Matthew Bontempi
Instructor asdfas
ENGL 1301
15 June 2013

Strengthening America’s Work Force and Culture

Immigration is a big topic in America today. Many people believe that our current process for immigration is too lenient. Others however disagree; this process needs to be less strict, because immigration has so many benefits for our country. Immigration laws should be more lenient, because immigrants benefit our economy as well as our culture. However there are benefits and set backs to every side, but if you weigh out the pro’s and con’s you will see that the only answer to this problem at hand is to give immigrants a better chance to enter our country. The first and possibly the most important reason for this is how much more people could do for our economy. The American economy needs two key components to strive, highly skilled workers and low skilled workers. Immigration provides us with both. What all these various skilled workers would do is enable division of labor. Division of labor is the idea of work being split up amongst workers in the most efficient way possible. Dr. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda helps explain why economics is a huge part of why immigration is key in the United States. Dr. Hinojosa-Ojeda writes in his report, “Raising the Floor for American Workers: The Economic Benefits of Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” that if we were to agree on a plan for Immigration Reform, for illegal residents to obtain a way of legally working here, that it could make our economy boom. Dr. Hinojosa-Ojeda also wrote that a higher personal income would increase consumer spending and would actually support 750,000-900,000 jobs in the US. Lowly skilled workers would see an increase of around $4,405 per year, while America’s higher paid workers would see an increase in yearly wages around $6,185. This is proof of enabled Division of Labor. Immigrants fill the jobs that our current citizens either do not want to or cannot do. Secondly, immigration is a gift to our culture. New people from foreign places would provide our society with a sense of tolerance and diversity. They show us new and interesting things that we have not seen before. They share their cuisine, their religion, and new languages. This humbles our society; it shows us that there is so much more to the world than where we are. It helps reduce the ideas of racism and overall ethnic conflict. These things also contribute back to the first idea of benefiting our economy. Americans now find themselves wanting more of this foreign culture; they want to spend their money at restaurants offering a different style of food. They find themselves taking classes on how to speak their language, and lastly find themselves finding faith in new places of worship. When looking deeper into this topic there is also another