Immigrants to U.S. Are Facing a Tough New Reality This Independence Day Alan Gomez - USA Today
go to original July 3, 2017

The Trump administration said Friday it will begin arresting parents and other relatives who hire smugglers to bring their children into the U.S., a move that sent a shudder through immigrant communities nationwide. (ICE)

The Fourth of July has long been a day when foreigners swear their oath of allegiance to the United States to become citizens. It is an annual reminder that the U.S. has been a nation of immigrants since its founding 241 years ago.

That tradition will continue this holiday period, when nearly 15,000 people will be sworn in as U.S. citizens at dozens of naturalization ceremonies, from George Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Virginia to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans to the ship deck of the USS Hornet off the coast of California.

What's changed dramatically over the decades is where those immigrants come from, what roles they play in the U.S., how they're treated by native citizens and the debate over the millions who have entered the United States illegally over past decades.

Today, immigrants make up 13.5% of the U.S. population — 32 million here legally and an estimated 11 million illegally. The percentage is lower than the massive influx during the late 1800s but far more than the immigration slowdown that followed World War II.

While Mexico has provided the largest flow of immigrants during the past generation, an increasing number of people are now arriving from Asia, Africa and other Latin American countries. They are changing the makeup of U.S. cities and stretching into small towns unaccustomed to all the new faces.

The flow of foreign-born people into the U.S. — as legal visitors and undocumented immigrants — continues to shape the nation's economy in profound, and highly contested, ways. A landmark study from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine last year found that first-generation immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers $57.4 billion a year.

President Trump cited that figure during his first address to a joint session of Congress in February as a reason to restrict immigration — a key theme of his 2016 campaign. But he omitted the second half of the report's sentence: that second- and third-generation immigrants create a net benefit of $30.5 billion and $223.8 billion respectively.

The report's bottom line is that immigrants are a big plus for the U.S. over time. Yet Trump continues to focus on the negative aspects of immigration. His administration has increased arrests of undocumented immigrants, implemented a temporary travel ban on people from majority-Muslim countries and all refugees as an anti-terrorism move and pushes for a border wall with Mexico.

Read the rest at USA Today

Related: Remarks By U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson at the 241st Anniversary of the Independence of the United States of America (The Yucatan Times)

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