Foreign policy has played a large role in making the United States what it is today. From immigration to relations with other countries, forging policy is important to have. A prime example would be immigration. For more than over a century, immigrants have come to the US yearly. Immigrants come from all over the globe in search of a new beginning. The US has always been seen as a new start and a way to escape from issues that face their home countries. Immigrants flooded our nation around the early 1900s. So, it might not be surprising, but many Americans might possibly be descendents of past immigrants. I’m sure most of us could look and find that at some point in time, our ancestors immigrated from some other country. Immigration has always been important to our nation. Which has made it very controversial and political. If we as a nation are not able to find a forging policy that works for everyone, issues like our southern border crisis will continue to happen and possibly worsen. As many of us have different views on what the United States foreign policy should be, especially politicians, has caused many arguments and disagreements between Americans. Foreign policy has been a big deal especially when it comes to electing a new president. As whoever the president is, they have a lot of control on our nation’s foreign policy. Thus making it an important topic for presidential candidates. As our nation can be pretty divided over many topics such as foreign policy, getting the right foreign policy can be hard. Both of the two primary political parties, Democrat and Republican, have very different views on foreign policy. Meaning, whichever party’s candidate wins the election, the foreign policy will fall along the lines of the views of the winning party. This is a cause for concern as each party’s views differ. Especially in the last decade and in the last election, we have seen that both parties have not been able to agree on most aspects of our nation’s foreign policy. We have also seen a rise in issues with immigration, especially at our southern border. This especially has seen lots of coverage in the last decade due to the rise in legal and illegal immigrants coming from Mexico. Something must be done to positively change our foreign policy. Especially in a way that we can all agree on.
![A photo provided by the office of Congressman Henry Cuellar shows detainees in a Customs and Border Protection temporary overflow facility in Donna, Texas, the United States [Courtesy of the Office of Congressman Henry Cuellar via AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/AP_21081535252917.jpg?resize=770%2C513)
America has always been known for its famous saying “The American Dream”. This short saying gave hope to many immigrants as they fled their home countries in search of a fresh start in America. During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, millions of immigrants had arrived from nations all over the world. They were escaping things such as crop failure, famine, increased taxation, and job shortages. America was seen as the land of opportunity. Migrants looked to make a better life for them and their families. This led to more and more immigrants coming to America. The amount of immigrants that have come to america has tremendously made it what it is today. Immigration has led increased economic growth, more diversity, more workers for the workforce, and many other benefits. However, even with these benefits, we have seen some down sides to immigration in recent years. Primarily at our southern border. In the last two decades, we have seen a large increase in immigrants coming across the Mexico-US border. It has kept on growing and has yet to show any sign of stopping. At the moment, the US is seeing the most immigrants coming from Mexico at one time than ever before. This has been associated with the new presidential administration.. America has recently had a switch in office, in which current president Joe Biden replaced former president Donald Trump. It was a big shift in government as Biden is a Democrat while Trump is a Republican. Many topics came into conversation such as foreign policy. While Donald Trump was in office, he held a more strict foreign policy. His foreign policies include “America First ” and “the zero tolerance policy”, meaning a crackdown on illegal immigration and the promoting of American made businesses and goods. As politics goes, this was seen as a good idea to many while seen as a bad idea to many others. When president Biden beat Donald Trump in the 2020 election, things were bound to change.
President Biden vowed to change Trump’s foreign policy and criticized him for his policies leading to kids being kept in “cages”. Many people saw Joe Biden opening the border and allowing asylum seekers to come into America. As these were just some of his plans for our nation’s foreign policy. Well, many people living in Mexico and other countries in central and southern America started their trip to the US shortly after his election win. Tens of thousands of people are waiting at the border seeking asylum in the US. While around 18,000 people were apprehended at the border in just January and February. This has generated bigger issues. Unaccompanied children are coming over the border more than ever seen before. Border patrol isn’t able to keep up with the wave of unaccompanied children. The children are then detained by border patrol and immediately placed into detention facilities. These facilities are made of several “pods” that each hold up to 260 kids. Some even exceeded the limit and held 400 children. These pods are made up of small areas with a small tv in the corner and some blankets and padding, while also being completely surrounded and divided by plastic tarp. These children are being placed into these small cramped spaces with more than over twenty other children. These children are being kept there all alone for extended periods of time. The current administration has been criticized in how it is doing basically the same thing it criticized the prior administration for, putting kids in “cages”. However, in this case it’s putting kids behind tarps. Both presidents have now been criticized for the same thing. Both of their policies have led to the placement of children in “cages’ ‘. Even though we are barely into president Biden’s presidency, this issue raises concern over our nation’s foreign policy.
