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Amnesty To Illegal Immigrants Essay

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Ronald Reagan once said, "A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation." I agree. The topic of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants who have committed no crime except for being in the U.S. illegally continues to be debated by Americans from dinner around dining tables to the White House. Illegal immigration has been permitted in the U.S. for way too long. Whether the illegal immigrant illegally crossed the border to get here or overstayed their visa expire without renewing, illegal immigration is wrong. Many U.S. citizens believe all immigrants including those here illegally are hard working, moral people who should not have to get deported, requiring separation from their families, to find a legal path to U.S. citizenship. Others believe that deporting all illegal immigrants would hurt the U.S. economy. Regardless of these sympathetic arguments, …show more content…

Claude Arnold, a retired U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, points out, "Title 8 of the U.S. Code, Section 1324(a), plainly states that it is a felony to encourage or induce an alien to come to or reside in the U.S. knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the alien's entry or residence is or will be in violation of the law"[Arnold]. This specific section of the code means that it is against the law to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants. It is illegal because the immigrant broke the law. Moreover, writers Drew Ryun and Daniel Horowitz explain that in 1986, the Federal government supported policies that insisted illegal immigrants be granted amnesty before getting deported, and these policies failed. To grant illegal immigrants amnesty now would be "yet another recipe for disaster and will repeat the perennial cycle of open borders and amnesty engendered by the 1986 bill" [Ryun and Horowitz]. History would appear to support the premise that we should not grant amnesty to illegal

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