unmarried children of US citizens must wait more than 5 years to be able to come to the US, while siblings of US citizens must wait more than ten years. The website continues:

People from countries with high levels of immigration to the United States–Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines — generally have longer waiting times. For example, married children of US citizens from Mexico must wait more than 20 years for a visa to become available, and Filipino siblings of US citizens currently wait about 25 years.

And if a person seeking to immigrate does not have a close family tie in the US in the first place, they are ineligible for this route.

Each year, the US sets a limit on how many refugees will be admitted for humanitarian reasons. This year, the cap was a mere 50,000 , and was reached in June. To be admitted as refugees, individuals must be screened by multiple international and U.S. agencies and prove that they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home country “based on race, religion, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, or national origin.” An immigrant does not qualify as a refugee or an asylee because of poverty or difficult economic conditions in their home country. This is also a very difficult path to entry — untold numbers of immigrants have been deported because they came to the US seeking asylum and had their cases denied, in many cases because it is almost impossible to prove that one’s life is in direct danger. Furthermore, the Trump Administration is now reportedly turning away asylum applicants at the border , in violation of international law.

Why can’t immigrants already in the US “get legal”? There’s no way

All of the above explains why would-be immigrants to the US generally have no legal way to come. For undocumented immigrants already in the US, the situation is not much different. Even in the many, many cases where undocumented immigrants have been in the US for decades, married, had US citizen children, worked and paid taxes, started businesses and bought homes, there is no way to obtain legal status.

An undocumented person already in the US could be sponsored by a US-citizen child — but the child must first be 21 years of age or older, and the undocumented parent would still have to get into the long family-based immigration lines mentioned above, resulting in a wait of 20 years or longer.

A person could marry a US citizen, but this does not necessarily lead to legal status either. As we explained here , an undocumented person who seeks legalization by marriage must leave the US first and return to their country of origin. But once they identify themselves as undocumented and leave, they trigger a ban — that can last up to 10 years — during which they cannot reenter the country. There are ways around this ban, but only for a select group of people.

Immigration and Jesus Lara Lopez

To underscore everything we’ve talked about in this article, let’s talk about Jesus Lara Lopez , an Ohio father of four who was deported and separated from his family last week. Jesus came to the US from Mexico 16 years ago and was discovered to be undocumented when officials caught him driving without a license. As a Mexican national, there was no way — zero — for Jesus to come to the US legally. He would not have been sponsored by an employer, he didn’t have immediate family in the US who could sponsor him, and Mexican nationals generally do not qualify for asylum .

Once Jesus made it to the US, there was no way for him to obtain legal status. None of his children are over the age of 21, and so would not be able to sponsor him. Jesus’ wife is undocumented, but even if he had been married to a US citizen, this likely would not have been a path to legal status for him. To gain legal status through a US citizen wife, Jesus would have likely had to leave the country for ten years before being able to return. At no point in his immigration history have the doors of US legal status been open to someone like Jesus.

In short, it is very difficult for people outside of the US to immigrate here, and impossible for most undocumented immigrants already in the US to become documented. As David Leopold wrote:

The outdated, rigid, and poorly structured immigration law makes it nearly impossible for most undocumented immigrants to fix their status in the United States. This is true regardless of whether a person arrived in the country on a lawful visa and later fell out of status, or whether they entered the country without lawful inspection by US. immigration officers. That’s because once someone enters the country illegally or overstays their visa, the law prohibits them from applying for legal immigration status from inside the United States. Of course, there are important exceptions to this for victims of crime, persecution, human trafficking, and domestic violence. But for most undocumented immigrants, these outdated and rigid immigration laws offer few options and little forgiveness.

For a visualization of what the US immigration system is like today — and how hard it can be to get admitted — visit Bend the Arc’s website at EntryDenied.org .

• What is Temporary Protected Status (TPS)?
• Why is the Trump Administration Separating Immigrant Families And Detaining Immigrant Children?
• What is Asylum?
• What’s Happening with DACA and the Dream Act?
• What is a Dreamer?
• What is a Sanctuary City?
• What is Family Migration (or so-called ‘Chain Migration’)?
• Are You New to Immigration Reform? Check Out Our Immigration FAQ

* There are few other very limited channels, such as the diversity lottery; please read about them at the American Immigration Council .

• Press Releases
• Immigration 101
• Reform is Urgent

• MPI en Español
• All Publications
• Fact Sheets
• Policy Briefs
• Commentaries
• Press Releases
• Work at MPI
• Intern at MPI
• Contact MPI
• Internships
• International Program
• Migrants, Migration, and Development
• National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy
• U.S. Immigration Policy Program
• Beyond Territorial Asylum
• Building a Regional Migration System
• Global Skills and Talent
• Latin America and Caribbean Initiative
• Migration Data Hub
• Migration Information Source
• Transatlantic Council on Migration
• ELL Information Center

Topics see all >

• Border Security
• Coronavirus
• Employment & the Economy
• Illegal Immigration & Interior Enforcement
• Immigrant Integration
• Immigrant Profiles & Demographics
• Immigration Policy & Law
• International Governance
• Migration & Development
• Refugee & Asylum Policy

Regions see all >

• Africa (sub-Saharan)
• Asia and the Pacific
• Central America & the Caribbean
• Middle East & North Africa
• North America
• South America
• International Data

Featured Publication

Note: The preference categories listed above have annual caps, as is explained below. Source: Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics , Yearbook of Immigration Statistics , “Lawful Permanent Residents,” multiple years, available online .

The Family Route

There are both numerically limited and unlimited categories that U.S. citizens and green-card holders can access to petition to bring in a relative.

Immediate family of U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens can sponsor their spouses, unmarried children under age 21, and parents for a green card. This category does not have annual numerical limits.

Family-sponsored preference visas. There are 226,000 green cards reserved each year for other categories of relatives. U.S. citizens can sponsor adult children and siblings, while green-card holders can sponsor their spouses and unmarried minor or adult children.

The Employment Route

There are 140,000 green cards available each year for immigrants in five employment-based categories (formally known as “preferences”). The categories were created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, and the numerical caps were set then and have not been adjusted since, as is also the case with the family preferences.

Almost all employment-based immigrants, except some very high-skilled immigrants and investors, must have an employer who will sponsor them for a visa.

Spouses and children of immigrants who get an employment-based green card count against the 140,000 cap. This means in reality that less than half of employment green cards given out annually go to people selected for employment reasons.

Other Routes

While about 80 percent of green cards annually are issued via the family and employment routes, the U.S. immigration system has a few other channels for entry for permanent residence.

Diversity visa. Nationals from countries that send few immigrants to the United States can enter the Diversity Visa program, which allocates up to 50,000 visas annually. After all lottery applications are submitted in a given year, a number that spanned more than 14 million in fiscal year (FY) 2018, the U.S. government conducts a virtual lottery of qualified applicants, randomly selecting winners who will be invited to apply for a green card if they meet some basic criteria.

Refugees and asylees. People may be granted refugee status or asylum, and given the right to live in the United States permanently, if they can demonstrate they have experienced persecution or have a well-founded fear that they will be persecuted “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Asylum is granted to people who are already in the United States, while refugee status is provided to people who are vetted abroad and approved for resettlement. Resettled refugees and those granted asylum are eligible to apply for a green card after one year.

There are a number of other small categories of green cards available. Some are paths created to respond to particular situations, such as visas made available to people who worked as interpreters or translators for the U.S. military in Iraq or Afghanistan. Other green cards are available to people who it is in the national interest to help, such as victims of crimes or human trafficking who aid in the investigation and/or prosecution of their perpetrators.

Which National-Origin Groups Are the Top Recipients of Green Cards?

While a small number of countries predominate—Mexico, China, Cuba, India, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines at the top of the list—the diversity of origins is such that no individual country has a sizeable share of the overall number of green cards issued in a particular year.

Note: On an annualized basis for fiscal years 2013-17, the United States issued a total of 1,073,755 green cards. Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Lawful Permanent Residents,” available online .

Limitations on Green Cards

For the capped preference categories in the family and employment streams, U.S. law imposes a limit on how many immigrants from any particular country can receive green cards in a given year. Under the per-country cap set in the Immigration Act of 1990, no country can receive more than 7 percent of the total number of employment-based and family-sponsored preference visas in a given year. There are no per-country limits for uncapped categories, such as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens.

Because of the numerical caps and per-country caps on certain green-card categories, there are significant waits for some categories, with sharper effects on a few countries. For example, as of April 2019, the wait for U.S. citizens to sponsor adult, unmarried children was more than seven years for most parts of the world, but was 12 years for relatives from the Philippines—and more than 21 years for those from Mexico. As of November 2018, there were 3.7 million people waiting in line abroad for a family-sponsored green card, and 121,000 awaiting an employment-sponsored green card.

Source : State Department, “Annual Report of Immigrant Visa Applicants in the Family-Sponsored and Employment-Based Preferences Registered at the National Visa Center as of November 1, 2018,” available online .

Temporary Immigration

Beyond permanent admissions, the United States also admits hundreds of thousands of workers, foreign students, and exchange visitors annually for temporary residence through a broad swath of visa categories, assigned letters of the alphabet from A through V. While temporary visas do not lead directly to a green card, temporary visa holders in some cases can get one if they are able to find a family member or employer to sponsor them.

Some temporary visas (B, C, and D) allow foreigners to enter for tourism or short business trips. Others allow students to study at U.S. colleges and universities or to participate in cultural exchange programs (F, J, and M visas). And there are many other temporary visa classes, including for temporary workers.

In most cases, temporary workers can bring spouses and minor children with them, but those family members do not have the right to work. Temporary workers usually have to remain with their sponsoring employer in order to maintain the right to stay in the United States, unless they can find another employer to sponsor them.

Below are some examples of temporary worker visas:

H-1B: The H-1B visa for “specialty occupations” allows workers to stay for up to two three-year work periods, or longer if they are in line for a green card. H-1B visas are capped at 85,000 visas per year, but renewals do not count against the cap, nor do H-1Bs sponsored by a college, university, or certain nonprofit organizations. Employers wishing to sponsor an H-1B worker must attest to the Labor Department about the wages and working conditions they will offer H-1B workers.

