P3 Blog Post 1

I am interested in many of the issues surrounding the upcoming election and more generally political problems of the United States right now.  There is very little within the course theme of Ethics in Higher Education that interested me.  The first couple of ideas that came to mind are the illegal immigration problem as well as the Syrian refugee immigration crisis.  I also considered writing about abortion and marriage but after a little bit of thought I think that I would have a difficult time being objective if I chose to write about either of these topics because I have strong opinions about both.  I began to be interested in the topic of immigration from seeing the extreme views of both Clinton and Trump as well as what is currently happening under the Obama administration.  I hated the idea of allowing the illegal immigrants to continue to pour into the United States but at the same time the US is a nation of immigrants so there should be a way for them to gain legal citizenship.  I began to wonder how bad the problem was and what the current border security looks like as well as the current options for immigrants looking to become citizens.  The potential stakeholders in this issue are the people of the United States which I would divide into three categories: The Trump supporters, the Clinton supporters, and the independents.  All of these groups have very strong opinions one way or another for immigration and while I would like to think that presenting both sides with facts would create a readiness for compromise from both sides but that seems unrealistic.  A more effective stakeholder would be Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton as they have a very large amount of influence over their respective followings and could advocate for a more moderate immigration policy.  Additionally, Congress as a whole is a stakeholder that would have power to implement policies with respect to immigration.  I would consider our politicians fairly resistant stakeholders, but not because they do not want to do something rather because they are so intent on not compromising that they are always pushing some extreme legislation.  It will take convincing some very stubborn people that they are not entirely wrong but perhaps there is a better way of solving the problem of immigration than building a wall or offering everyone amnesty.  The thing I’m most worried about for P3 is achieving a good balance between my own personal beliefs and the facts surrounding immigration, and figuring out exactly what I want to argue for and against in terms of policies.  Additionally, I’m not sure how much I will be able to find in terms of government released statistics on the issue.  It is a very difficult thing to track as one would imagine with illegal immigration.  The only way to really combat this is to just do a lot of research from many different sources.  One thing that could be nice would just be a day that we can write in class and ask questions about what we are writing or possibly even another library day.