Chapter 14

Welcome back to my blog. Today we are talking about Chapter 14 of the book "Regional Landscapes of the United States and Canada" by Stephen Birdsall. The Chapter is about the Southwest Border Area: Tricultural Development. Look at the map below for a picture of where we are talking about. The picture is from a Santa Barbara Blog.

As you can see from this map, included in this region is California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

If you live in this region like I do, you know that illegal immigration is a hot topic. Birdsall writes, "Large numbers of illegal immigrants make it difficult to estimate how many Mexicans enter the United States each year ... estimates  of 2 to 12 million." (p. 282)

Is illegal immigration a problem in Pittsburgh? Let's look at Pennsylvania as a whole. I'm getting this information from an article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by policy analyst Daniel Griswold.

According to the paper, illegal immigration is not a problem. Illegal immigrants are only 1.3% of the population and that's 40th in the country. The article even says cracking down on illegal immigration is the wrong answer because it would hurt the economy because "low-skilled immigrants do not compete directly with the large majority of American workers."