Have you eaten a strawberry, peach or carrot today? Maybe you had a glass of milk for breakfast or a delicious omelete. Or maybe, for an afternoon snack, you had french fries drizzled with ketchup. Whatever the case is, the food you ate was most likely neatly packaged, clean, and pristine. Even though there is a worldwide pandemic, the food you craved was convenient and fresh. Nearly seventy-five percent of the produce and diary consumed by Americans was farmed by someone from South or Central America who is in the United States illegally. According to the United States Agricultural Department, about half of the crop hands in the U.S. (around one million people) are undocumented immigrants. The essential workers that some Americans are trying to keep out of the country are quite literally the ones keeping them alive. Don’t believe me? Without the help of unauthorized workers, the United States’ vegetable, fruit, meat, and dairy industries would be at major risk as production would decline and consumers would see an incline in prices. A study commissioned by the USDA found if federal immigration policies reduced the number of foreign-born workers by fifty percent, more than three thousand dairy farms would close within two weeks, leading to a massive drop in milk production and a spike in food prices by around thirty percent. According to my calculations, a total elimination of immigration labor would increase the price of milk by ninety percent. But these “people” we speak of aren’t just secret integral chess pieces of our economy, they are actual human beings with incredible identities, passions, and dreams.
My question is, how did in a country built on immigrants and a country who counts on the intensive labor of immigrants, the word “immigrant” become such a dirty word? Why is the American dream only limited to a selected few and not to others? I believe today’s root causes surrounding the issue of exclusive immigration reform strains from a single source; the growth in the backlog of immigration pending court cases. The increase in court backlog results in a decelerated process for those who need it most. Moreover, the demand for green cards has increased significantly in the past years and congress has not been able to keep up. Since 1998, the influx of immigrants has piled by the backlog so much that the vast majority of those over the age of sixty will die before they will receive their green card.
This trend of backlog can be attributed to a number of factors such as the increase in identificating the rising numbers of unauthorized immigrants within the interior of the U.S. and ramped-up immigration enforcement activities that were not matched with commensurate increases in court resources. So what exactly does that mean? Basically it means that there is not enough funding towards appropriate resources such as legal representation for immigrants. I do not want to throw my man Obama under the bus (because I admire him oh so greatly) but the decisions made under his administration did not help necessarily help our issue. For example; his Federal Government spent 18 Billion (YES, you read that right… 18 BILLION) towards border patrol, detention facilities, deportation, and identifying non citizens for arrest. Furthermore, the of cases undocumented immigrants seeking refuge have quadrupled in the past decade as the backlog exceeds one million cases. This semester, I hopefully will be able to understand, research, and write about how we as a nation can achieve comprehensive immigration reform that will help this country thrive.
Source: Department of Homeland Security. N.d. Budget-in-Brief. Budget data for FY 2003-18. Accessed September 29, 201
Adventures In The Life Of Mary M. 