H-2A : The H-2A visa is for foreign agricultural workers, who can stay in the United States for up to three years. There is no numerical limit on H-2A visas. Employers sponsoring H-2A workers must demonstrate that they have tried and failed to hire U.S. workers, must be certified by the Labor Department, and must provide housing and pay at least a specified wage, which is set above the local minimum wage.

H-2B:  The H-2B visa, which is usually granted for short periods but can be extended for up to three years, is available for workers filling nonagricultural seasonal or temporary jobs, such as landscapers, crab pickers, life guards, or resort workers. There are currently 66,000 visas available per year. In recent years, Congress has authorized the Homeland Security Secretary to increase the cap if the determination is made that there is sufficient need for additional workers.

L: The L visa allows entry for workers transferring from a foreign branch of a company to a U.S. branch. There is no numerical limit on L visas. L visa holders can stay for seven years if they are a manager or executive in the company, and for five years if they are a “specialized knowledge” employee. Spouses of L visa holders are allowed to work in the United States.

O: The O visa is for people with extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, business, or athletics. There is no numerical limit on O visas, and holders can stay for up to three years.

TN: The TN classification, established by the North American Free Trade Agreement, allows professional workers from Mexico and Canada to live and work in the United States. There are no numerical caps for TN workers, and their period of stay is not limited.

To learn more about the U.S. immigration system, here are some useful resources:

• A brief examining family-based migration in the United States and eight other significant immigrant destinations, It’s Relative: A Crosscountry Comparison of Family-Migration Policies and Flows
• An article examining the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on its 50 th anniversary, Fifty Years On, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Continues to Reshape the United States
• A brief that examines the Immigration Act of 1990, which created the employment-based preferences, The Immigration Act of 1990: Unfinished Business a Quarter-Century Later

Download Explainer

71 Illegal Immigration Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for illegal immigration essay topics? The issue of undocumented immigration is hot, controversial, and worth exploring.

• 📝 Essay: How to Write

👍 Essay Topics & Examples

🔍 research paper topics & examples, ❓ questions about illegal immigration for research paper.

Illegal immigration refers to undocumented migration of people into a county in violation of the according immigration laws of that country. Illegal immigrants face a number of problems, like the risk of being enslaved, health problems due to the lack of access to public health systems, and many more. Whether you’re planning to write a 5-paragraph essay or a thesis about illegal immigration, the article below will be helpful. Here you’ll find everything all you might need to write an A+ immigration essay. There are research paper ideas, tips, & illegal immigration essay examples.

📝 Illegal Immigration Essay: How to Write

Illegal immigration essays are familiar to anyone studying sociology, politics, human rights, and other similar subjects. Today, there is plenty of information about illegal immigration on the Internet, so you shouldn’t worry about finding things to write about. What you absolutely need to pay attention to is the structure. The tips in this post will help you to nail your next illegal immigration essay!

Tip 1: Create a list of possible topics. Illegal immigration is a rather broad subject, so you will need to narrow it down a little bit. For example, you may want to write about the pros and cons of illegal immigration. Argumentative papers on this subject could be particularly successful if your points are strong and supported by evidence.

Tip 2: Write down a title. You may want to postpone this step until you’re one-on-one with the paper, but finding the right title will aid you in structuring the essay. There are numerous online resources that you could use to browse illegal immigration essay topics and titles. If nothing comes to mind, compose a thesis statement and use it as a preliminary title to help you focus.

Tip 3: Collect ideas. While you may have studied illegal immigration already, don’t write down any points until you’ve done your research. Be sure to check a variety of sources, including scholarly articles, government reports, newspaper articles, and editorial pieces. This will ensure that your overview of the chosen theme is comprehensive. Try to avoid sites such as Wikipedia, online encyclopedias, and blogs. While there may be some good points there, your tutor will most likely reject sources that are not academic quality. Hence, you should stick to publications from reputable sources to avoid losing marks! Write down all the key statements, information, and arguments that you can find online.

Tip 4: Prepare an outline. An outline is the backbone of your paper on illegal immigration. Argumentative essay outline examples would usually include an introduction, two points supporting your position, one point against it, a rebuttal, and a conclusion. A persuasive paper would have a different outline, with more supporting points and no opposing opinions. An informative essay will have an introduction, background, three to five main points, and a conclusion. Create a basic outline for the chosen essay type and don’t worry about adding information to each section yet.

Tip 5: Organize your points in a sequence. Now, return to the list of points you’ve already made and see which ones fit into the outline nicely. The most general information should go into the introduction, where you describe the problem and your approach. You should finish your introduction with an illegal immigration essay thesis to show the focus of the paper. In the next sections, your points should escalate in complexity. For example, you can start with the history of immigration, then consider recent data on undocumented immigrants, and then discuss the opportunities for immigration reform. Write each point as a topic sentence and ensure that they follow in a logical sequence. Delete any information that doesn’t fit – you won’t regret it later!

A paper structured based on these tips will be interesting to read and earn your tutor’s approval. If you need to write an essay about immigration in the United States, don’t forget to check our free sample papers!

• Illegal Immigration Policies and Violent Crime The authors of this article discuss how illegal immigration and border enforcement influence the level of crime along the U.S.-Mexico border.
• Strategies for Solving the Issue of Illegal Immigration in the US The first one is enforcing the measures preventing it, and the second one is changing immigration policy in order to make legalization easier.
• The Birth of Illegal Immigration In addition, Americans blamed Chinese immigrants for low wages and the unemployment rate, which further influenced the ban on Asians to move to the U.S.
• Illegal Immigration Control in the Texas Although the public assigns immense powers to the governor’s office, Texas’ office of the governor enjoys weak institutional powers because of the constitution’s provision of multiple offices that server alongside the office of the governor.
• The Illegal Immigration Prevention Policy For example, one of the biggest of them would be the necessity to analyze all the gathered information. Therefore, it is safe to assume that there would be no shortage of information for the Chef […]
• Illegal Immigration: Difference in Covering the Matter The aim of the paper is to discover the difference in covering the matter of illegal migration to Canary Islands from sub-Saharan including periodical issues, radio broadcasts, and a photo, in order not only to […]
• Ethics of Illegal Immigration Effects on the US As such, the Immigration Act of 1924 was established, which promoted the immigration of foreign citizens into the US to meet these requirements, and also created several objective preconditions for foreigners to consider entering America […]
• Illegal Immigration Issue in the USA The secure border could also be considered one of the possible solutions to the problem of illegal immigration as it will help to control this very aspect.
• Illegal Immigration, Its Causes, Methods, Effects It is the duty of immigration officers to update all the expired visas and ensure that either they are renewed or the victims leave the country.
• Illegal Immigration Crisis: Problems and Solutions For example, federal policy has led to the involvement of local law enforcement as immigration agents who have inherited the responsibilities of checking citizenship status and detaining those failing to produce documentation.
• Sheriff Joe’s Illegal Immigration in Arizona Often dubbed as the “toughest sheriff in the United States”, the sheriff has the numbers to back his fight against illegal immigrants in his county.
• Illegal Immigration in the United States Another factor that calls for strict application of the law for the deportation of illegal immigrants in the United States is the fact that the legislation that has been in existence has provided avenues for […]
• Illegal Immigration Problem in the United States The fences that were set up to deter entry only covered part of the border and in the past decade, the government has been searching for better ways to control entry into the United States.
• Is the Legalization of Illegal Aliens a Good Solution to Illegal Immigration in America? Huge numbers of illegal immigrants come from the southern borders of the US and especially on the US-Mexico border and to the north; the US-Canada border.
• Role of Frontex in Combating Illegal Immigration in the European Union Territory Surveillance on external borders With its headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, the European Agency for the management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the member states of the European Union is a body, which […]
• Illegal Immigration in the United States as an Economic Burden Finally, the economic challenge of illegal immigration also undermines the educational system in the United States. As it has been mentioned before, the illegal immigration in the Unites States creates both opportunities and shortcomings for […]
• Migration and National Security The author has noted that there is a close relationship between immigrants and these issues and this call for the need to evaluate the application of these policies in controlling the activities of immigrants in […]
• The Issue of Muslims’ Immigration to Australia This increase was especially noticeable in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, following the overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt, resulting in the rise of the Arab nationalist movement.
• Stopping Illegal Immigration: Border Security The other reason for the need to stop illegal immigration is that the Illegal aliens are weighing down many systems in the country.
• Illegal Immigration in the United States The name of the article to be critiqued is, ‘The Economics and Policy of Illegal Immigration in the United States’. One of the hypotheses that have been supported by the article is that policymakers across […]
• Immigration and Illegal Foreigners in Japan However, the economic boom of the mid 1980s necessitated the use of foreign workers and this marked the first wave of immigrants in Japan.
• Effects of illegal immigration on the economy of the United States and the measures that be taken to minimize the effect The study will include the demographics of the illegal immigration, its history, the immigration policy, and the impact that the illegal immigration has on the economy of the United States.
• How Has Immigration Transformed the Life and Culture of London Over the Past 150 Years? Except in the recent years where the number has decreased as a result of the heightening recession, people seeking employment have always constituted the largest number of the total inflows in the UK.
• Socio-Economic Benefits of Immigrant Population in the US and Canada Immigration in the United States and Canada in the Post Hart-Cella Act and Canadian Immigration Act Era This paper addresses the socio-economic benefits of immigrant population in the United States of America and Canada.
• Economic advantages and disadvantages of immigration into the U.S. According to Geigenberger, because of this inability to get taxes from the majority of the immigrants, the government is always strained in the achievement of objectives.
• Immigration Reform and the Economic Impact The emergence of immigration policy from the comprehensive immigration reform primarily seeks to implement a flexible legal immigration platform that would leverage the economic situations of the United States. The national GDP depends on the […]
• Immigration Bill in US This essay seeks to prove that it is proper for such people to acquire citizenship in the United States of America through the passing of the pending immigration bill.
• The Issue of Illegal Immigration On the other hand, opponents of immigration depict immigrants as a menace to the American people as it promotes the rise in criminal activities and causes an economic and social burden to taxpayers.
• Illegal Immigration: Views of Policy Makers, Media and General Public Illegal immigration into the U.S.is a billion dollar question that has fueled considerable public debate within the country in the past few years due the inherent social and economic costs that illegal immigration places on […]
• The Impact of Immigration on the Economy of the USA The USA is one of the most attractive countries to come for many specialists and workers from different countries of the World.
• Argument for Measures to Control Illegal Immigration One of the impacts of such immigration is the financial burden that is laid on the government in terms of making provisions for the immigrants.
• The Unemployed and Illegal Immigrants in the United States Are More Likely to Be Involved in Crime Than the Employed and Legal Immigrants The criteria of selection for the literature will be the relevance to the research topic as well as the year of publication.
• Free-rider Problem and Illegal Immigration The issue of free riding is inevitable in each and every country because of the presence of the presence of minors, tax evaders and illegal immigrants just to mention but a few.
• Economic Contribution of Slaves and Present Day Legal and Illegal Immigration In Europe, slavery peaked in the fourteenth and ended in the late twentieth century after the emancipation of serfdom. The economy of a country is undoubtedly the last receptor of the effects of illegal immigrants.
• Illegal Immigrants and Amnesty: A Pro Argument This is given that the illegal immigrants will now be able to participate fully in the economy. However, they are of the view that, as much as this might be the case, this is not […]
• Legal Immigration versus Illegal Immigration in America Due to the large number of illegal immigrants in the U. Legal immigration in America is accompanied by introduction of new skills to the country.
• Implications of Illegal Immigration in the US According to politicians, an increase in the number of illegal immigrants is highly likely to destabilize the law of the land, as well as disrupt the government’s planning and implementation of the labor market laws.
• Analyzing the Issue of Illegal Immigration in the US Illegal immigration is one of the main disasters of the USA. The Mexico illegal immigrants remain one of the most devastating problems of the USA.
• Arizona Immigration Law: What For? Lately though, the signing of an immigration law that seems to curtail the freedom of the people by Governor Jan Brewer rattled some feathers not only in the state, but in the larger US and […]
• Does Border Enforcement Protect U.S. Workers From Illegal Immigration?
• Does Illegal Immigration Empower Rightist Parties?
• How Illegal Immigration Effects the Economy and the School System in the U.S.?
• How Should America Handle Illegal Immigration?
• Who Has the Most Impact on Illegal Immigration Policy?
• Why the Border Fence May Not Be the Solution for the Illegal Immigration?
• Why the Federal Government Can’t End Illegal Immigration in the US?
• What Are the Common Causes of Illegal Immigration?
• What Is the Role of Smugglers in Illegal Immigration and Border Enforcement?
• What Is the Effect of Illegal Immigration on the Hospitality and Food Industry?
• What Is President Donald Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy Effect on Illegal Immigration?
• What Are the Welfare Effects of Illegal Immigration?
• What Are the Emerging Geopolitics of Illegal Immigration in the EU?
• What Is the Rational Approach to Illegal Immigration?
• What Is Theory of Permissible Illegal Immigration?
• What Are the Links Between Illegal Immigration and Organized Crime?
• What Are the Strategic Perspectives on Illegal Immigration Into South Africa?
• What Are the Perspectives and Challenges of Asylum Policy and Illegal Immigration?
• How Illegal Immigration Laws Affect the Economic of Texas?
• What Is the All-American Canal and What Are Its Effects on Illegal Immigration?
• What Is the Controversy Surrounding Arizona’s Anti-illegal Immigration Legislation?
• Why Is Turkey a Transit Country for Illegal Immigration to EU?
• What Is the Role of Informality, Taxation and Trade in Illegal Immigration?
• What Is the European Union’s Anti-illegal Immigration Discourse?
• Cultural Identity Research Topics
• International Studies Ideas
• Human Trafficking Titles
• Crime Ideas
• Personal Identity Paper Topics
• Social Inequality Paper Topics
• Globalization Essay Topics
• Overpopulation Topics
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, February 4). 71 Illegal Immigration Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/illegal-immigration-essay-examples/

