Congressional Digest

Excerpt

Estimates are that some 450 million people traverse the
2,00-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, more than a million of them
illegally. And the pace of unauthorized arrivals has accelerated over
the last two decades. On average, nearly five times as many illegal
immigrants now come into the United States each year as entered in the
1980s. There are now about 11.5 million illegal immigrants in the
United States, four out of 10 of whom have been in the country five
years or less. Seventy-five percent were born in Latin America and
enter via the southern border.
U.S. immigration law has swung
back and forth throughou…