http://www.kypost.com/2005/03/23/kedita032305.html

This opinion piece worthy of posting for the writer's conclusion .. see last line .. this really puts the numbers flooding into our country into a perspective that one can really understand and comprehend!

Strangers among us
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A new study confirms what a glance around almost any major U.S. city shows -- that efforts to stem, let alone stop, illegal immigration are a continuing failure.

A review of government data by the Pew Hispanic Center puts the number of illegal immigrants in the United States as of last March at 10.3 million, up 23 percent from 8.4 million in 2000.

That means the illegal-immigration rates of the 1990s continued unabated despite an economic slowdown, which presumably lessened the jobs attraction, and 9/11, which presumably brought tougher border and immigration controls.

Pew figures the number of illegals now is around 11 million, about 30 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population, with a steady annual influx of about 485,000. According to Pew, our surreptitious visitors share the Western Hemisphere with us -- 57 percent are from Mexico, 24 percent from elsewhere in Latin America.

If there's anything new to be learned from the figures, it's that illegals are fanning out from their typical destinations. In 1990, according to Pew, almost 90 percent of illegals lived in six states -- California, New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida and New Jersey. Now only 61 percent do, with new destination states such as Arizona and North Carolina.

The number of illegal immigrants in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia was up 70 percent, reflecting an abundance of construction and service-industry jobs, and, around the Chesapeake Bay, harsh but available work in poultry-processing and seafood-packing plants.

Early in his first term, President Bush proposed an immigration reform plan that contained an updated guest-worker program and a means for illegals to legalize their status that GOP conservatives objected was too close to amnesty.

Immigration reform of any kind -- whether of the raise-the-drawbridge or let-'em-come variety -- is at an impasse. There is no consensus in Congress, and it may be beyond even Bush's formidable skills to forge one. Doing nothing is OK if a city the size of Tucson, Ariz., coming across our borders each year is your idea of immigration policy.