"71 Illegal Immigration Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 4 Feb. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/illegal-immigration-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '71 Illegal Immigration Essay Topics & Examples'. 4 February.

IvyPanda . 2023. "71 Illegal Immigration Essay Topics & Examples." February 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/illegal-immigration-essay-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "71 Illegal Immigration Essay Topics & Examples." February 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/illegal-immigration-essay-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "71 Illegal Immigration Essay Topics & Examples." February 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/illegal-immigration-essay-examples/.

Words Matter: Illegal Immigrant, Undocumented Immigrant, or Unauthorized Immigrant?

• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
• Focus Areas
• More Focus Areas
• Immigration Ethics
• Immigration Ethics Resources
• Immigration Ethics Blog

The labels we use to refer to different classes of individuals are not merely neutral descriptors but often implicitly come with various associations or value judgments, which can, in turn, frame and influence political debates.

Immigration protest signs saying "Stop the Raids" and "No one is illegel"

"No One is Illegal! May Day of Action"  by  Tania Liu  is licensed under  CC BY-ND 2.0

Jonathan Kwan ( @migrationethics ) is the Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow in Immigration Ethics with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are his own.

What term should we use to describe the 11 million or so people who have entered or reside within the U.S. without official government authorization? “Illegal immigrants,” “undocumented immigrants,” “unauthorized immigrants,” or something else entirely? The labels we use to refer to different classes of individuals are not merely neutral descriptors but often implicitly come with various associations or value judgments, which can, in turn, frame and influence political debates.

Conservatives tend to favor the term “illegal immigrant” and argue that it is the most precise because, unlike other terms such as “undocumented immigrant,” it underscores the legal violation that took place. However, critics of the phrase “illegal immigrant,” such as the Drop the I-Word campaign contend that “illegal immigrant” is actually imprecise or, at the very least, misleading. “Illegal” blankets all cases with connotations of criminality but different cases are treated differently under the law. For instance, living in the U.S. without authorization, such as overstaying a visa but entering the country legally, is a civil but not a criminal offense. “Illegal” also carries with it a finality that obscures the fluidity of immigration status, which can be adjusted based on different individual circumstances.

In 2013, the Associated Press (AP) changed its stylebook to no longer sanction the use of “illegal immigrant” on the ground that “illegal” should only describe an action but not a person. This represented an important shift due to the many newspapers that follow the AP’s style recommendations. Activists and immigrant advocates, of course, have long proclaimed, “No person is illegal.” The AP saw this change as consistent with its general practice of rejecting labels (for instance, saying someone is “diagnosed with schizophrenia” rather than “schizophrenic”). Instead of “illegal immigrant,” the AP suggests “living in or entering a country illegally” or “without legal permission.” But “illegal immigration” is still accepted by the AP insofar as this phrase does not describe people as “illegal.”

More recently, in April 2021, the Biden administration instructed U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to replace the term "illegal alien" (which is used throughout U.S. immigration law) with "undocumented noncitizen."

Even more damning is the critique that the term “illegal immigrant” functions as a racist dog whistle that buoys the idea that America is or should be a white nation. U.S. immigration law, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the national origins quota system, has historically played a role in constructing categories of racial difference that have served to exclude those not considered white or white enough from the U.S. polis. As José Mendoza put it, “the notion of illegality plays a large role in constructing, perpetuating, and solidifying whiteness … illegality , like race, has historically functioned as a signifier of nonwhiteness and thereby marks entire communities (e.g., Latino and Asian communities) as nonwhite.” The ways in which racist ideologies are bound up with U.S. immigration policies are unfortunately not just historical artifacts but continue to this day, as is evidenced by former President Trump’s comments referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as “shithole countries.”

If “illegal immigrant” is imprecise and racially problematic, what term should be used instead? Pro-immigrant liberals often prefer the term “undocumented immigrant.” The nonprofit Define American , in its criticism of phrases such as “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien,” recommends “undocumented American.” But “undocumented immigrant” has its shortcomings too. For many conservatives, “undocumented immigrant” smacks of euphemism, which makes it seem as though the matter were simply a clerical or administrative error—as if some document was misplaced or not properly issued. And “undocumented immigrant” is itself imprecise since an individual may have many documents even if they did not enter the country legally or do not have federal authorization to continue residing in the country. New York City residents, for instance, can be issued an identification card regardless of their immigration status. And “undocumented American,” which presumably is meant to challenge the idea that only citizens are Americans, could also be problematically imposing a label on people that they do not necessarily endorse themselves—after all, not everyone identifies or wants to be seen as an American.

Perhaps better than “undocumented immigrant” is “unauthorized immigrant,” which makes it clear that the issue is not merely the lack of documentation (even if not having the right papers can indeed be a serious problem for many people in different situations) but the lack of government authorization to enter or reside in the country. Though “unauthorized” does not carry with it the negative connotations of criminality associated with “illegal,” “unauthorized” is not necessarily neutral or free from value judgments itself.

The word “authority,” for instance, is ambiguous between an entity who in fact has the power to make some determination and an entity who should have (i.e. is legitimately entitled to or has the right to) such power. When we say, “The DMV is the authority that decides who is issued a driver’s license,” we mean authority in the first descriptive sense. If we say, “Women should be the authorities on whether or not abortions are legal,” we mean authority in the second value-laden sense. Oftentimes we use “authority” in both senses. If we say, “Parents are the authorities when it comes to the well-being of their children,” we might mean both that parents do in fact have the power to decide the well-being of their children and that they should have this power. Sometimes it may not be clear what sense of “authority” is being used, or “authority” may be used in one sense but carry with it connotations of the other sense or be (mis) interpreted in that way.

The ambiguities and value-laden connotations of authority can consequently import into the term “unauthorized immigrant.” If there are unauthorized immigrants, then are there authorized immigrants as well? Does “unauthorized immigrant” imply that those immigrants should be unauthorized? What kind of authorization do they lack? Who decided they are unauthorized? Who has the right to decide this and why? Perhaps there should be no unauthorized immigrants at all! Or perhaps more deeply, there should not even be a distinction between immigrants who are authorized and immigrants who are unauthorized.

The broader lesson that I think should be drawn from this discussion is that the terms we use to refer to different groups of people are not merely neutral or impartial descriptions. Instead, the very words we use to understand our social and political world can not only influence political debates and opinions but may already carry with them implicit ethical judgments about how to structure and change our world. But this doesn’t mean that we should just give up on describing our world accurately or abandon critical investigation of the words we use as just overblown and overly sensitive “political correctness.” Rather it means that how we see our world goes hand in hand with what our values are. How we should describe different classes of immigrants will depend partly and more broadly on what we envision justice in immigration to be.

