Obama's Immigration Policy

This past June, Obama signed an executive order which halts the deportation of young illegal immigrants who fulfill the requirements laid out in the DREAM act, and allows them to receive work permits. This will help over 800,000 innocent people living in fear of deportation. Jose Aliseda, with Texas Weekly, believes Obama's immigration policy is wrong. In his article, Aliseda uses an extended metaphor likening immigration to thievery. He asserts that if a family stole a substantial amount of money from you, and used it to help raise their children, it would be wrong for law enforcement to not have your money returned to you because it may harm the children benefitting from their parents’ theft. This statement is true, as in this crime, you have been wronged. However, it is distinctly different from immigration, and the same logic cannot follow.

Illegal immigration is a victimless crime; nobody is wronged in when someone crosses the border. It is therefore a completely different scenario than the thieving family metaphor. If a family brings their child to America illegally, the child is not just benefiting from a crime as with the hypothetical thief family. They are being raised in America, to the point where their "homeland" is just as foreign to them as it is to us. Deporting them to an unfamiliar place because their parents brought them here seems rather cruel, and certainly unjust. Aliseda goes on to list more crimes that the parents of immigrants protected under this policy may have committed, including driving without a license or insurance, working without a social security card/number, unlawfully accessing public services, or taking jobs from legal residents. This is all nonsense, of course, as many of these “crimes” aren’t committed out of malice, but because it is impossible to obtain a valid license, insurance, or social security card as a consequence of their mode of immigration. What’s more, undocumented immigrants, comprising an estimated 8% of Texas’ workforce, actually contribute more to the economy than they receive in state services, and in the long run, immigration has been shown to have positive effects on unemployment for both immigrant and native born workers.