It’s normal to see a shift in foreign policies when a member of one political party replaces a member of the other political party for President of The United States. We tend to expect many things to change as both parties have extremely different views on things like foreign policy. This is why foreign policy is used to argue which presidential candidate is better than the other. The president has a large impact on how our nation’s foreign policy functions and this can lead to lots of support and/or criticize. Each party (Democrat and Republican) wants the foreign policy to reflect their views the most. Thus creating little similarities between the two parties views on foreign policy. This can be an issue as foreign policies can change every time a new president comes into office. A good example would be when Donald Trump replaced former president Barack Obama. When he took office, Donald Trump got rid of Obama’s foreign policies. This was suspected as many presidents before him did the same. However, Trump’s policies were very different from former president Barack Obama’s. During his campaign, he spoke about cracking down on illegal immigration and vowed to build a wall on our southern border. Many people quickly began to support the idea of building a wall to prevent illegal immigrants from coming over the US-Mexico border. When former president Trump got into office, he began his plan to build the wall. Over his four year term, the wall was built. However, this “wall” wasn’t fully built. Due to time and money, it wasn’t fully built. Most parts got replaced with lager fences. While other parts still have the same barriers that it had prior to Trump’s presidency. Some parts don’t even have a physical barrier separating the two nations. This plan got lots of praise and lots of criticism. Former president Trump used the wall to deter illegal immigration and securely protect the border. This part of isi foreign policy seems to work in a way, as there the amount of people trying to cross the border decrease by a somewhat large amount during his first year. However, soon after, a large number of immigrants were detained at the border. This led to a similar situation to what is happening right now. An overflow of children and families caused them to be placed into facilities (not the same ones that are being used under Biden’s administration). These facilities aslo where bad conditions like the ones we see in the new administration. Even though it’s early into the new administration, we have seen the same issues transparent for both presidents. It seems even though both had very different views and policies on foreign policy, they both experienced the same issue of an overflow of migrants and the placement of children in harsh facilities.
So how can we avoid this in the future? The fact that the same issue has occurred under two different presidencies generates questions about our foreign policy. Both presidents were associated with different political parties and had different views on foreign policy and our border. Yet the same problem has affected both of them. It seems that no matter what the policy focuses on, strict closed borders or more open and immigrant friendly borders, it has led to the outcome of migrants being placed in detention centers at a very high rate. Due to our nation being very divided in politics, every policy made by a president will have half the nation agree and the other half disagree. This makes issues like our border extremely hard to solve. As everyone one wants it to be done their way and their way only. If we can’t find a solution that everyone can agree on, we will see issues like the one at our southern border continue and worsen. If we take certain aspects from each foreign policy, we could find one that appeals to everyone and finds a solution to our issues. For example, if we take the idea of keeping a protective border which appeals to the republican party, then we could see less illegal immigration. We would also take the idea of open borders and immigrant friendly borders which appeals to the democratic party, and work with Mexico to try and limit the amount of migrants coming over the border at one time. This way the border isn’t flooded with migrants and leads to more children and families being placed into detention facilities. These are just a few examples. If we take parts of different foreign policies and combine them together, it helps find a compromise in foreign policy that we can all agree on. One that also helps us reduce the high amounts of detention facilities while still promoting importance of immigration the to US.
Sources:
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/152453/economics/pros-and-cons-of-immigration/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/22/biden-administration-faces-new-scrutiny-on-unaccompanied-minors
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46824649
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-biden/
1.) Christian did not include an additional questions for the peer review
2.) Your topic for your issue brief is great but your thesis could use a more narrowed focus to help with the direction of your issue brief. You need to include the specific PARTs of foreign policy that you want to advocate for such as immigration and border relations and then talk about how the U.S should go about implementing said policies
3.) to appeal to the logos of this piece, I recommend finding more statistical evidence on both the horrible living conditions of immigrant holding centers/the humanitarian criss that IS the border and then also bring in stats about how improved foreign policy can help improve other areas of life such as safety and the economy.,
4.) Try to think of cons to the foreign policy that you are advocating and then counterarguments to those cons.
5.) I think with the adding subheading for each specific section of your foreign policy issue brief will really help. Try to make the first part of your issue brief about WHY we need to change issue brief THEn talk about how to got about it.
6.) I think your issue brief could greatly benefit from brief but informative subtitles/subheadings so that It can break your brief down into smaller, easier to digest parts. For example, you talk about the southern border problem a lot so you should make it its own entire section with a subtitle like “Improving Neighboring Relations: the Crisis at the Souther Border.” And then after you can have a section comparing different American foreign policies that have been implemented by different president and then MODEL your issue brief around an accumulation of the best qualities you found from each policy.
7.) I think you can delete the blurb about us Americans descending from immigrants “Immigrants flooded our nation around the early 1900s. So, it might not be surprising, but many Americans might possibly be descendents of past immigrants. I’m sure most of us could look and find that at some point in time, our ancestors immigrated from some other country.”
I see that you use the term “forging policy” twice int the intro! Maybe you could clarify to readers what that exactly entails.
In the phrase ”issues like our southern border crisis will continue to happen and possibly worsen.” You should remove “happen and possibly” to remove redundancy.
Also, you CAN use first person perspective when writing, but due to the formality of this piece, I would try to only use it during pathos-filled, call-to-action statements
2). I think you chose a great and current topic to discuss. I think your thesis needs to be more clear and explain how the issue of immigration policy (or foreign policy) will be solved.
3). I think you gave a great overview of the issue, but there is not a lot of data or current studies that support your claims. Using numerical data or percentages to discuss the crisis at the border would be useful. I would also add what politicians, except for our president, are doing to help. Lawmakers from both parties have taken trips down to the border, include what they say first-hand.
4). The proposal or solution does not take on one stance. To make your issue brief more effective, take one stance on the issue, introduce the pros and cons, and include a solution. I think the use of graphs regarding immigration would also be a useful aspect.
5). I would arrange the paper to first give an overview of immigration in the US, explain the current problem at the border, and then offer solutions. The information seems more like a summary than an arranged argument.
6). There are no subtitles included, the divisions are based on images. Using subheadings will help structure and guide your issue brief. You could break it down as Introduction, American Dream, Current Border Problem, etc.
7). I think you could delete parts of the introduction that repeat foreign policy and political parties. Using the term “foreign policy” is broad when discussing immigration, which could also be referred to as “domestic policy” depending on who you talk to.