Estimate of Illegal Alien Population Rises

New figures from the 2000 Census say there are a significantly larger number of illegal aliens or immigrants in the United States than previously estimated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

As recently as last year, the INS estimated that the illegal population was 3.5 million in 1990 and 5.1 million as of January 1997.

But the number of illegal immigrants in the United States is at least 7 million and possibly as high as 8 million, according to Census Bureau figures.

A net increase of this size implies that the total flow of new illegals entering each year must be more than 700,000, says the Center for Immigration Studies, because the INS estimates that several hundred thousand illegals return home each year or receive legal status as part of the normal "legal" immigration process.

On average, the net increase had to be 400,000 to 500,000 per year during the 1990s, says CIS.

CIS says the Census Bureau's estimates clearly demonstrate that amnesties don't solve the problem of illegal immigration. Although 2.7 million of the estimated 5 million illegal aliens living in the country in 1986 were given amnesty (legal permanent residence), the new estimates indicate that they have been entirely replaced by new illegal aliens and that by last year the illegal population was 3 million larger than before the last amnesty.

Source - http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=7599

Failure to arrest illegal aliens 'an anomaly'

The U.S. Border Patrol said the failure to arrest and deport four men who are in Bismarck without documentation was a fluke.

Glen Schroeder, chief patrol agent with the Border Patrol in Grand Forks, said the Border Patrol's reaction was an anomaly.

According to Bismarck Police Lt. Nick Sevart, four illegal aliens were discovered Saturday night when police responded to a call about a loud party in south Bismarck. The four men were between 17 and 21 years old - and they were from Mexico.

Bismarck police indicated they will be following up on the matter.

Sevart said when police contacted the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service, they were told not to detain or deport the men because they had not committed a major crime.

Usually, the Border Patrol and local police departments work closely to find and deport all illegal aliens in North Dakota.

"We go out of our way to take care of these things," Schroeder said.

However, on that particular day, the Border Patrol was too busy to handle the call.

"We need to have resources, and that time we were just short," Schroeder said. "It was the wrong thing at the wrong time."

The Border Patrol's resources are stretched to shore up security on the border with Canada. "Our mandate is for border security," Schroeder said.

The Border Patrol is responsible for detecting any illegal activity between the ports of entry along the Canadian border and making sure that no one enters through a port of entry that is closed for the night. If they discover people entering the United States without proper documentation, the Border Patrol will take them and make every attempt to remove them.

According to Bismarck Police Sgt. Mark Buschena, the decision about what to do with illegal aliens is left up to the Border Patrol, but usually, action is taken in these cases.

"As far as I know, being in the country illegally is the crime," Buschena said. "Deportation is the penalty."

Schroeder said his department has always supported the Bismarck Police Department's activities and will continue to do so in the future.

"We'll respond to all the requests," he said.

Source - http://www.bismarcktribune.com/uncategorized/article_4e9dacfb-c4e2-5073-9770-b01ddbde7b26.html

Americans Clearly Oppose Amnesty for Illegal Mexican Aliens

PRINCETON, NJ -- Mexican President Vicente Fox reportedly surprised his White House hosts at a welcoming ceremony Wednesday by forsaking the usual diplomatic bromides and launching into an intensive lobbying effort on behalf of amnesty for the estimated three million Mexican immigrants now living in the United States illegally. Gallup polling about blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants more generally finds the public widely unsympathetic to this proposal, with only 6% supporting it. An additional 20% think that citizenship should be granted selectively to illegal immigrant workers who have been here a specified length of time and paid taxes, but two-thirds of Americans think that the United States should not do anything to facilitate citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Source - http://www.gallup.com/poll/4852/americans-clearly-oppose-amnesty-illegal-mexican-immigrants.aspx

84 illegal aliens arrested in Easton

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents from Baltimore raided an Eastern Shore company Monday and arrested 84 undocumented alien workers.

Agents discovered the workers at Chesapeake Building Components Inc., the second time in two years that undocumented workers were found at the Easton company.

"This operation should send a clear sign to employers in Maryland that INS will actively enforce immigration law as it pertains to the employment of undocumented workers," said Louis D. Crocetti Jr., director of the Baltimore District of the INS.

Company officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.

INS officials said that 57 of the aliens were from Mexico, 24 from Guatemala and one each from Costa Rico, El Salvador and Honduras.

Nine were flown back to Mexico yesterday morning. Twenty-two were being detained at the Howard County Detention Center and 32 at the Wicomico County Detention Center. Eighteen were in the process of being returned to their home countries.

If Chesapeake is found to have knowingly violated the employment eligibility provisions of the Immigration and Reform Control Act of 1986, it could be fined from $250 to $2,000 per worker.

