The Rights of Immigrants
Immigrants play an important role in building our nation. The United Sates is known as the land of immigrants, because every year millions of immigrants from all over the world come here in hopes of living a better life, some for protection and some to pursue their dreams. However, most of them are deprived of basic civil rights such as citizenship. If they were offered civil rights such as citizenship it will encourage them to excel and strive to do even more for their country. In addition to immigrants not being offered equal rights, they are denied basic labor protection, education and public services. They cannot freely travel from one place to another due to their immigration status. By proposing citizenship, labor rights and civil rights for immigrants, the United States will advocate acceptance of different races, cultures and traditions and that will affect the economy positively. Moreover, the United States will move forward towards becoming one of the best nations in the world.
One of the major problems that the immigrants living and working in the United States face is unequal labor rights. A total of 154 million workers make up the working force of our nation and of that 154 million, eight million make up the foreign born labor force also known as unauthorized immigrant workers (Milkman). Most of these immigrants are from the third world countries and come here to seek better work opportunities. However, they are offered low paying jobs without any sort of labor protection or security. For example, a U.S citizen is offered health insurance and social security whereas, an immigrant is granted nothing but a low paying wage. Moreover, there is a bias when it comes to immigrants seeking work in the United States. They are offered low position jobs in hotels, restaurants and janitorial services which shows significant discrimination in the work field.
People from all over the word come to the United States for many reasons, however, majority of the immigrants that migrate to the United States are labor migrants, focused in manual, low-paying jobs and looking to escape poverty. (Ports & Rumbaed 2). Instead of providing our immigrant community with equal labor rights, offering them low income jobs forces them into poor living conditions. Moreover, due to not having enough resources about ten percent of immigrants over the course of 1980 and 1990 lived in areas of high poverty and this percentage is increasing tremendously by the day when compared to that of the U.S born citizen (Fix & Passel, 1994). It is of utmost importance that social groups and social organizations come forward with developing a program that will help these immigrants meet the basic needs of life, such as adequate housing, food and clothing.
American Civil Liberties Union has push forward a very important aspect that “the fundamental constitution protections of due process and equal protection embodied in our constitution and bill of rights apply to every “person” and not limited to citizens”. If this is applied and practiced it will give the immigrant population the same rights as a U.S citizen to live freely and practice what they believe. It will also advocate that immigrants’ rights are civil rights. These hard working immigrants play an important role in building our nation for example, the immigrant workers in the construction labor force help build the luxurious buildings our higher class citizens enjoy and live in. In addition these immigrants are responsible for keeping our parks, public places and schools clean. However our authorities fail to provide them with proper equal rights that will help them grow and prosper. They are not provided any assurance of moving up in their working class and instead work all their lives in the same position because they are not educated and eligible to compete for a higher-ranking job position.
Social workers and social organizations need to come up with plans that ensure