Julia Geigenberger

The Lasting Value of Legal Immigration for the United States of America Julia Geigenberger

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, grade: A (85%), Bishop's University Lennoxville (Bishop's University Lennoxville, Canada), course: Topics in U. S. Public Policy, 19 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: Excellent term paper , abstract: The United States of America has always been a nation of immigrants. After the earlier settlement by Europeans, the next great wave of immigration started in 1840 and ended in 1924. Another wave of immigration can be dated from 1960 to the present. From the year 1970 to the year 2000, the U. S. has admitted more than 20 million people as legal permanent residents (LPRs). In the fiscal year of 2006, the U. S. admitted a total number of 1,266,264 LPRs. Immigration is controlled by a policy that aims at several purposes. Besides the economic goals of increasing U. S. productivity and the U. S. standard of living, it serves the important social goal of unifying families, the socio-cultural goal of promoting diversity in the U. S. population, the economic goal of increasing America's prosperity, and the political goal of maintaining stable demographics. In short, the main focuses of legal immigration are the socio-cultural, economic, and political goals. According to Linda Chavez, author and chairperson of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D. C., debates about immigration have become "one of the most controversial public-policy debates in recent memory" . To weigh the benefits of legal immigration, it is essential to know its difficulties. In fact, the advantages of legal immigration not only counterbalance its problems, but also illustrate the need of legal immigrants for the U. S. in terms of socio-cultural, economic, and political factors. Nonetheless, legal immigration is only beneficial with a proper immigration policy. For this reason the proposal of a point system by George J. Borjas, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government,