Originally published February, 2021. Updated January, 2022 to include terminology changes by the Biden Administration.

Subscribe to Ethics Center Blogs

• All About Ethics
• Benison: The Practice of Ethical Leadership
• Center News
• Ethical Dilemmas in the Social Sector
• Internet Ethics: Views from Silicon Valley
• Ethics in Health Care

• Upjohn Research Home
• Upjohn Institute
• < Previous

Home > Upjohn Institute Publications > Upjohn Press Collection > Press > 193

Upjohn Press

Essays on Legal and Illegal Immigration

Susan Pozo Editor , Western Michigan University Follow

Publication Date

10.17848/9780880995559

Immigration is an issue drawing increased attention among policymakers and citizens. These essays provide an economic perspective to the effects of immigration on the labor markets in the United States.

Download Full Text (11.3 MB)

Download 1. The Many Guises of Immigration Reform / Susan Pozo (2.7 MB)

Download 2. Immigrants and the U.S. Labor Market / George J. Borjas (3.1 MB)

Download 3. Can International Migration be Controlled? / Michael J. Piore (3.6 MB)

Download 4. The Imperative of Immigration Reform / Vernon M. Briggs, Jr. (4.0 MB)

Download 5. The Illegal Alien Policy Dilemma / Barry R. Chiswick (3.2 MB)

Download 6. Immigration and the U.S. Taxpayer / Francine D. Blau (3.6 MB)

Download 7. U.S. Immigration Policy, What Next? / Jagdish N. Bhagwati (3.4 MB)

Papers presented in a seminar series conducted by the Department of Economics at Western Michigan University

Sponsorship

Financial support from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the Collge of Arts and Sciences of Western Michigan University

9780880990400 (pbk.) ; 9780880995559 (ebook)

Subject Areas

INTERNATIONAL ISSUES; Immigration

Related Title(s)

The Human and Economic Implications of Twenty-First Century Immigration Policy.

Book. 2018.

Since July 07, 2010

Included in

Immigration Law Commons , Labor Economics Commons

Pozo, Susan, ed. 1986. Essays on Legal and Illegal Immigration. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. https://doi.org/10.17848/9780880995559

Creative Commons License

Advanced Search

• Notify me via email or RSS
• Most Recent Additions
• Open Access Books
• Upjohn Institute Publications
• Externally Published Works
• Staff Papers and Presentations
• Upjohn-Sponsored Grants
• Dissertation Awards
• Subject Collections
• Publication Types
• Upjohn Institute Experts
• Request an Accessible Copy

Home | About | My Account | Accessibility Statement

Privacy Copyright

This website is owned and operated by Elsevier, Inc., through bepress. By creating a user account through this website, you are agreeing to the bepress Terms of Service and Privacy Policy .

Content on this website is provided by W.E. Upjohn Institute. By viewing or downloading any content, you are agreeing to the W.E. Upjohn Institute Privacy Policy .

Banking and Antitrust

This Essay seeks to recover the deeply rooted connection between U.S. banking law and antitrust. It reconceptualizes banking law as a sector-specific antimonopoly regime that imposes multiple structural constraints on publicly subsidized banks’ ability to abuse their power over the supply and alloca…

Policing the Polity

Interior immigration enforcement reaches well beyond deportation. In practice, it also offers a rationale for policing U.S. residents stereotyped as foreign. This Essay shows how a “deportation-centric” approach limits the ability of courts to recognize and redress unjustified surveillance, and it a…

The Moral Ambiguity of Public Prosecution

In a legal system where criminal prosecution is the institutional analog of moral blame, a state that acts as exclusive prosecutor exceeds its moral standing and incurs a debt to the victim. The nature of this debt and how we might discharge it are the primary subjects of this Essay. 

The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance

The Fourth Amendment allows police to perform warrantless searches of individuals if they give consent to be searched and that consent is voluntary. Based on original laboratory research, this Essay posits that fact-finders assessing voluntariness underappreciate the extent to which suspects feel pr…

Democratic Policing Before the Due Process Revolution

Prevailing narratives of the Warren Court’s Due Process Revolution emphasize how it constrained police behavior. This Essay questions this account. It returns to the legal culture before the Revolution, focusing on three lectures by the prominent scholar Jerome Hall. Due process, it concludes, as mu…

The Dilemma of Localism in an Era of Polarization

Localism discourse has long confronted a fundamental problem: how can we remain committed to decentralized decision-making while checking the excesses of local parochialism? This Essay proposes a new approach in our polarized era, emphasizing the joint role state individual rights and the often-igno…

Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought?

It is an age-old maxim of criminal jurisprudence that the state must never punish people for their mere thoughts—for their beliefs, desires, and unexecuted intentions. Yet its justification is something of a mystery. This Essay argues that each of the prevailing justifications is deficient and propo…

Originalism Without Text

Originalism is not about the text. A society can be recognizably originalist without any words to interpret: without a written constitution, written statutes, or any writing at all. What originalism generally is about is our present constitutional law and its dependence on a crucial moment in the pa…

Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement

In police reform circles, many scholars and policymakers diagnose the frayed relationship between police forces and the communities they serve as a problem of illegitimacy, or the idea that people lack confidence in the police and thus are unlikely to comply or cooperate with t…

Cops and Pleas: Police Officers’ Influence on Plea Bargaining

abstract.Police officers play an important, though little-understood, role in plea bargaining. This Essay examines the many ways in which prosecutors and police officers consult, collaborate, and clash with each other over plea bargaining. Using original interviews with criminal justice of…

Agency Design and Political Control

Although historical debates about the separation of powers focus on Congress, the President, and the Judiciary, in modern times, the bureaucracy is the elephant in the room. In a world of seemingly inevitable widespread congressional delegation to administrative agencies, as we…

Fiduciary Political Theory: A Critique

“Fiduciary political theory” is a burgeoning intellectual project that uses fiduciary principles to analyze public law. This Essay provides a framework for assessing the usefulness and limitations of fiduciary political theory. Our thesis is that fiduciary principles can be…

The New Public

By exploring the intertwined histories of the automobile, policing, criminal procedure, and the administrative state in the twentieth-century United States, this Essay argues that the growth of the police’s discretionary authority had its roots in the governance of an automotiv…

The Domestic Analogy Revisited: Hobbes on International Order

This Essay reexamines Thomas Hobbes’s understanding of international order. Hobbes defended the establishment of an all-powerful sovereign as the solution to interpersonal conflict, and he advanced an analogy between persons and states. Extending this “domestic analogy,” the…

Which Way To Nudge? Uncovering Preferences in the Behavioral Age

Behavioral Law and Economics has created a dilemma for policymakers. On the one hand, research from the field suggests a wide range of unconventional policy instruments (“nudges”) may be used to shape people’s voluntary choices in order to lead them to the option they most pref…

On Evidence: Proving Frye as a Matter of Law, Science, and History

This Essay is a cautionary tale about what the law does to history. It uses a landmark ruling about whether scientific evidence is admissible in court to illustrate how the law renders historical evidence invisible. Frye v. United States established o…

The End of Jurisprudence

For more than forty years, jurisprudence has been dominated by the Hart-Dworkin debate. The debate starts from the premise that our legal practices generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal, and the question at issue is how the cont…

Bounded Institutions

This Essay examines two alternative designs for hierarchical institutions: “bounded” and “unbounded.” In a bounded structure, a principal decides on a bounded aggregate numerical allocation, and then an agent makes the allocation to an underly…

We the People : Each and Every One

In his book series, We the People, Bruce Ackerman offers a rich description of how constitutional law comes to be changed by social movements. He also makes some normative claims about “popular sovereignty,” “popular consent,” “higher law,” …

Reactionary Rhetoric and Liberal Legal Academia

As celebrations mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is essential to recover the arguments mainstream critics made in opposing what has become a sacrosanct piece of legislation. Prominent legal scholarship now appears to m…

Popular Sovereignty and the United States Constitution: Tensions in the Ackermanian Program

The very title of Bruce Ackerman’s now three-volume masterwork, We the People, signifies his commitment to popular sovereignty and, beyond that, to the embrace of democratic inclusion as the leitmotif of American constitutionalism. But “popular…

The Neo-Hamiltonian Temptation

The central force behind the development of constitutional law, according to Bruce Ackerman’s magisterial We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution, is not the courts but the People, acting through the elected officials who were responsible for th…

The Civil Rights Canon: Above and Below

This essay builds on the constitutional history of the civil rights movement from below to complement and complicate the canon identified in We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution. Like Professor Ackerman’s work, this essay embraces the concept o…

Changing the Wind: Notes Toward a Demosprudence of Law and Social Movements

This essay was influenced by a class on Law and Social Movements that Professors Guinier and Torres taught at the Yale Law School in 2011. This essay was also informed by numerous conversations with Bruce Ackerman regarding his book that is under review in this Symposium. …

Protecting Civil Rights in the Shadows

Beyond grand constitutional moments such as the New Deal and the civil rights era, the American people also remove other, less prominent issues from majoritarian politics. This process of petit popular constitutionalism resolves numerous important issues of government …

Universalism and Civil Rights (with Notes on Voting Rights After Shelby )

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, voting rights activists proposed a variety of legislative responses. Some proposals sought to move beyond measures that targeted voting discrimination based on race or ethnicity. They ins…

Separate Spheres

This essay is about the mixed legacy, or incomplete achievement, of the landmark legal changes of the Second Reconstruction. This mixed legacy is one of the central themes of The Civil Rights Revolution, the third volume of Bruce Ackerman’s We the…

Ackerman’s Civil Rights Revolution and Modern American Racial Politics

Bruce Ackerman’s The Civil Rights Revolution makes a signal contribution by documenting how the major civil rights statutes of the 1960s, especially the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, pragmatically …

Rethinking Rights After the Second Reconstruction

The Civil Rights Act was remarkably successful in fighting overt bigotry and discrimination, but much less so in combating the subtler, institutionalized disadvantages that are now the main sources of social injustice. The heroic idea of rights as protecti…

A Revolution at War with Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences from Weber to Ricci

Two aspects of the constitutional transformation Bruce Ackerman describes in The Civil Rights Revolution were on a collision course, one whose trajectory has implications for Ackerman’s account and for his broader theory of constitutional change. Ackerman makes a co…

Have We Moved Beyond the Civil Rights Revolution?

