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Alexis Budihas
October 28th, 2014
ENC 1011
Professor McGriff
Illegal Immigration
Illegal immigration has been a very hot topic in recent years. People have been deciding
whether or not illegal immigration is a good thing for our country or a bad thing for our country.
I believe that illegal immigration is a bad thing for our country because it causes strain on the
economy, it also causes social unrest, and it puts stress on the jail system of the United States.
Not many people really think about the bad effects of illegal immigration, as people want
the under privilege to have a chance at the American dream. What those people do not
understand is the fact that when illegals come into the United States, they are not on the books.
What this means is that they can be paid under minimum wage, undercutting actual citizens
attempting to make a decent living with the jobs that no one really wants. This actually lowers
the salary of almost 11 million citizens! (Adam Davidson) Why would anyone want to lower the
salary of those citizens, as many of them are immigrants that went through the actual process to
become an American citizen? Illegal immigration does have some undeniably negative
economic effects. Similarly skilled native-born workers are faced with a choice of either
accepting lower pay or not working in the field at all. Labor economists have concluded that
undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S. adults without a high-school diploma
25 million of them by anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4 percent.(Adam Davidson) Meanwhile, if

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the illegal immigrants were actually granted amnesty, it would cause such a strain on welfare
programs that the government might not have enough money to pay for an influx of 10 million
illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigration can also become a major problem with crime, as illegals have no
records on police databases, which theoretically means that they could get away with murder.
Illegals actually do not have to worry about being put in jail for years on end for a law that they
break, as they get deported when they get caught. After they get back to the country that they are
from, they will come back, and repeat the same step over and over again, as they can never get in
actual trouble for committing a crime. This means that they have no reason to stop, which then
causes prejudices against Latinos, which will cause social unrest in areas that have a high Latino
population. This is why illegal immigration is a very bad thing for the United States.
Along with economic strain and social unrest, illegal immigration also puts strain on the
jail system. With 400,000 illegals being convicted a year (Timothy Dolan), the influx puts the
jails to their maximum capacity. In 1980, our Federal and state facilities held fewer than 9,000
criminal aliens but at the end of 2003, approximately 267,000 illegal aliens were incarcerated in
U.S. correctional facilities are 46,000 in Federal prisons, 74,000 in state prisons, and 147,000 in
local jails.(Edwin Rubenstein) There have been many of times when jails actually could not
detain enough people within the jail, and there were illegals just sitting in the hallway because it
was better than where they were living. Now, if those people were granted amnesty and they
could actually be detained for their crimes, which ever they committed, the jail system,
especially in the south west, would be put on the brink of anarchy. This also ties into the
economy, as the tax payers would have to pay for the new influx of LEGAL immigrants (if

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granted amnesty), causing less money to be put to good uses, such as the welfare system, which
will be put to the test if the illegal immigrants were granted amnesty.
Illegal immigration is clearly a very poor thing for the United States. The strains that it is
going to put on the economy is going to be so great, the government will have no idea how to
stop the rapid increase in expenditure, along with the increase of taxes to the ordinary citizen.
Meanwhile, the social unrest that illegal immigration causes can be very troubling to people.
With illegal immigrants knowing that no real consequences can happen to them, they can go
about their business and can actually do anything they want to, without fear of punishment. The
jail system is also being tested (and could be tested even harder if illegal immigrants are granted
amnesty) because of the influx of illegals being arrested and placed in holding cells, just so they
can be deported back to their own country.

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Work Cited
Davidson, Adam "Do Illegal Immigrants Actually Hurt the U.S. Economy?" New York Times,
February 12, 2013.

Dolan, Timothy. Just and Humane Immigration Reform Will Bring Immigrants Out of the
Shadows. Immigration, 2014.

Rubenstein, Edwin. National Data | Criminal Alien Nation. VDARE.com, June 30, 2005,

Seminara, Dave. Legalizing Illegal Immigrants A Bad Idea. February 08, 2013