Growing up in El Paso, Texas; a
city where the great majority of its population is Hispanic I never fully
understood how deep and real the racial profiling issue was in Texas. In El
Paso I never knew discrimination, I never experienced being singled out by
police or border patrol or any other law upholding institutions. Now that I
have grown older and seen more of the state I can clearly recognize that these
issues still plague the state. Just recently 27 Mexican immigrants, what I deem
a considerable amount of people, where arrested in Corsicana, Texas. This is a
prime example of the presence of these issues I speak of in the state of Texas.
Before I talk about deportation I want
to first talk about immigration. As citizens of a prosperous country it is
sometimes easy to forget that people in other places do not live with the commodities
that we do. Taking Mexico as our prime example, it is perhaps more correct to
say that many people in Mexico do not even satisfy what we consider essentials
to live. To give an idea of how abysmal the difference is between the standards
of living in the country of Mexico compared to here in the state of Texas, the
minimum salary of Mexico is of seventy pesos per day. That’s roughly five dollars
and fifty cents for an eight hour work day. In Texas minimum wage is of seven
dollars and twenty five cents per hour. What this means is that a person
working at minimum wage in Texas makes more in one hour than a person working
in Mexico makes in an entire day. Knowing this, can we really fault Mexican immigrants
for crossing illegally?
Deportation has historically been
the primary response to illegal immigration in the United States as a whole,
this has to stop. As reported by Mark Lopez, Ana Gonzales, and Seth Motel in
2011, deportations steadily rose during the last decade. Although some empirical
research would be required to confirm this theory, this could possibly mean
that illegal immigration has continued to increase and consequently
deportations has as well. In short, the solution is doing nothing to solve the
problem and therefore is a waste of resources. The only thing that comes from
deportation is the destruction of families which only leads young Hispanic kids
to grow up resenting figures of authority in the United States. Deportations
have to stop, instead of sending these people back to a country they escaped
from in search of a better life, lets help them and make them productive
citizens of American society.
