Illegal Immigration and the U.S.

The world has gone through a revolution and it has changed a lot. We have cut the death rates around the world with modern medicine and new farming methods. For example, we sprayed to destroy mosquitoes in Sri Lanka in the 1950s. In one year, the average life of everyone in Sri Lanka was extended by eight years because the number of people dying from malaria suddenly declined. This was a great human achievement. But we cut the death rate without cutting the birth rate. Now population is soaring. There were about one billion people living in the world when the Statue of Liberty was built. There are 4.5 billion today. World population is growing at an enormous rate. The world is going to add a billion people in the next eleven years, that"s 224,000 every day! Experts say there will be at least 1.65 billion more people living in the world in the next twenty years. We must understand what these numbers mean for the U.S. Let"s look at the question of jobs. The International Labor organization projects a twenty-year increase of 600 to 700 million people who will be seeking jobs. Eighty-eight percent of the world"s population growth takes place in the Third World. More than a billion people today are paid about 150 dollars a year, which is less than the average American earns in a week. And growing numbers of these poorly paid Third World citizens want to come to the United States. In the 1970s, all other countries that accept immigrants started controlling the number of people they would allow into their countries. The United States did not. This means that the huge numbers of immigrants who are turned down elsewhere will turn to the United States. The number of immigrants is staggering. The human suffering they represent is a nightmare. Latin America"s population is now 390 million people. It will be 800 million in the year 2025. Mexico"s population has tripled since the Second World War. One third of the population of Mexico is under ten years of age, as a result, in just ten years, Mexico"s unemployment rate will increase 30 percent, as these children become young adults, in search of work. There were in 1990 an estimated four million illegal aliens in the United States, and about 55 percent of them were from Mexico. These people look to the United States. Human population has always moved, like waves, to fresh lands. But for the first time in human history, there are no fresh lands, no new continents. We will have to think and decide with great care what our policy should be toward immigration. At this point in history, American immigration policies are in a mess. Our borders are totally out of control. Our border patrol arrests 3000 illegal immigrants per day, or 1.2 million per year, and Two illegal immigrants get in for every one caught. And those caught just try again! More than 1 million people are entering the U.S. legally every year. >From 1983 through 1992, 8.7 million of these newcomers arrived -- the highest number in any 10-year period since 1910. A record 1.8 million were granted permanent residence in 1991. Because present law stresses family unification, these arrivals can bring over their spouses, sons and daughters: some 3.5 million are now in line to come in. Once here, they can bring in their direct relatives. As a result, there exists no visible limit to the number of legal entries. Until a few years ago, immigrants seeking asylum were rare. In 1975, a total of 200 applications were received in the U.S. Suddenly, asylum is the plea of choice in the U.S., and around the world, often as a cover for economic migration. U.S. applications were up to 103,000 last year, and the backlog tops 300,000 cases. Under the present asylum rules, practically anyone who declares that he or she is fleeing political oppression has a good chance to enter the U.S. Chinese are almost always admitted, for example, if they claim that China"s birth-control policies have limited the number of children they can have. Right now, once aliens enter the U.S., it is almost impossible to deport them, even if they have no valid documents. Thousands of those who enter illegally request asylum only if they are caught. The review process can take 10 years or more, and applicants often simply disappear while it is under way. Asylum cases are piling up faster than they can be cleared, with the Immigration and Naturalization Service falling farther behind every year. At her confirmation hearings at the end of September, Doris Meissner, Clinton"s nominee as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Services, conceded, ""The asylum system is broken, and we need to fix it."" Adding the numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, 50 percent of all U.S. population growth comes from immigration. While Americans try to have smaller families, immigration threatens our nation. If immigration rates continue to be this high, more than seventy million people will be added