Bruce Ackerman’s account of the Civil Rights Revolution stresses the importance of popular sovereignty and the separation of powers as the basis of constitutional significance. In this view, key spokespersons, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ly…

Equal Protection in the Key of Respect

This essay challenges the three related claims embedded within Professor Ackerman’s assertion that the distinctive wisdom of Chief Justice Warren’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education lies in its recognition of segregation as institutionalized humiliation. Ack…

Ackerman’s Brown

This essay contends that, despite its revisionist ethos, Professor Ackerman’s We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution is conventional in its assessment of Brown v. Board of Education. Ackerman praises Brown as “the greatest judicial opinion of the twentieth cen…

The Anti-Humiliation Principle and Same-Sex Marriage

Bruce Ackerman’s volume on the civil rights revolution argues that the Second Reconstruction was centrally concerned with the concept of institutionalized humiliation. Ackerman inveighs against the fact that we have turned away from this “anti-humiliat…

De-Schooling Constitutional Law

For more than two centuries, constitutional law has been created by a dialogue between generations. As newcomers displace their predecessors, they begin to challenge parts of the legacy they have inherited while cherishing other elements of their tradition. The…

Five to Four: Why Do Bare Majorities Rule on Courts?

Interrogating a commonsense assumption

Federalism as the New Nationalism: An Overview

Federalism has had a resurgence of late, with symposia organized,1 stories written,2 and new scholarly paths charted. Now is an appropriate moment to assess where the new “new federalism”3 is heading. This Feature thus brings together five scholars who have made unique contribution…

From Sovereignty and Process to Administration and Politics: The Afterlife of American Federalism

Announcing the death of dual federalism, Edward Corwin asked whether the states could be “saved as the vital cells that they have been heretofore of democratic sentiment, impulse, and action.” The federalism literature has largely answered in the affirmative. Unwilling to aband…

The Loyal Opposition

The term loyal opposition is not often used in American debates because (we think) we lack an institutional structure for allowing minorities to take part in governance. On this view, we’ve found our own way to build loyalty while licensing opposition, but it’s been a rights-…

Our [National] Federalism

“National Federalism” best describes the modern allocation of state and federal power, but it is a federalism without doctrine. Federalism today comes primarily from Congress—through its decisions to give states prominent roles in federal schemes and so to ensure the stat…

The Shadow Powers of Article I

This essay argues that the interpretive struggle over the meaning of American federalism has recently shifted from the Commerce Clause to two textually marginal but substantively important battlegrounds: the Necessary and Proper Clause and, to a lesser extent, the General Welfa…

Negotiating Conflict Through Federalism: Institutional and Popular Perspectives

The contours of our federal system are under constant negotiation, as governments construct the scope of one another’s interests and powers while pursuing their agendas. For our institutions to manage these dynamics productively, we must understand the value the system is capab…

The Moral Impact Theory of Law

I develop an alternative to the two main views of law that have dominated legal thought. My view offers a novel account of how the actions of legal institutions make the law what it is, and a correspondingly novel account of how to interpret legal texts. According to my view, legal obl…

Pretrial Detention and the Right to Be Monitored

Although detention for dangerousness has received far more attention in recent years, a significant number of non-dangerous but impecunious defendants are jailed to ensure their presence at trial due to continued, widespread reliance on a money bail system. This Essay develops two rel…

Reconsidering Citizens United as a Press Clause Case

The central flaw in the analysis of Citizens United by both the majority and the dissent was to treat it as a free speech case rather than a free press case. The right of a group to write and disseminate a documentary film criticizing a candidate for public office falls within the core…

Tops, Bottoms, and Versatiles: What Straight Views of Penetrative Preferences Could Mean for Sexuality Claims Under Price Waterhouse

This Essay reports the results of a survey experiment that we conducted on over eight hundred heterosexual respondents to compare associational attitudes toward gay men who engage in different types of sexual practices. Specifically, we randomly assigned respondents to hear one…

The Unbundled Union: Politics Without Collective Bargaining

Why civil gideon won’t fix family law.

This Essay explains why we should hesitate before throwing full support behind a civil Gideon initiative for family law, regardless of how wholeheartedly we embrace the proposition that parental rights are as important as physical liberty. The comparable importance of these interests does not necess…

Gideon Exceptionalism?

122 Yale L.J. 2126 (2013). There is no doubt that Gideon v. Wainwright is extraordinary, but in thinking about its uniqueness, we are reminded of “American exceptionalism” and the diametrically opposed meanings that advocates have ascribed to the phrase. Gideon too is exceptional, in both the laudato…

Fifty Years of Defiance and Resistance After Gideon v. Wainwright

122 Yale L.J. 2150 (2013). In its 1963 ruling Gideon v. Wainwright , the Supreme Court declared the right to a lawyer “fundamental and essential” to fairness in the criminal courts and held that lawyers must be provided for people who could not afford them so that every person “stands equal before the…

Poor People Lose: Gideon and the Critique of Rights

122 Yale L.J. 2176 (2013). A low income person is more likely to be prosecuted and imprisoned post- Gideon than pre- Gideon . Poor people lose in American criminal justice not because they have ineffective lawyers but because they are selectively targeted by police, prosecutors, and law makers. The crit…

Celebrating the “Null” Finding: Evidence-Based Strategies for Improving Access to Legal Services

122 Yale L.J. 2206 (2013). Recent empirical studies tested whether litigants with access to lawyers fared better than litigants with access only to advice or limited assistance. Two of the three studies produced null findings—the litigants with access to lawyers, the treatment group, fared no better …

Race and the Disappointing Right to Counsel

122 Yale L.J. 2236 (2013). Critics of the criminal justice system observe that the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright remains unfulfilled. They decry both the inadequate quality of representation available to indigent defendants and the racially disproportionate outcome of the criminal process. Some hop…

Participation, Equality, and the Civil Right to Counsel: Lessons from Domestic and International Law

122 Yale L.J. 2260 (2013). Domestic efforts to establish a right to civil counsel by drawing narrow analogies to Gideon v. Wainwright have met with limited success. In contrast, two principles drawn from international jurisprudence—the human right to “civic participation” and the concept of “equality…

Gideon’s Migration

122 Yale L.J. 2282 (2013). For the past fifty years, immigration law has resisted integration of Gideon v. Wainwright ’s legacy of appointed counsel for the poor. Today, however, this resistance has given way to Gideon ’s migration. At the level of everyday practice, criminal defense attorneys appointe…

Searching for Solutions to the Indigent Defense Crisis in the Broader Criminal Justice Reform Agenda

122 Yale L.J. 2316 (2013). As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Gideon v. Wainwright decision, the nearly universal assessment is that our indigent defense system remains too under-resourced and overwhelmed to fulfill the promise of the landmark decision, and needs to be reformed. At the same t…

Gideon’s Amici: Why Do Prosecutors So Rarely Defend the Rights of the Accused?

122 Yale L.J. 2336 (2013). In Gideon v. Wainwright , twenty-three state attorneys general, led by Walter F. Mondale and Edward McCormack, joined an amicus brief on the side of the criminal accused, urging the Supreme Court to recognize indigent defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to appointed counsel in…

Valuing Gideon’s Gold: How Much Justice Can We Afford?

122 Yale L.J. 2358 (2013). In this Essay, we explore Gideon ’s impact in our community, El Paso, Texas, which has the will to try to meet Gideon ’s challenge, but lacks the resources to deliver fully Gideon ’s promise. We look at the origins of our community’s indigent defense reform and examine our off…

Investigating Gideon’s Legacy in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

122 Yale L.J. 2376 (2013). This Essay investigates the legacy of Gideon by examining the de facto courts of last resort for convicted offenders: the federal courts of appeals. Part I focuses on the U.S. courts of appeals’ judges and caseloads, revealing that very few federal appellate judges have pri…

An Immigration Gideon for Lawful Permanent Residents

122 Yale L.J. 2394 (2013). In evaluating the legacy of Gideon v. Wainwright , it is critical to remember that the Supreme Court’s decision rested on the Sixth Amendment right to counsel for the accused in criminal cases. American law sharply demarcates between the many rights available to criminal def…

Gideon at Guantánamo

122 Yale L.J. 2416 (2013). The right to counsel maintains an uneasy relationship with the demands of trials for war crimes. Drawing on the author’s personal experiences from defending a Guantánamo detainee, the Author explains how Gideon set a baseline for the right to counsel at Guantánamo. Whether …

Enforcing Effective Assistance After Martinez

122 Yale L.J. 2428 (2013). This Essay argues that the Court’s effort to expand habeas review of ineffective assistance of counsel claims in Martinez v. Ryan will make little difference in either the enforcement of the right to the effective assistance of counsel or the provision of competent represen…

Gideon’s Law-Protective Function

122 Yale L.J. 2460 (2013). Gideon v. Wainwright dramatically affects the rights of indigent defendants by entitling them to representation. But Gideon has another systemic consequence as well. In addition to protecting the rights of individual defendants in particular trials, Gideon also protects the…

Gideon’s Shadow

122 Yale L.J. 2482 (2013). The right to counsel is regarded as a right without peer, even in a field of litigation saturated with constitutional protections. But from this elevated, elite-right status, the right to counsel casts a shadow over the other, less prominent criminal procedure rights. Elabo…

Gideon at Guantánamo: Democratic and Despotic Detention

122 Yale L.J. 2504 (2013). One measure of Gideon v. Wainwright is that it made the U.S. government’s efforts to isolate 9/11 detainees from all outsiders at Guantánamo Bay conceptually and legally unsustainable. Gideon , along with Miranda v. Arizona , is part of a democratic narrative shaped over dec…

Fear of Adversariness: Using Gideon To Restrict Defendants’ Invocation of Adversary Procedures

122 Yale L.J. 2550 (2013). Fifty years ago Gideon promised that an attorney would vindicate the constitutional rights of any accused too poor to afford an attorney. But Gideon also promised more. Writ small, Gideon promised to protect individual defendants; writ large, Gideon promised to protect our …

Federal Public Defense in an Age of Inquisition

122 Yale L.J. 2578 (2013). This Essay asks whether federal criminal defendants receive fairer process today than they did in 1963, when Gideon v. Wainwright was decided. It concludes that in many situations they do not; indeed, they often receive far worse. Although Gideon and the Criminal Justice Ac…