In an October 1999 raid, 35 undocumented workers were found at Chesapeake.

Source - http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2001-04-12/news/0104120288_1_undocumented-workers-aliens-easton

Feds Undercount Illegal Aliens

LOS ANGELES (UPI) – New data from the 2000 Census and other sources suggest the government has long underestimated the number of illegal aliens living in the United States.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service had figured the number of illegal aliens as 6 million. Scholars at Boston's Northeastern University are now suggesting that the actual number might run as high as 13 million.

Several facts point toward there being far more illegals than had been previously admitted. A year ago, the Census Bureau expected to count about 275 million residents of the United States on Census Day, April 1, 2000. Instead, it found 281.4 million.

This, by the way, is an unadjusted number based on the raw count. The Census Bureau thinks it might have missed counting between 0.96 percent and 1.40 percent of the population, as many as 4 million people. A sizable fraction of the undercount would consist of people, such as illegal aliens, who don't want the government to find them. The Northeastern economists think even the Census Bureau's adjusted figure would be too low. So, the population of America remains a mystery.

The bureau found it had particularly underestimated the number of Hispanics. In March 2000, the bureau claimed, "In 2000, 32.8 million Latinos resided in the United States." Yet, after compiling the Census data, it had changed its tune: "According to Census 2000 ... 35.3 million, or about 13 percent, were Latino." In other words, the rigorous Census 2000 search had found 8 percent more Hispanics than the government's more spotty annual estimates had turned up.

Demographers had long been predicting that the Hispanic total would catch up with that of blacks by the middle of this decade. Instead, the two groups appear to be virtually equal in numbers already.

Experts found this new view of illegal immigration quite plausible. For example, demographer William H. Frey of the University of Michigan and the Milken Institute, noted: "This surprising data from the 2000 Census has provided proof positive of why we have a census. All the estimates based on samples were too low. A census where you go out and look for everybody is a much better way of doing it."

Frey added, "It would be great to do a census every five years." The Constitution mandates a census every 10 years.

Northeastern University researchers Andrew Sum, Neeta Fogg and Paul Harrington have been researching for some time another anomaly. From 1994 to 2000, U.S. businesses reported creating 5.2 million more jobs than U.S. workers had been reporting obtaining. They believe this discrepancy largely stems from illegal aliens who wish to avoid coming to the government's attention. This would suggest that the annual increase in illegal aliens is between 500,000 and 1 million. That would be about the same as the net number of legal immigrants each year.

What remains unclear is whether illegal immigration has soared recently, or if the 2000 Census just proved a lot better at counting illegals than previous attempts.

The Northeastern study suggests that the number of illegals did grow rapidly in the 1990s, probably driven by the Mexican economic collapse of 1995 and the U.S. boom of the last few years.

On the other hand, the 2000 Census does appear to have done a better job of finding illegal residents. Widespread complaints by Hispanic and black leaders that the 1990 Census missed sizable numbers of minorities have led to strong efforts being made by the bureau to reduce the undercount in 2000. The census appears to have been more accurate at counting Hispanics, who make up the majority of illegal aliens, than in 1990. The bureau estimates that in 1990, it missed 5 percent of Hispanics.

In contrast, this year it expects to miss only between 2.2 percent and 3.5 percent. Of course, it is possible that it missed far more Hispanics in 1990 than even its follow-up surveys found.

Dan Stein, executive director of an anti-immigration campaign, Federation for American Immigration Reform, stated, "The Northeastern study places the figure at nearly double any previous estimate of the size of the illegal population, indicating gross incompetence on the part of the government agencies charged with enforcing immigration laws."

The new estimates of illegal immigration have important implications for long-term population growth. Last year, the Census Bureau estimated that America's population would grow to 571 million in 2100, with the number of Hispanics growing to 190 million. But these figures may now have to be looked at again, because they seem to have been based on an underestimate of the actual population and an underestimate of illegal immigration.

If the number of illegal aliens is now 13 million, as estimated by Northeastern demographer Paul Harrington, instead of the 6 million estimated by the INS, then any new amnesty for illegals, which Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., and the pro-Democrat labor federation AFL-CIO are calling for, would have a much more sizable effect than previously assumed.

The INS has estimated that about 40 percent of illegal aliens live in California. Of course, these figures, like all estimates about illegal aliens, are now open to question.

Source - http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/3/15/202322.shtml

Study shows New Mexico residents pay disproportionate costs of illegal aliens

In Luna County, N.M., the poorly funded ambulance service of the small town of Columbus is frequently called to the nearby United States-Mexico Port of Entry to pick up sick or injured Mexican citizens who have arrived from across the border and carry them to the privately owned Mimbres Memorial Hospital in Deming, about 30 miles away.

