Written by: Jake Crain
Introduction
A controversial topic that has surrounded the United States for many years in immigration. People will always take sides on immigration, but will never find background information to explain what it is. Many immigrants are single parents of one or more children. For example in the movie A Better Life Carlos has to work from sun up to sun down to provide for his kid and stay afloat. Normal immigrants may experience low paying jobs with high labor, but undocumented immigrants are almost certain of getting these jobs. being undocumented mean that these people have to hide in fear of being deported, so any real job is only a dream.
This image is an example of jobs that immigrants both documented or undocumented would have to do. These labor jobs can have extremely long hours and low pay.
This is Carlos from the film A Better Life. He is a single parent and an undocumented immigrant. He try his best to find landscaping jobs for rich white neighborhoods, but the pay is low and under the table. This image can be seen as a metaphor because Carlos is at the top of the world, only to have a massive downfall shortly after.
Analysis
In immigration distance is a huge thing, as well as family. With distance comes broken relationships and connections, a.k.a. help. Family is a driving factor when it comes to crime. I found that “In 2019, approximately 17.8 million U.S. children under age 18 lived with at least one immigrant parent.” (Jeanne Batolva). Life is already hard enough for a single immigrant parent, but money is usually the problem. These parents can not afforad to live in a good community so it is likely that their child or children will go to a "bad school". In A Better Life Carlos's son goes to a school with many behavior problems, and it rubs off on his son. “The violent crime rate began to fall in the mid-1990’s and by 2014 it was half of its 1990 level… By that year, the foreign-born population had more than doubled, reaching 42.2 million people (including 11.1 million undocumented people).” (Ghandnoosh and Rovner). A big reason that these immigrant live in the places they do is because of gentrification. The immigrants will basically be bought out of their homes because prices will go up so much. Next they will have to move away and to a place that is affordable, typically high crime rate. It is not about the people or ethnicity that lives in these places, it is the poverty that brings crime. As Ghandnoosh and Rovner said, the foreign born baby statistic has double since the 90's and crime has actually went down. However when you place a lot of people who live in poverty in the same place, crime is inevitable.
This picture is an example of immigrants in poverty. There are children adults, and even babies of all race in this picture. This picture contains mostly females if you look closely. this is because the men are either working or have abandoned the family and left the mother single.
This picture is from the film Entre Nos. In this Mariana is a homeless single mother with her two kids laying in her lab. They are sitting on a park bench. At this point Mariana realized she hit rock bottom and pretty soon had to start collecting cans for scrap metal.
This picture is from the film A Better Life. Carlos and his son maize off into the distance as his hopes of having his landscaping business drives away over the horizon.
Work Cited
Ghandnoosh, Nazgol, and Josh Rovner. “HIGHER LEVELS OF IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE HISTORIC DROP IN CRIME RATES.” IMMIGRATION AND PUBLIC SAFETY, The Sentencing Project, 2017, pp. 8–9, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep27212.5.
Jeanne Batalova, Mary Hanna, and Christopher Levesque. Migration Policy Institute, 11 Feb 2021, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states-2020 Accessed 7 Dec 2021
Association of Chicago Theological Schools (ACTS), et al. Urban Ministry Cluster Task Force Proposal, 1980. Association of Chicago Theological Schools (ACTS), pp. 1–3, https://jstor.org/stable/community.30752194.