1. Sutphin 1
Stephen Sutphin
April 7, 2014
Prof. Harold Blanco
FYS 100
Immigration Paper
I believe that immigration is a non-solvable problem in the United States. We will
never be able to stop it, only regulate it. It is a very controversial subject, and my personal
belief is that we shouldn’t close the borders, but we should make them a bit harder to cross.
While at the same time we should be allowing people to get here legally who deserve to be
here. We are by no means a perfect country but we have something that most people in the
world long for, freedom. This freedom doesn’t come cheap and currently the United States
government is just giving it away. This is how we should begin to work on our immigration
laws in the United States.
We should allow people who are trying to come here legally and are already
successful in their countries. If you are a successful individual, I don’t mean successful as in
a millionaire, successful in this case is defined by somebody who has a job, x amount of
money, and a plan for when they get here. Then you should be able to come into America.
Also,we should look into your background not so much on the “non-crime side” but on the
crime side. Any drug violation that could lead to you having been associated with a cartel or
something along those lines is a no go. A person looking to come to the United States should
know exactly what they are going to do upon arrival, we as a country do not have the
resources to support more people who plan to live off the government. Next is the illegal
side of immigration.

2. Sutphin 2
As for illegal immigrants, we will never be able to stop them all from getting in. If we
put one man on every mile of the US-Mexican border (just used as an example) we would
need 1,954 men to work the border. That’s if nobody calls in sick and you would need a 24
hour watch so you’d really need roughly 4,000 individuals to have eyes everywhere. The
Canadian border with the United States spans roughly 5500 miles, that’s another 11,000
individuals when you add it up.We would need 15,000 border patrol agents and with all of
them making minimum wage, that would be a combined salary of $208,800,000 for one
years work, that doesn’t include any overtime that may have to be worked. Even with
border patrol at every mile you are still not 100% effective at keeping people out. We
would also need to search every shipping container, airplane, train, and any other form of
transportation into the US. Totally stopping immigration is impossible!