Effective Trial Counsel After Martinez v. Ryan: Focusing on the Adequacy of State Procedures

122 Yale L.J. 2604 (2013). Everyone knows that excessive caseloads, poor funding, and a lack of training plague indigent defense delivery systems throughout the states, such that the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright is largely unfulfilled. Commentators have disagreed about how best to breathe life int…

Implicit Racial Bias in Public Defender Triage

122 Yale L.J. 2626 (2013). Despite the promise of Gideon , providing “the guiding hand of counsel” to indigent defendants remains unmanageable, largely because the nation’s public defender offices are overworked and underfunded. Faced with overwhelming caseloads and inadequate resources, public defend…

Effective Plea Bargaining Counsel

122 Yale L.J. 2650 (2013). Fifty years ago, Clarence Earl Gideon needed an effective trial attorney. The Supreme Court agreed with Gideon that the Sixth Amendment guaranteed him the right to counsel at trial. Recently, Galin Frye and Anthony Cooper also needed effective representation. These two men,…

The Continuum of Excludability and the Limits of Patents

122 Yale L.J. 1900 (2013). In IP scholarship, patents are commonly understood as more efficient than other approaches to innovation policy. Their primary ostensible advantage is allocative: as a form of property rights, patents act as a conduit between market signals and potential innovators, ostensi…

Spite and Extortion: A Jurisdictional Principle of Abuse of Property Right

122 Yale L.J. 1444 (2013). This Essay puts forward the conceptual and normative underpinnings of a principle of abuse of property right. Owners abuse their right, I argue, when their decisions about a thing are designed just to produce harm. This is so whether that harm is an end in itself (spite) or…

Reconceptualizing the Burden of Proof

122 Yale L.J. 1254 (2013). The preponderance standard is conventionally described as an absolute probability threshold of 0.5. This Essay argues that this absolute characterization of the burden of proof is wrong. Rather than focusing on an absolute threshold, the Essay reconceptualizes the preponder…

Can the President Appoint Principal Executive Officers Without a Senate Confirmation Vote?

122 Yale L.J. 940 (2013). It is generally assumed that the Constitution requires the Senate to vote to confirm the President’s nominees to principal federal offices. This Essay argues, to the contrary, that when the President nominates an individual to a principal executive branch position, the Senat…

Asymmetries and Incentives in Plea Bargaining and Evidence Production

122 Yale L.J. 690 (2012). Legal rules severely restrict payments to fact witnesses, though the government can often offer plea bargains or other nonmonetary inducements to encourage testimony. This asymmetry is something of a puzzle, for most asymmetries in criminal law favor the defendant. The asymm…

Contra Nemo Iudex in Sua Causa: The Limits of Impartiality

122 Yale L.J. 384 (2012).

Regularly invoked by the Supreme Court in diverse contexts, the maxim nemo iudex in sua causa —no man should be judge in his own case—is widely thought to capture a bedrock principle of natural justice and constitutionalism. I will argue that the nemo iudex principle is a m…

Judicial Capacity and the Substance of Constitutional Law

122 Yale L.J. 422 (2012). Courts can decide only a small fraction of constitutional issues generated by the American government. This is widely acknowledged. But why do courts have such limited capacity? And how does this limitation affect the substance of constitutional law? This Essay advances a tw…

How Much Difference Does the Lawyer Make? The Effect of Defense Counsel on Murder Case Outcomes

122 Yale L.J. 154 (2012). One in five indigent murder defendants in Philadelphia is randomly assigned representation by public defenders while the remainder receive court-appointed private attorneys. We exploit this random assignment to measure how defense counsel affect murder case outcomes. Compare…

One in five indigent murder defendants in Philadelphia is randomly assigned representation by public defenders while the remainder receive court-appointed private attorneys. We exploit this random assignment to measure how defense counsel affect murder case outcomes. Comp…

The Antitrust/Consumer Protection Paradox: Two Policies at War with Each Other

121 Yale L.J. 2216 (2012) . The potential complementarities between antitrust and consumer protection law—collectively, “consumer law”—are well known. The rise of the newly established Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) portends a deep rift in the intellectual infrastructure of consumer law …

Due Process as Separation of Powers

121 Yale L.J. 1672 (2012) . From its conceptual origin in Magna Charta, due process of law has required that government can deprive persons of rights only pursuant to a coordinated effort of separate institutions that make, execute, and adjudicate claims under the law. Originalist debates about whether t…

Income Tax Discrimination: Still Stuck in the Labyrinth of Impossibility

121 Yale L.J. 1118 (2012).

In previous articles, we have argued that the European Court of Justice’s reliance on nondiscrimination as the basis for its decisions did not (and could not) satisfy commonly accepted tax policy norms, such as fairness, administrability, economic efficiency, production o…

Intrastatutory Federalism and Statutory Interpretation: State Implementation of Federal Law in Health Reform and Beyond

121 Yale L.J. 534 (2011).

State implementation of federal law is commonplace, but has been largely ignored by the interpretive doctrines of legislation and administrative law.  We have no Chevron , federalism canon, or anything else for state implementation, nor any doctrines that ask how Congress’s…

The Principle of Misalignment: Duty, Damages, and the Nature of Tort Liability

121 Yale L.J. 142 (2011). When a tort rule is fully aligned, harms are valued equally across the elements. Because the valuation of harm within duty equals the valuation within the damages remedy, a fully aligned rule gives dutyholders the option to fully comply with the duty with respect to any harm by…

Justifications, Power, and Authority

117 Yale L.J. 1070 (2008).

Criminal law theory made a significant advance roughly thirty years ago when George Fletcher popularized the important conceptual distinction between justifications and excuses. In the intervening years, however, very little progress has been made in exploring the structu…

Irreparable Benefits

116 Yale L.J. 1284 (2007)

The conventional approach to preliminary relief focuses on irreparable harm but entirely neglects irreparable benefits. That is hard to understand. Errant irreversible harms are important because they distort incentives and have lasting distributional consequences. But the…

The Efficient Performance Hypothesis

116 Yale L.J. 568 (2006) Notable American jurists and scholars have advanced an approach to contract enforcement that would render breach legally and morally uncontestable, assuming compensation follows. Much of the justification for this endeavor has rested upon claims of judicial and economic effic…

Executive Branch Usurpation of Power: Corporations and Capital Markets

115 Yale L.J. 2416 (2006) Agencies in the executive branch are better situated than other political institutions to take advantage of opportunities to expand their power base by responding quickly and decisively to real or imagined crises. The executive has structural advantages over the other branch…

Beyond Marbury: The Executive's Power To Say What the Law Is

115 Yale L.J. 2580 (2006) Under Marbury v. Madison , it is "emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." But in the last quarter-century, the Supreme Court has legitimated the executive's power of interpretation, above all in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural R…

Can Strong Mayors Empower Weak Cities? On the Power of Local Executives in a Federal System

This Essay considers the historic weakness of the American mayoralty and recent reform efforts designed to strengthen it. I argue that the strong mayoralty is a potential instrument for democratic self-government to the extent that it is able to amass power on behalf of the city.

Rational War and Constitutional Design

115 Yale L.J. 2512 (2006) Contemporary accounts of the allocation of war powers authority often focus on textual or historical debates as to whether the President or Congress holds the power to initiate military hostilities. In this Essay, we move beyond such debates and instead pursue a comparative …

Break Up the Presidency? Governors, State Attorneys General, and Lessons from the Divided Executive

115 Yale L.J. 2446 (2006) Proponents of the unitary executive have contended that its adoption by the framers "swept plural executive forms into the ash bin of history." Virtually every state government, however, has a divided executive in which executive power is apportioned among different executiv…

Gubernatorial Foreign Policy

115 Yale L.J. 2380 (2006) In a variety of circumstances, state governors exercise independent decision-making power over matters affecting the foreign policy of the United States. This Essay describes and defends this emerging system of gubernatorial foreign policy on both legal and functional ground…

Setting the World Right

115 Yale L.J. 2350 (2006) Five years after September 11, 2001, America's response to that traumatic day has effectively turned the world of American public law upside down. Claiming that a global war on terror calls for an entirely new legal paradigm, the Bush Administration and its supporters have p…

The President's Completion Power

115 Yale L.J. 2280 (2006) This Essay identifies and analyzes the President's completion power: the President's authority to prescribe incidental details needed to carry into execution a legislative scheme, even in the absence of congressional authorization to complete that scheme. The Essay shows tha…

Quasipublic Executives

115 Yale L.J. 2254 (2006) In this Essay, we first observe the rise of what we call "quasipublic executives": both "nominally private executives," that is, private executives in charge of public functions such as corrections, education, and national defense; and "nominally public executives," that is,…

Why (and When) Cities Have a Stake in Enforcing the Constitution

115 Yale L.J. 2218 (2006) This Essay examines independent constitutional interpretation from the bottom up. It focuses on San Francisco's recent challenge to the California ban against same-sex marriage and the judicial response it provoked in Lockyer v. City & County of San Francisco . The Essay argu…

Inherent Executive Power: A Comparative Perspective

115 Yale L.J. 2480 (2006) In light of recent debates regarding the scope and basis of inherent executive power, particularly with regard to foreign affairs and national security, this Essay examines different conceptions of executive power in five modern democracies. The Essay's study of British and …

Internal Separation of Powers: Checking Today's Most Dangerous Branch from Within

115 Yale L.J. 2314 (2006) The standard conception of separation of powers presumes three branches with equivalent ambitions of maximizing their powers. Today, however, legislative abdication is the reigning modus operandi. Instead of bemoaning this state of affairs, this Essay asks how separation of …

Absolute Priority, Valuation Uncertainty, and the Reorganization Bargain

115 Yale L.J. 1930 (2006) In a Chapter 11 reorganization, senior creditors can insist on being paid in full before anyone junior to them receives anything. In practice, however, departures from "absolute priority" treatment are commonplace. Explaining these deviations has been a central preoccupation…

Evolution and Chaos in Property Rights Systems: The Third World Tragedy of Contested Access

115 Yale L.J. 996 (2006) According to conventional law-and-economics theory, private property rights tend to evolve as resource values rise. This optimistic assessment fails to explain the development of open access in many Third World property systems. Indeed, while the evolution of property has bee…