Once the patients have been treated, the Luna County Sheriff's Office is called to take them back from Deming to the Columbus Port of Entry, where they are returned across the border. The number of the ambulance calls rose approximately 20 percent between 1998 and 1999, but 76 percent of the bills for the service remain uncollected write-offs, said New Mexico State University government professor Nadia Rubaii-Barrett, one of four authors of a study on the costs to U.S. border counties of handling illegal immigrants from Mexico.

In 1999, Luna County's total cost for law enforcement, criminal justice and emergency medical services related to undocumented persons was $943,000, and of this it was reimbursed $8,000 from the federal government, approximately 0.8 percent. The federal law that provided the reimbursement covers part of the expense of detaining criminal illegal immigrants, but doesn't cover ambulance service or hospital costs, Rubaii-Barrett said.

Hidalgo County, one of the most sparsely populated counties in New Mexico, spent approximately $485,000 in 1999 in law enforcement, court costs or emergency medical services connected with illegal immigrants, but was reimbursed only 0.5 percent of its costs by the federal government, Rubaii-Barrett said.

Dona Ana County is more urbanized than either of the other two New Mexico border counties and its costs of handling illegal immigrants are more evenly spread among detention services, emergency medical and indigent health care. It spent $3.2 million in 1999 to provide legal, judicial and emergency services to illegal immigrants, but recovered only 12 percent of those costs from the federal government, Rubaii-Barrett said.

The study, released Feb. 2 and 3 by the United States-Mexico Border Counties Coalition, a coalition of county government officials from California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, says that, in all four states, counties on the U.S.-Mexico border are paying a disproportionate share of the costs of illegal immigration from Mexico and deserve increased financial help from the federal government, Rubaii-Barrett said.

"We recognize that immigrants contribute to communities throughout the U.S.," she said. "It's not our intent to say immigrants are the problem. The problem is the way the federal government reimburses counties for their expenses."

Between them Dona Ana, Hidalgo and Luna counties spent $4.7 million in 1999 -- the fiscal year covered by the study -- to detain illegal immigrants in jail, to process them through county judicial systems and to provide emergency medical and indigent health care, Rubaii-Barrett said. This compares with $23 million spent by border counties in Texas, $24 million in Arizona and $43 million in California, according to the study.

But, Rubaii-Barrett notes, the impact on individual taxpayers in the New Mexico counties is actually higher than in any of the other border states. The cost per capita in New Mexico's three counties was $23.45, while in Texas the per capita cost was $12, in Arizona it was $22 and in California it was $19, she said.

Hidalgo County incurred the second highest per capita burden on any of the 24 counties studied, at $80.50 per person for each of its 6,000 residents, she said.

"The burden is falling on the poorest counties, which can least afford it. They either have to cut services or raise taxes to cover the costs of what we think is a federal government responsibility," she said.

Rubaii-Barrett said some members of Congress recognize the counties are suffering and have initiated steps to lessen the burden. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., the author of the 1995 State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) law, which partially repays county detention facilities for holding criminal illegal immigrants, has authored a new bill, SCAAP-II, to expand the payments to the costs of prosecution, as well. The bill is co- sponsored by all senators from the four border states, including Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, have co-authored a bill to increase the number of federal district judges in border states. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, has introduced a bill to distribute $25 million a year to border counties to help offset the cost of medical services to undocumented persons. Also, the current federal budget earmarks $300,000 for the U.S.-Mexico Border Counties Coalition to study health care costs along the border, she said.

But, she added, more reforms are needed.

"One of the reasons the payments from SCAAP have been so low is that its payment formula has less to do with the number of undocumented persons held in a county's detention center, than with the population of the county. As a result, the bulk of SCAAP's payments are going to places like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles," she said.

She added that the federal government should also consider giving more funding to states affected by illegal immigration. One limitation of the current study, she said, is that it concentrates on counties that are in direct proximity to the border, yet other counties are also affected.

"When a van containing 17 illegal immigrants crashed on Interstate 40 east of Albuquerque killing 13 people, it placed a burden on state and local law enforcement and health care systems in Bernalillo County, more than 200 miles from the border," she said.

The U.S.- Mexico Border Counties Coalition carried out the study under a grant from the U.S. Justice Department. Rubaii- Barrett, the director of NMSU's master of public administration program who frequently studies issues concerning local government, was asked to be one of four researchers who performed the study for the coalition.

The other researchers are Tanis J. Salant, of the University of Arizona's department of public administration, the study's principal investigator; Christine Brenner, of the University of Texas-El Paso's political science department; and John R. Weeks, of San Diego State University's geography department.

Source - http://www.nmsu.edu/~ucomm/Releases/2001/Feb2001/immigrnt.html