Engraved At The Base Of The Statue Of Liberty Analysis

Engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty is a poem by Emma Lazarus that expresses America’s commitment to being a haven for the persecuted: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazarus was neither the first nor the last American to welcome the victims of oppression and suffering to America. America is and has been a country of immigrants, from the Puritans escaping religious oppression to the Italians escaping the poverty of Italy. Despite this fact, immigration is still a highly controversial political topic that continues to be debated by our lawmakers. Although
Some anti-immigration sources, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, estimate that illegal immigration costs the federal government at much as $113 billion, but these estimates wildly overinflate the real cost of immigration and most estimates place the cost of illegal immigration somewhere from $10-20 billion(Valverde). Costs associated with illegal immigration often include emergency medical care and governmental benefits such as Social Security, but the former is not a cost that can be avoided or restricted, while the latter is actually a net positive for the government. Immigrants receive about one billion dollars in Social Security but pay about thirteen billion dollars in Social Security taxes (Agresti). The Social Security excess is due to the fact that most illegal immigrants are young. Nearly every
The biggest effect of immigration is on the prices of consumer goods and services. The Academy found that “the willingness of less-skilled immigrants to work at low pay reduced consumption costs — the costs to consumers of goods and services….for millions of Americans” (Edsall). Lower prices are good for everyone as they increase the purchasing power of everyone and make important goods and services more accessible. But reduced costs aren’t the only economic benefit of immigration, as Vice President and Senior Economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Pia Orrenius, put it “immigrants grease the wheels of the labor market by flowing into industries and areas where there is a relative need for workers.” Immigrant labor has allowed the United States’ economy to continue to grow when labor shortages would have slowed or stopped growth. Immigrants fueled the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, war production during WWI and WWII, and the oil boom of the 1970s. Immigration also has a significant impact on production capacity and GDP. While most of the GDP boost goes to these new immigrants as much as seventy billion dollars accrues to native born Americans (Orrenius). One of the most substantial criticisms of immigration’s economic effect is its