Why should illegal immigrants already in the US be granted amnesty?

Answer 1

You can get several different answers to this, most of which will tell you more about the person doing the answering rather than giving you useful information to reason through this question. I will try to outline some of the key points of the issue as it stands in April 2013 in the United States, but this is an extremely complex issue that touches on many different groups with diverse backgrounds. First, there really isn't any group that is proposing to grant amnesty to large groups of illegal immigrants - this is a political soundbite used by conservative Republicans to try to prevent the possibility of any illegal immigrant from earning citizenship through any pathway. A bipartisan (4 Republicans, 4 Democrats) group is working on introducing an Immigration reform bill into the Senate in June 2013, and part of the legislation is a method to potentially provide for citizenship for those individuals who are here illegally as of a certain date after working for it for 15 years or so. There are significant financial and legal hurdles for these people to overcome, including paying a penalty fee, having to hold a steady job, not being convicted of crime, etc. The argument for this path is, there are approximately 11 million illegal immigrants already in the United States - you have to bring these people out of the shadows and into the mainstream society to effectively deal with them. By offering a path, albeit a hard path, to citizenship, you engage these people and can prevent more illegal immigration. The opposite viewpoint is that any immigrant who wants to be in the United States legally simply has to self-deport back to their home country, wait ten years then apply for a green card same as everyone else. By giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship outside of the already established legal venues, you are in effect legitimizing their criminal activities by coming to the United States illegally. This is seen as not fair both to those who are trying to immigrate legally as well as those who already immigrated legally. The hardest part of this question is how to handle individuals in which minor children were brought across the border illegally by their parents - many of these children don't find out they are illegal immigrants until they try to apply for college or to join the military and suddenly discover they don't have a social security number. The children couldn't do anything about the immigration - sometimes they were infants in arms being carried across the border by their parents. Should they be held as criminals for not following the legal immigration pathways, even though there was literally nothing they could have done about it when it happened? These children, incidentally, generally speak American English and have only lived in the United States so they don't even know what their parents' home country is like, nor would they be able to function in that country.