The Surprising Realities of Immigration in the United States and Europe
I wanted to share a speech that one of my students gave regarding his experience as an immigrate to the USA and the myths about immigrants that we tend to believe. He gives powerful evidence against those myths. - Jennifer
June 5th, 2022
Leonardo Contreras
Good morning, everyone. My name is Leonardo Contreras, and I am going to be speaking to you today about immigration in the United States and Europe. Before we start, I would like to put you in perspective. I am going to ask you to close your eyes for a minute. Imagine that one morning you wake up, your mother is screaming and telling you to pack your essentials. In the background, between your mother's desperate screams, you can hear the bombs destroying everything in your hometown. Let’s assume that in the best of cases scenarios you are not in a war, but one night you come home, and your mother terrified tells you that you must cross the desert because a criminal group has threatened you with death. You are in a situation where you must emigrate to survive. Now you can open your eyes. This is probably not your case, but it is the case for seventy-one million people who according with the United Nations refugee agency have had to flee because wars in Syria, famines in Uganda or South Sudan, economic collapse in Venezuela, or violence by criminal groups in El Salvador and Honduras. Thirty-seven thousand people are displaced every day. More than thirty million children have had to flee their homes due to wars, where there are right now five million more children at risk due to the war in Ukraine according with the data shown by the United Nations refugee agency.
It is a reality that more than seventy million people have been forcibly displaced from their country of origin, but it is not the reality of all immigrants. There are currently about two hundred and seventy million immigrants according to the United Nations, who are defined as people who do not live in the country where they were originally born. There are people who flee violence and people who emigrate for work, studies, sports, among other factors. As an immigrant, son of immigrants, grandson of an immigrant and descendant of immigrants. Immigration is a topic that is very interesting and which I will deepen for you throughout this speech.
Nowadays there is too much xenophobia “hate towards a person for being a foreigner”. Hate that it's irrational because we only must look in the mirror every day to see a person who has a descendant who is an immigrant. So that's when I wonder, if these people who hate immigrants just because of their foreign status, do they also hate their descendants? It is very easy to speak out of ignorance, to label immigrants as criminals, even to generalize them. It is very easy to fanatically emulate what politicians say, when these politicians also speak from ignorance on many occasions. If I were paid for all the times that people have treated me badly, insulted me or looked at me badly just because they heard me speaking Spanish, I would accumulate a great fortune. I have dual nationality, I am Venezuelan by birth and Italian by blood affinity, my mother is Italian. I have lived in two different countries than my place of birth (Mexico and the United States). In Mexico I have never felt rejection because of my nationality or for being a foreigner, while in the United States I have felt rejection from coaches, teachers, and many people for being Latino and speaking Spanish. When the only mistake I have made is to pay more than one hundred thousand dollars to receive an education, to be treated badly for generating more than one hundred thousand dollars to the United States in the past 4 years, I would have preferred to study in Mexico for a quarter of the amount I spent here and studying in one of the best one hundred universities in the world, but that’s a topic that not everyone is ready for. The perception that many individuals who do not support immigration have been that immigrants only come to dispose of state money through government aid, we commit crimes, and we are a threat to society. However, it is quite the opposite, for this reason I decided to divide my arguments into the three fundamental issues that are always debated when we refer to immigration, such as the economy, greater insecurity, and terrorism.
Argument 1: “Economy”.
The stereotype of Latin-American immigrants here in the United States is that we are simple farm or construction workers, if not gang members or drug traffickers, while women are simple house cleaners. But according to studies by the Pew Research Center, most of the sixty million Latin American immigrants work in the education, health, and social services sectors. Latino immigrants in the United States generate 2.3 billion dollars annually of the United States gross domestic product. If we were a country, we would be among the eight best economies in the world. In another economic context of immigration. Approximately one million international students’ study in the United States according to data from the Dallas News. Another report published by the MIT emphasizes that the United States generated between 2016-2017 a total of thirty-six billion dollars, which represents a large income for the United States economy coming only from international students. These numbers are probably not so shocking, not so stunning in an economy as large as the United States, but to give you a better point of view of the quantity of money. To eradicate hunger from the world, the United Nations estimates that two hundred and sixty-seven billion dollars are needed by 2030. If the United States generates the same thirty-six billion dollars annually, in 8 years it would have more than what is necessary to end world hunger.
Argument 2: “Insecurity, Higher Criminal Rates”.
Insecurity and higher criminal rates have been always related to immigrants. However, a study conducted in Texas by students from the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a study published by the United States Department of Justice compares crime rates among documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and people born in the United States, the results were the following ones:
Undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.
□ Relative to undocumented immigrants:
® U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes.
® 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes.
® Over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.
Argument 3: “Border Crossing Immigrants and Terrorism”.
Terrorism is one of the most controversial issues when we refer to immigrants, and it is a reality that unfortunately terrorist attacks have been carried out by foreign individuals. However, illegal immigration along the southern US border is not a contributor to terrorism. This is a topic recently debate about the current border crisis on the southern border. Empirically, the case is simply false. Foreigners who have carried out terrorist attacks have entered the United States legally on immigrant, non-immigrant work and study, or tourist visas.
To conclude, I can understand that people may feel concerned about issues related to immigration, since we live in an era where misinformation is at the forefront of the day. Many times, we are victims of misinformation to the point where we judge other people by their place of origin, assuming false premises about their past, generalizing them to the point of turning them into criminals. But these acts of hatred for the foreign status of an individual were what forced Moses and the people of God to emigrate from Egypt, they were the same reasons why the Nazi Germans wanted to eradicate the Jews, that same racial hatred that I have biased many people throughout history, it is what is currently being experienced in the United States and many European nations. Where many innocent people have died trying to flee wars, but due to the misgivings and bad prejudices of many individuals today, they are not allowed to live in these countries, since they are assumed to be criminals. Until we put an end to misinformation, prejudice, and political fanaticism, we will not stop seeing how children continue to die in wars and drown on European shores, how bright young immigrants continue to join gangs in their countries, since they are allowed to enter a country in search of better opportunities, such as education. Immigration is the best thing that can happen to a country.
References:
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