Legal Immigration—The Bigger Problem By Edwin S. Rubenstein

Everyone is against illegal immigration (they say). Problem: legal immigration is actually the bigger problem.

How many legal immigrants enter the U.S. each year? Let me count the ways they come in! (With apologies to the poet.)

The 1990 immigration law "capped" legal immigration at 700,000 persons a year. Yet since 1990, there’ve been only two years in which legal immigration has been below that level.

In 2006, 1,266,264 people were granted legal permanent resident status. That’s a record if you exclude the post-IRCA amnesty spike of the early 1990s—which reflected the 1986 amnestying of illegal aliens already here.

In contrast, the stock of illegals in the US is growing by an estimated 500,000/year. [The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S., by Jeffrey S. Passel, Pew Hispanic Center, 2006. PDF]

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