When I think of immigration, my mind drifts to the journey my parents took when traveling to America. They had to create a whole new life for themselves for success and opportunity. To travel all this way from another country, work hard for years to even stay in the country, and then have an officer show up at your door to tell you you are being deported is truly a tragedy.

Approximately eleven million people in America are undocumented immigrants. Even if there was a new serious law enforced to deport all immigrants, it will be unrealistic to work towards that goal. There would still be many immigrants that would put up a fight to to stay in a country they deserve to be in, a country that protects them from dictatorship and crime and poverty. They will fight to have their children get an education and to become an American citizen so they have a better life.

The only reasons people have for dehumanizing foreigners is because of the fear that they will impact American culture and society, but a main part of American culture is accepting and learning about new cultures. Ever since the United States started working to become a free nation, there was one necessary statement that the Founding Fathers had in mind: all men are equal. Everyone is a human being who deserves to be acknowledged, whether rich or poor, strong or weak, wise or illiterate. In modern day USA, we have to have that same statement in mind. Everyone is worth something whether male or female, rich or poor, foreign or American.

People that migrate from places like South Asia are commonly labeled as terrorists or criminals, but this is simply not true. According to federal immigration statistics, between 1990 and 2013, the foreign-born population of the United States grew from 7.9 percent to 13.1 percent and the number of undocumented immigrants more than tripled from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. During the same time period, The Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that the violent crime rate declined 48 percent, which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. The property crime rate also decreased by 41%. Connecting increased immigration with increased crime is simply faulty logic.

The stories of countless immigrants, from Albert Einstein to Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, tell that people from other countries can bring their own intelligence and experience to improve the economy of a new country. If immigrants were more welcome in the country, important science and math discoveries would be more abundant. Minds together work better than separate groups trying to do similar things. What if there is a scientist in another country right now who, when combined with our researchers here, could cure cancer or some other disease? We’ll never know unless we let him or her in.