Of Property and Federalism

115 Yale L.J. 72 (2005) This Essay proposes a mechanism for expanding competition in state property law, while sketching out the limitations necessary to protect third parties. The fact that property law is produced by the states creates a unique opportunity for experimentation with such property and…

Democratic Disobedience

114 Yale L.J. 1897 (2005) Traditional justifications for civil disobedience emphasize the limits of legitimate political authority and defend civil disobedience as a just response when governments overstep these limits. Such liberal justifications are well suited to certain classes of civil disobedie…

To Insure Prejudice: Racial Disparities in Taxicab Tipping

114 Yale L.J. 1613 (2005) Many studies have documented seller discrimination against consumers, but this Essay tests and finds that consumers discriminate based on the seller's race. The authors collected data on more than 1000 taxicab rides in New Haven, Connecticut in 2001. After controlling for a …

Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It

114 Yale L.J. 535 (2004) Recent cases and scholarship have debated whether copyright law is consistent with the First Amendment. Much of the discussion has centered on copyright law's ability to suppress transformative, creative reuses of copyrighted works and on copyright's fair use doctrine as a m…

Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production

114 Yale L.J. 273 (2004) This Essay offers a framework to explain large-scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of carpooling and distributed computing as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for shareable goods as goods that are "lump…

Integrating Remorse and Apology into Criminal Procedure

114 Yale L.J. 85 (2004) Criminal procedure largely ignores remorse and apology or, at most, uses them as proxies for an individual defendant's badness. The field is preoccupied with procedural values such as efficiency, accuracy, and procedural fairness, to the exclusion of the criminal law's substan…

The Priority of Morality: The Emergency Constitution's Blind Spot

113 Yale L.J. 1753 (2004) INTRODUCTION In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a campaign of aggressive preventive detention. Invoking Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General announced that just as Kennedy would arrest a mobster for "spitting on the…

Editor's Note: The Constitution in Times of Emergency

113 Yale L.J. 1751 (2004) Earlier in this Volume of The Yale Law Journal, Professor Bruce Ackerman published his essay The Emergency Constitution, in which he advocated a new constitutional regime to confront the potential for recurring terrorist attacks among modern nations--and the United States in…

The Anti-Emergency Constitution

113 Yale L.J. 1801 (2004) INTRODUCTION The season for talk of leaving the Constitution behind, while we grit our teeth and do what must be done in times of grave peril--the season for talk of saving the Constitution from the distortions wrought by sheer necessity, while we save ourselves from the d…

Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets: An Exaggerated Threat

113 Yale L.J. 1223 (2004) The phrase "adverse selection" was originally coined by insurers to describe the process by which insureds utilize private knowledge of their own riskiness when deciding to buy or forgo insurance. If A knows he will die tomorrow (but his insurer does not), life insurance th…

The Emergency Constitution

113 Yale L.J. 1029 (2004) Terrorist attacks will be a recurring part of our future. The balance of technology has shifted, making it possible for a small band of zealots to wreak devastation where we least expect it--not on a plane next time, but with poison gas in the subway or a biotoxin in the wat…

Juries and Race in the Nineteenth Century

113 Yale L.J. 895 (2004) The Supreme Court's jurisprudence on criminal juries has overlooked an important piece of history. This is most notable in the context of its jury discrimination jurisprudence over the past twenty years. In Batson v. Kentucky, the Court held that the Equal Protection Clause p…

Bargaining in the Shadow of Takeover Defenses

113 Yale L.J. 621 (2003) For decades, practitioners and academic commentators who believe that target boards should have broad discretion to resist hostile takeover attempts have put forward the "bargaining power hypothesis" to support their view. This hypothesis states that a target with strong tak…

Insider Abstention

113 Yale L.J. 455 (2003) Scholars writing on insider trading have long believed that insiders can beat the market simply by using nonpublic information to decide when not to trade. Using a simple model, this Essay has shown that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Insiders prevented from trading while …

Minorities, Shareholder and Otherwise

113 Yale L.J. 119 (2003) "[M]en are described as I think they are," Adolf Berle writes of his work, "rather than as they think they are." He continues: "Some will be shocked. The businessman will find that he is a politician and a commissar--perhaps even a revolutionary one. The liberal finds himsel…

Digital Architecture as Crime Control

112 Yale L.J. 2261 (2003) The first generation of cyberlaw was about what regulates cyberspace. Led by Larry Lessig's path-breaking scholarship isolating architecture as a constraint on behavior online, a wide body of work has flourished. In a recent article, I took those insights and reverse-engine…

How Much Redistribution Should There Be?

112 Yale L.J. 2291 (2003) Egalitarianism ties people's fortunes together. It takes the good and bad things in people's lives--their blessings and their afflictions--and shares them out, or redistributes them, among their fellows. Where egalitarianism operates, each person's fortunes and misfortunes c…

Eldred and Lochner: Copyright Term Extensionand Intellectual Property as Constitutional Property

112 Yale L.J. 2331 (2003) As intellectual property has become increasingly important to the national economy, a consensus has emerged among academics that courts should scrutinize congressional legislation closely under the Constitution's Copyright Clause. This Essay has challenged the academic conse…

Common Law, Common Ground, and Jefferson's Principle

112 Yale L.J. 1717 (2003) Why do we care about the Framers of the Constitution? After all, they lived long ago, in a world that was different in countless ways from ours. Why does it matter what their views were, for any reasons other than purely historical ones? And if we don't care about the Framer…

The Secret History of Race in the United States

112 Yale L.J. 1473 (2003) In the beginning, there was a man named Looney. George Looney's world was Buchanan County, Virginia, a pocket of Appalachian hills and hollows that juts into Kentucky and West Virginia. In 1911, his place in this world was secure. Where lumber was the only industry in town, …

Economic Analysis of Contract Law After Three Decades: Success or Failure?

112 Yale L.J. 829 (2003) Modern economic analysis of contract law began about thirty years ago and, many scholars would agree, has become the dominant academic style of contract theory. Traditional doctrinal analysis exerts less influence than it did prior to 1970 and enjoys little prestige. Philosop…

Vigorous Race or Leisurely Walk: Reconsidering the Competition over Corporate Charters

112 Yale L.J. 553 (2002) Does American corporate law work effectively to enhance shareholder value? The recent corporate governance crisis makes this time as good as any for reexamining the basic structure of this body of law. This Essay provides such a reconsideration of a defining feature of U.S. c…

100 Million Unnecessary Returns: A Fresh Start for the U.S. Tax System

112 Yale L.J. 261 (2002) We are now in a quiet interlude awaiting the next serious political debate over the nation's tax system. No fundamental tax policy concerns were at stake in the 2002 disputes over economic stimulus or the political huffing and puffing about postponing or accelerating the inco…

Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law

112 Yale L.J. 61 (2002) In this Essay, my central claim has been that the probability of harm is often neglected when people's emotions are activated, especially if people are thinking about the worst-case scenario. If that scenario is vivid and easy to visualize, large-scale changes in thought and b…

Local Policing After the Terror

111 Yale L.J. 2137 (2002) Crime waves always carry with them calls for more law enforcement authority. What happened on September 11, 2001 was, among other things, a crime wave--because of that one day, the number of homicides in America in 2001 will be twenty percent higher than the year before. It…

Legislative Entrenchment: A Reappraisal

111 Yale L.J. 1665 (2002) There is a principle of constitutional law holding that "one legislature may not bind the legislative authority of its successors." The Supreme Court recently discussed that principle at length in United States v. Winstar, and although the case was decided on other grounds,…

Judicial Review, the Congressional Process, and the Federalism Cases: An Interdisciplinary Critique

111 Yale L.J. 1707 (2002) Following the lead of Alexander Bickel's The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics, legal scholars have been obsessed with the countermajoritarian aspects of judicial review. Much of the literature is normative--how can the dilemma of judicial re…

Stopping Above-Cost Predatory Pricing

111 Yale L.J. 941 (2002) This Essay has refocused the predatory pricing debate on ex ante incentives--i.e., the incentives for entry and limit pricing before the predatory period--instead of the traditional focus of high prices after the predatory period. Ideally, a monopoly incumbent should price re…

Categorical Federalism: Jurisdiction, Gender, and the Globe

111 Yale L.J. 619 (2001) An absence of bounded categories may be unsettling but, in lieu of (false) comfort, multi-faceted federalism offers something else, hopefully more useful if less supportive. Under the rubric of multi-faceted federalism, the deployment of categories is accompanied by a sense t…

Veil of Ignorance Rules in Constitutional Law

111 Yale L.J. 399 (2001) A veil of ignorance rule (more briefly a "veil rule") is a rule that suppresses self-interested behavior on the part of decisionmakers; it does so by subjecting the decisionmakers to uncertainty about the distribution of benefits and burdens that will result from a decision. …

What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?

111 Yale L.J. 357 (2001) Property has fallen out of fashion. Although people are as concerned as ever with acquiring and defending their material possessions, in the academic world there is little interest in understanding property. To some extent, this indifference reflects a more general skepticism…

Drug Designs are Different

111 Yale L.J. 151 (2001) In an essay published in this Journal entitled Is There a Design Defect in the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability?, George Conk criticizes the American Law Institute and the Reporters of the new Restatement for immunizing prescription drug manufacturers from lia…

Bush v. Gore and the Boundary Between Law and Politics

110 Yale L.J. 1407 (2001) Shortly after the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, one member of the majority, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, addressed a group of students in the Washington, D.C., area. He told them that he believed that the work of the Court was not in any way influenced…

Pennhurst, Chevron, and the Spending Power

110 Yale L.J. 1187 (2001) Narrowly construed, Pennhurst is a sensible (even if not necessary) process-based limitation on Congress's power to bind states to costly burdens. If read to mean that a state can never be bound by a grant condition when the statute itself does not unmistakably speak to a pa…

The Internet and the Dormant Commerce Clause

110 Yale L.J. 785 (2001)

Equal Protection by Law: Federal Antidiscrimination Legislation After Morrison and Kimel

110 Yale L.J. 441 (2000) Last Term, the Supreme Court sent ominous signals about the future of federal antidiscrimination law. The Court twice ruled that Congress lacked power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to enact laws prohibiting discrimination. In Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, …

Disaggregating Constitutional Torts

110 Yale L.J. 259 (2000) This Essay has attempted to clarify and reconceptualize constitutional tort law. Current doctrine severs remedies from rights and authorizes money damages on terms that apply indifferently to all constitutional violations. This remedial uniformity is faithful to the Monroe mo…

Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes

110 Yale L.J. 71 (2000) In this Essay, I have discussed the phenomenon of group polarization and explored some of its implications for deliberation generally and deliberative democracy in particular. The central empirical finding is that group discussion is likely to shift judgments toward a more ext…

Volume 133’s Emerging Scholar of the Year: Robyn Powell

Announcing the eighth annual student essay competition, announcing the ylj academic summer grants program, featured content, lock them™ up: holding transnational corporate human-rights abusers accountable, administrative law at a turning point, law and movements: clinical perspectives.

