CX Group Debate: Immigration Reform

Summary:

For the CX group debate project, my team took the affirmative position for immigration reform and my members were Allyssa, Tumi, and Brian. Our opponents were Halli, Tre, Deonte, and Jane who took the negative position on our topic. For my team, we concentrated our two main constructive arguments on how the current system is already difficult, clunky, and expensive. An immigrant seeking citizenship in the U.S. must go through countless hurdles to make sure that they complete the entire process correctly and legally. There are various documents that need to be done, interviews, a health checkup, and a long waiting time. The money poured into the process does vary, but if the immigrant so much as faces one thing going south, such as a document getting declined for one reason or another or they fail an interview, they must restart the entire process. This can lead to that individual wasting a lot of time, money, and resources.  Immigration should be reformed so that when an immigrant does try to go through the process to be an American citizen legally, it can be much smoother. Immigrants coming into the U.S. stimulate the economy, allow more room for innovation and increase the size of the labor force. For our rebuttals, my team brought up the fact that the effect that immigrants have on wages is minimal. Therefore, Americans do not have to worry about losing their jobs to immigrants. Immigrants may also take on blue collar jobs, such as working as a janitor or at a fast food place. Some ideas my team proposed for reform were shorter queue times, not having to restart the entire process from scratch, and increasing the number of immigrants that can go through the process. My team acknowledged that it is not ideal to allow every single immigrant to come to the U.S., the system we have today should at least be smooth for the select ones that go through the process legally and try to get the privilege to be a U.S. citizen.