No doubt that America is built on immigrants from everywhere around the world, as a matter of fact, we are known as “the great melting pot”. Many come here seeking better job opportunities and education, freedom, and to escape violence and poverty, and although we are a free country, should there be a limit to how many asylum seekers we allow into the United States? There have been many issues in the United States recently, but one of the biggest for voters in the upcoming election is the sudden surge of migrants from all over the world crossing the Mexican border into America. For example, the Biden administration’s immigration policies resulted in about 300,000 migrants, nearly 10,000 per day, coming into the United States through Mexico in December alone.
This amount is untraceable and scary because we never know who exactly we are letting in. Though President Biden proposed a $106 billion package that included aid to states and localities, as well as more funding for border security, money won’t fix all the problems with this crisis.
Since last spring, 170,000 migrants have arrived in New York City alone, and the city is still housing about 70,000 of them. The main problem is that we aren’t vetting every single migrant and we don’t know their intentions for coming here. With severe winter weather hitting the region, New York administration policies delayed a plan to force migrants to leave city shelters after they had stayed for more than 60 days. But now more than 100 migrants are expected to continue sleeping on CTA warming buses while they wait for a spot in 28 maxed-out city shelters where 14,574 people are already staying.
The backlog of cases pending in U.S. immigration courts currently sits at almost two million—the most in history. With no solution in sight, the November election will surely address and debate the dilemma.