• (888) 777-9102
• Learning Center

• How It Works
• All Packages & Pricing
• I-90 Application to Replace Permanent Resident Card
• I-129F Petition for Alien Fiancé
• I-130 Petition for Alien Relative
• I-131 Application for Travel Document
• I-485 Adjustment of Status Application
• I-751 Remove Conditions on Residence
• I-765 Application for Employment Authorization
• I-821D DACA Application Package
• I-864 Affidavit of Support
• N-400 Application for Naturalization
• N-565 Application to Replace Citizenship Document
• Citizenship Through Naturalization
• Citizenship Through Parents
• Apply For Citizenship (N-400)
• Apply for Certificate of Citizenship (N-600)
• Replace Citizenship Document (N-565)
• Apply for a Green Card
• Green Card Renewal
• Green Card Replacement
• Renew or Replace Green Card (I-90)
• Remove Conditions on Green Card (I-751)
• Green Card through Adjustment of Status
• Adjustment of Status Application (I-485)
• Affidavit of Support (I-864)
• Employment Authorization (I-765)
• Advance Parole Application (I-131)
• Adjustment of Status Fee
• Family-Based Immigration Explained
• Search the Learning Center
• Request Support
• Find an Immigration Attorney

Home » Blog » Immigration Papers: Your Proof of Immigration Status

Immigration Papers: Your Proof of Immigration Status

April 9, 2024 Citizenship Humanitarian Immigration News Replace/Renew Green Card Working in the U.S.

It is becoming increasingly important to have proof of your immigration status in the United States. Maintaining immigration papers, documentation, or proof of your legal status is essential if you have contact with law enforcement or immigration officials. In the current environment, even natural-born U.S. citizens can run into problems with identification. What’s more, immigration paperwork is generally necessary to obtain employment, gain access to many government benefits, secure housing, request driving privileges, just to name a few.

Immigration Documents for Employment in the U.S. Immigration Documents for Driving Immigration Documents for Health Insurance Replacing Immigration Papers:

• Citizenship Document

Permanent Resident Card

Employment authorization card.

• I-94 Arrival/Departure Record

How CitizenPath Can Help

Foreign nationals who wish to work, get a driver’s license, or obtain other benefits must have the appropriate immigration papers to prove a lawful status. These papers come in a variety of types and can be confusing. Additionally, immigration documents must be valid and unexpired in most situations. If you have an expired or missing document, you’ll need to renew or replace it.

Documentation for U.S. Employment

In 1986, Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in an effort to address the problem of people unlawfully immigrating to the United States without immigration papers and becoming employed by U.S. employers. IRCA requires all employers, regardless of number of employees, to verify the identity of new employees and their eligibility for employment in the United States.

As a result, all employers, regardless of size, must complete a Form I-9 upon hiring a new employee to work in the United States. Re-verification of eligibility for employment in the United States may also be required under certain circumstances.

To verify identity and prove employment authorization, foreign nationals may use a variety of documents . Employees can show a List A Document that proves identity and employment authorization. Alternatively, employees can show a List B Document to prove identity and a List C Document to prove employment authorization.

Examples of List A Documents for Foreign Nationals

• Foreign passport with I-551 stamp
• Foreign passport with I-94 record and work endorsement

Examples of List B Documents for Foreign Nationals

• U.S. driver license
• State-issued ID card
• School ID with photograph
• U.S. military ID

Examples of List C Documents for Foreign Nationals

• Social Security Card (nonrestrictive)
• Form I-94 (if employment authorization is part of the class)

The lists of examples above are not inclusive of all possible immigration papers for use in employment. Additional documents and some restrictions may apply. Please refer to USCIS I-9 Central for details.

Proof of Status for Driving

In the United States, the federal government does not issue driver's licenses. Each state issues their own driver's license. Consequently, there may be slightly different requirements in each state that affect foreign nationals.

Resident non-citizens who wish to drive a vehicle must obtain a driver's license from the state where they live. Again, each state may have different requirements. Generally, the following immigration papers may be used to apply for a driver's license:

• Foreign passport with an approved I-94 Arrival/Departure Record
• Foreign passport with an I-551 stamp
• Re-entry Permit
• Refugee Travel Document
• Form I-94 stamped “REFUGEE,” “PAROLE”, or “PAROLEE,” “ASYLEE,” “HP,” “PIP,” Section(s) 207, 208, 209, or 212d(2).
• Form I-94 with attached photo stamped “Temporary evidence of lawful admission for permanent residence.”
• Immigration judge’s order granting asylum

For the specific driver's license requirements for your state, check your state's department of motor vehicles .

Immigration Papers for Health Insurance

Like natural-born U.S. citizens, foreign-born U.S. citizens are also generally eligible for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – also known as Obamacare. Additionally, permanent residents and many other lawfully present immigrants are eligible. To qualify, applicants will be required to submit immigration papers that prove their status such as:

For a complete list of acceptable immigration document types, please visit Healthcare.gov .

Replacing Immigration Documents

If your immigration papers are lost, stolen or damaged, you likely need to replace them. Depending on the type of immigration document, there is generally a way to replace it.

Citizenship Documents

Foreign-born persons who become U.S. citizens may prove their immigration status with a variety of documents including: Certificate of Citizenship, Certificate of Naturalization, or U.S. passport.

To replace a Certificate of Naturalization or Certificate of Citizenship, you may file Form N-565, Application for Replacement Naturalization/Citizenship Document .

To replace a U.S. passport, you can submit an application directly on the U.S. Department of State website.

Replacing Your Certificate of Naturalization is a Simple Process

Also known as a green card or resident alien card, the permanent resident card if proof of a foreign national's right to permanently live and work in the United States.

To replace or renew a 10-year permanent resident card, you may file Form I-90, Application to Replace Permanent Resident Card . Conditional residents with a 2-year green card may replace a lost/stolen green card with Form I-90 but should not a renew a card with Form I-90. Instead, conditional residents file Form I-751, Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence , in the 90-day period before the 2-year card expires.

It can take several months to obtain a new green card. There is a way to get a "temporary green card." The method varies depending on the purpose of your application. If applying to renew your green card, USCIS will automatically extend the validity of your green card . On the other hand, applicants replacing a green card will need to request an ADIT stamp as temporary proof of permanent resident status .

Green Card Replacement and Short-Term Temporary Proof

A variety of foreign nationals with a nonimmigrant status may be eligible for an employment authorization document. Also known as a work permit, the card is proof of employment authorization for several visa types and other status. Some common immigration statuses eligible for an EAD include: adjustment of status applicant, DACA, TPS, and asylum/refugee grantees.

To replace or renew an employment authorization card, you may file Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization . You must continue to qualify for employment authorization within the eligibility category for which you are applying. If your status has expired, you may also need to submit forms related to renewing your status.

Lost EAD Replacement

I-94 arrival departure record.

The I-94 Arrival/Departure Record, also known as Form I-94, confirms that a foreign visitor has been lawfully admitted (or paroled) into the United States. It also includes information about the visitor’s visa status and permitted duration of stay.

Most people are issued an electronic I-94 and can replace it by simply visiting the I-94 website . Enter your information to get an instant copy. Read more for information about how to find an electronic I-94 record .

If CBP issued you a paper I-94, you may file Form I-102, Application for Replacement/Initial Nonimmigrant Arrival/Departure Document .

Guide to Form I-94, Arrival/Departure Record

Foreign passport.

Foreign passports are not under the purview of the United States government. In other words, you will need to contact your country's embassy here in the United States. Each country has its own rules on replacing or renewing a passport.

About CitizenPath

CitizenPath provides simple, affordable, step-by-step guidance through USCIS immigration applications. Individuals, attorneys and non-profits use the service on desktop or mobile device to prepare immigration forms accurately, avoiding costly delays. CitizenPath allows users to try the service for free and provides a 100% money-back guarantee that USCIS will approve the application or petition. We provide support for the Citizenship Document Replacement Package (Form N-565) , Green Card Replacement Package (Form I-90) , Employment Authorization Package (Form I-765) ,and several other immigration services .

Want more immigration tips and how-to information for your family?

Sign up for CitizenPath’s FREE immigration newsletter and

on our immigration services

Related Posts

How to Expedite a USCIS Request for Immigration Benefits

If your application is taking an unreasonably long time or you cannot afford to wait for the normal processing time, you may be able to expedite your USCIS request. Do a USCIS expedite request or use alternative strategies to speed it up.… Continue Reading →

New USCIS Fee Increase Published by Biden Administration

The USCIS fee increase affects many family-based immigration applications. Find out which forms are affected and what you may be able to do to beat the fee hike.… Continue Reading →

U.S. Income Taxes and Immigration Consequences

As a general rule, U.S. tax law applies to you if you live in the United States or spend a significant amount of time here. And income taxes can affect immigration status.… Continue Reading →

Immigration Form Guides Form I-90       Form I-129F       Form I-130       Form I-131       Form I-131A       Form I-131F       Form I-134       Form I-485       Form I-751       Form I-765       Form I-821D       Form I-864       Form N-400       Form N-565       Form N-600

Sign Up to Receive Free Monthly Information for Your Immigration Journey

© Copyright 2013-2024, CitizenPath, LLC. All rights reserved. CitizenPath is a private company that provides self-directed immigration services at your direction. We are not affiliated with USCIS or any government agency. The information provided in this site is not legal advice, but general information on issues commonly encountered in immigration. CitizenPath is not a law firm and is not a substitute for an attorney or law firm. Your access to and use of this site is subject to additional Terms of Use .