Immigration Policies in the United States of America

Running head: POLITICAL SCIENCE
Political Science
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1POLITICAL SCIENCE
Immigration has been an important topic in the political scenario of The United States of
America (USA) for years. The politicians and policymakers have debated over this topic for
decades. The Congress has not been able to reach a viable agreement about a comprehensive
immigration framework or policies, thus it has moved some of the major decisions related to
immigration to the executive and the judiciary branches of the government. The subject of
immigration has been a popular topic of debate in the halls of state and in other government
bodies such as the municipalities. Right after taking the office the president of TheUnited States
of America Donald Trump has taken certain measures to secure the borders, enforced policies
regarding the refugees and has launched various interior enforcement. He has also revoked two
of the programmes sanctioned by the ex-president Obama, which protected the undocumented
families from deportation.
Among the total population of The USA, the population of the immigrants is about 14 percent
according to the data presented by the Census Bureau (Bigo, 2016). The immigrants and their
children who were born in the U.S together form about 27 percent of the total inhabitants of U.S.
Since the year 1970 there has been a steady rise in the population of the immigrants in the
country, but in comparison with the year 1890, there are fewer immigrants living in the United
States today.
One of the major issues regarding immigration is the illegal immigration; there are about 11
million undocumented illegal immigrants present in the country and the number has reduced
since the economic crisis faced in 2008, the economic crisis led some of the immigrants to return
to their own country and others felt discouraged to come to the United States (Carmon, 2016) . In
the year 2017, the Customs and the Border Protection reported a 26 percent of the drop in the
number of immigrants they caught hold of while immigrating into the states, and similarly the

2POLITICAL SCIENCE
number of arrests of undocumented people increased a lot, most of the credit goes to the
administrative policies enforced by Trump.
According to the data of Pew Research Center among the undocumented immigrants living in
the United States one-third of them are the parents of the children who were born as US citizens.
Asylum seekers from the Central America mostly comprise of minors who have fled from their
countries in fear of the growing violence, and they contribute the maximum percentage to the
growing population of immigrants crossing over U.S and Mexico border (Balch, 2016). These
types of immigrants have a different type of legal rights under 2008 “anti-human trafficking
law”, the children below 18 years from non-contiguous countries are entitled to a hearing of
deportation before being sent to their respective home country (Bloemraad, Graauw & Hamlin,
2015). There are several laws, which aims to decrease the illegal immigration focuses on the
border security, but there are people who come to the United States in a legal way but overstay
their visa permit in the country and thus they also contribute to the percentage of undocumented
immigrants in the country (Hogan & Haltinner, 2015). According to the data presented by the
Center for Migration Studies, the number people who have stayed back after the expiry of their
visas are more than those who come illegally into the United States.
Coming to the topic of legal immigration, in the year 2016 permanent citizenship was granted
to almost 1.2 million people by the USA, among them two-thirds were allowed on the basis of
the reunification of the family members. Other categories are employment-based, refugees,
asylees, and diversity related. In late 2017, more than four million individuals were waiting for
their visas from the State Department. Several of individuals come to the United States under
non-immigrant visas to work legally in the country (Schuck, 2018). In 2017, the United States
permitted almost about 180,000 visas to the highly skilled workers, called the H1B visas, and