More than 44.5 million immigrants resided in the United States in 2017, an all-time high since census records were kept and according to data from the American Community 2017 Survey (ACS), one in seven U.S. residents was foreign born. In this essay I will talk about the history of immigration, specifically from Mexico to the United States, how immigrants are currently treated in our current society, and how obtaining citizenship can take away some of the fear or pressure of the immigrant relationship. and not immigrants. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Since we are just upstate, immigration from Mexico to the United States is a topic that has had a rather tumultuous and long history, so bear with me here. To begin, let's pay our attention, at the time of the annexation of Texas by Mexico, to one man in particular who was an important figure for immigrants. The man I'm talking about is José Antonio Navarro. José Antonio Navarro contributed to the first wave of Mexican immigrants to Texas. He was a friend of Texas founder Stephen F. Austin, was one of the few people who supported Mexican Texans as part of the Texas Senate, and was one of the primary people to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836. When in 1845 Texas officially became a self-governing state and part of the United States, Navarro took it a step further by trying to grant voting rights to non-white people in Texas. Now, shortly after the annexation of Texas, the United States gained California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico after its victory against Mexico in the Mexican-American War. This did not contribute much to immigration because even though the immigrant population was growing, looking at the bigger picture of migration shows us that it was more of a move that occurred from north to south than in the previously mentioned countries. Former Mexican citizens living in the South migrated back to Mexico and other surrounding regions, which caused levels of Mexican immigration to America to decline for years and years until agricultural work in the United States grew in the late 1800s. In Alan Riding's book Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, he describes how the long history of immigration between Mexico and the United States "involves so many 'push' and 'pull' factors in both countries" and that was due to expanding US agriculture in the 1880s and 1890s. The US took over many Mexican territories and took them for itself for years, pushing out former Mexican citizens in the process, but then we see a turning point with this agricultural growth which brings the Mexicans back north. This would eventually continue into the 1900s gaining momentum from the Mexican Revolution and the United States' entry into World War I as many people were being sent to fight freed agricultural jobs (as well as some railroad jobs) and violence was driving people out of the country. Mexico in search of refuge. Referring once again to Alan Riding, he stated that 500,000 to 800,000 Mexican immigrants entered the United States in the two decades preceding the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression (1929–1941). This wave of migrants was actually what led to the creation of the US Border Patrol in 1924 due to the sheer amount of people who were arriving. Returning to the topic of the Great Depression, this was the event that would finally change the fate of immigration flows. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans returned to.