Illegal immigration - Essay Example

However, such immigrations adversely affect the economy and society of the United States. The thesis statement for this paper is, ‘economics and social costs of illegal immigration outweigh the number of associated benefits’. Social and Economic Cost of Illegal Immigration Illegal immigrations put a damaging impact on the economy of a country. Some of the main effects on the economy of a country due to large-scale illegal immigrations include increased poverty, less job opportunities for local people, and decreased foreign investment because of increased fear of crimes in immigrant-populated areas.

Immigrants are cutting down the wage levels for local Americans (Porter, n. p.). Reports show that many companies in the United States prefer to hire illegal immigrants because they are willing to work for low salaries as compared to the salaries that local people demand. Such situations result in decreasing the number of job opportunities for local people because companies fill many job positions with people who demand less money in exchange for job and confidentiality about their legal status in the country.

Such situations also cause an increase in the graph of poverty in a country because when local people will not have jobs, they will face shortage of money, and their spending power will decrease as well. Overpopulation in the host country is also an effect of illegal immigrations. The demand and supply system also gets affected due to illegal immigrations because economic analysts cannot count the presence of illegal people accurately. In the United States, increase in the number of crimes is also associated with large-scale illegal immigrations.

Some percentage of illegal immigrants start engaging in criminal activities when they do not get proper job opportunities even in the developed countries. Increased drug trafficking in the United States is also associated with large-scale illegal immigrations. As Go states, “the US suffers an annual loss of about 70 billion dollars due to drug-related illnesses, death, and drug related crimes.” Along with high economic impact, crimes and violence also affect the society. Crimes cause threat and terror in the minds of local people because of which they start thinking negatively about all immigrants.

Benefits of Illegal Immigration Although there are no apparent benefits of illegal immigrations, if we analyze the positive effects of presence of illegal immigrants deeply, we come to know that they do play a little part in keeping the system running. For example, they do low profile jobs from which legal citizens usually keep themselves away, such as, sanitary jobs, waiter jobs, and petrol filling worker jobs. Illegal immigrants do such jobs to earn their livings by hiding themselves from the law enforcement agencies.

As Mauriello states, “one of the perceived benefits of illegal immigration is that of filling in of low wage jobs that a regular American would not be willing to accept.” Rights of Illegal Immigrants Basic rights of a person remain the same wherever a person lives and in whatever way a person arrives to the other country. In the U.S. constitution, the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments protect the basic rights of all individuals living in the United States. The law grants protection to every individual and applies law for illegal immigrants.

Although illegal immigrants