Amnesty

Perhaps the strongest view of the liberal stance on immigration is amnesty. Amnesty is the
process by which illegal immigrants are pardoned of the crime of illegally crossing the border
and are granted social security numbers, essentially granting them permanent resident status.
Liberals, by and large, do not support deportation and see it as a system that breaks up families,
sends workers back to horrible conditions in their own country, and costs the United States
government millions of dollars each year. This view has been championed by both President
Obama and the Democratic hopefuls of 2016, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This view
received its greatest push when in mid-2015 President Obama signed an executive order that
sought to grant amnesty and relief to nearly 4 million illegal immigrants. This effort, however, is
now tied up in a nasty legal battle and has been largely halted by the court system. As for the
candidates, Hillary Clinton is most in favor of a clear path towards citizenship, while Sanders
favors continued executive action that extends social programs to illegal immigrants and amnesty
for the close to 11 million living within the United States.
Open Immigration
Liberals favor a more open immigration policy. This would involve easing the process by which
citizens of foreign countries permanently immigrate to the United States. Liberals believe that if
the immigration process was easier, more user friendly, than immigrants would not feel the need
to sneak into the country and, therefore, there would be no need for a militarized border or a
wall. This policy upholds the long-held tradition that American is the melting pot of the world, a
nation built by immigrants, the land of opportunity. An open immigration policy has also been
argued to have economic benefit. The Baby-Boomers, the largest generation of Americans in
recent history, are getting older, and, as a result, the American workforce is getting older. The

people that have carried the United States economy for nearly sixty years are beginning to retire.
To maintain current rates of production, the influx of new, younger workers into the workforce is
necessary, at rates that the rising generation cannot muster.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/sunsetstory/graying.html
The Regulation of Migrant Workers
Liberals favor the state and federal regulation of migrant workers. From a civil liberties point of
view, liberals want to ensure that migrant workers have and the same rights and protections as
their American counterparts, such as minimum wage, worker safety, and child labor laws. Bernie
Sanders has been a proponent of Whistleblower Visas. These reward immigrants who report
employers and corporation whose practices violate employment law and/or endanger workers.
From an economic stand point, regulation of migrant workers ensures accountability for all
parties. Employers must provide benefits for their migrant workers, but can also receive tax
breaks based on the number of people they employ. On the migrant side, being regulated ensures
that they pay income, property, and social security taxes, but at the same time they can receive
the benefits of social services such as welfare, Obamacare, and social security. Finally, from a
political view point, a long held American belief, and a standard of democracy in general, is that
the majority rules, while protecting the rights of the minority. When migrant workers operate
outside of the view of government, they run the risk of being taken advantage of. They live and
work in this country, contributing greatly to its advancement and progress, but have almost no
say in how it operates or treats them. Deportation without representation.
The Fourteenth Amendment

Some conservatives have expressed either tampering with the natural born citizen clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment or passing a law that would create a special exception for Mexican
immigrants. Removing this clause from the Fourteenth Amendment outright would be extremely
difficult, as it would require another constitutional amendment itself, which are extraordinarily
difficult to pass by design. Passing a law that creates exception for Mexican expatriates sets
down a dangerous precedent. First of all, it would give government, most likely Congress in
particular, the power to basically decide which groups of people can be citizens and which
cannot. The same section in which birth rite citizenship is laid down contains the due process
clause. For those who do not know, the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment is
basically the arm of the Supreme Court. Using this clause, the Supreme Court has selectively
incorporated every protection contained within the Bill of Rights to be applicable to the states as
well as the federal government. In lay mans terms, before this the Bill of Rights only protected
you from the federal government, the states were only bound by their own constitutions, which
may or may not have offered rights as rigorous as the first ten Amendments. Tampering with this
section of the Fourteenth Amendment puts more than one hundred years worth of advances for
civil liberties into question. Altering the Fourteenth Amendment as a quick fix to immigration
instead of sitting down and discussing comprehensive immigration reform could, quite literally,
set United States social policy back one hundred years.