Greg's Corner

Is legal immigration the real problem?

Ever since the 2016 Presidential Election campaign, immigration has been a hot button issue in our country. Even though many people and politicians want to close off our borders for no other reason than the people coming to the US are different from them, the majority of people just want immigrants to come here legally. To put it bluntly, most people just want immigrants to sign the register in the way in. However, that’s easy to say if you were born here. In reality, the path to citizenship in the United States is neither fast nor cheap.

According to the Dallas Morning News, most immigrants coming through our Southern Border who want to come here legally can have their process take anywhere from seven to 20 years and cost them thousands of dollars. Indian immigrants with advanced degrees could potentially have a wait as long as 150 years. That’s not a typo. Their wait could be longer than they’ll be alive. The immigration process in the US has not been updated in decades and there isn’t enough staff to process all the applicants in anything that remotely resembles a timely fashion. We tell the immigrants to get in line but there’s really no line to speak of.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8T9651KKag%5D

While there are some politicians who say they want to deport all illegal immigrants n our country, to do so would cause an economic backlash as there millions of tax-paying immigrants in our country. These immigrants are mostly doing the work that citizens who are born here might find beneath them. If the process to become a US citizen were more streamlined and less expensive we could see an unprecedented economic boom. Then again we should address the elephant in the room that there are too many people in positions of power who don’t want immigrants here only because the immigrants may speak a different language or adhere to a different religion than them. Until these types of politicians are removed from power, there will never be an easy path to citizenship.