Legal Immigration Facts and History

* During the first fifty years after our country’s inception, the United States received about 710,000 immigrants.
* During the first century of our country’s existence (1776 to 1884), we received about two immigrants a day.
* Traditionally, modern immigration to the United States averaged below 200,000 newcomers per year. The exceptions are a brief period of mass immigration at the start of the 20th century and the decades of escalating arrivals since passage of the 1965 Immigration Act.
* In recent years, we have permitted over one million legal immigrants per year. Over three million when you add illegal immigrants to that number.
* In the 1990s we admitted two immigrants every minute.
* Immigration drives virtually all of California's current population growth. Last year alone, California grew by 500,000 more people.
* In the past 10 years the United States admitted enough immigrants to populate a new city larger than Washington, D.C.each year.
* The immigrant share of total U.S. population is also growing at a record-breaking rate. The foreign-born population grew from 7.9 percent in 1990 to 12.5 percent of U.S. population in 2006. If current trends continue, in this decade the percentage of foreign-born residents will surpass even the all time high reached in 1890 of 14.8 percent.
* The BCIS (formerly the INS) has a processing backlog of approximately 4.5 million immigration applications.
* Roughly 10 percent of Mexico’s population of 107 million resides in the United States.
* There is federal legislation currently under consideration, which, if passed, would add between 100 and 200 million more immigrants to our population over the next 20 years.
* Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans want a reduction in immigration numbers—both legal and illegal.


Illegal Immigration Facts

* There are an estimated 12 to 20 million illegal aliens currently residing in our country.
* All of the 9/11 hijackers were in the United States legally, having entered on temporary visas.
* California is home to at least 3.2 million of those illegal aliens.
* Illegal immigrants who take low-paying jobs don't pay enough in taxes, if they pay at all, to reimburse taxpayers the $5,000/per student annually cost of educating their children.
* Illegal immigration costs the taxpayers of California $10.5 billion a year for education, health care, and incarceration.
* Illegal aliens constitute 15 percent of our state’s school population.
* Between 1993 and 2003 60 California hospitals were forced to close from the financial burden of providing free health care for uninsured illegal aliens.
* Illegal immigrants who enroll in the University of California system are charged in-state tuition.
* Each year the Border Patrol makes more than a million apprehensions of persons unlawfully crossing U.S. borders to work and to receive public assistance, often with the aid of fraudulent documents. Such entry is a misdemeanor, and if repeated becomes punishable as a felony.
* Illegal aliens from Central America have been allowed to remain in the United States so long that their homelands have grown dependent on the billions of dollars a year they send home in remittances.
* 300,000 people who have been ordered deported are still in the country because their deportation orders were not enforced.
* Census Bureau estimates say 115,000 people from terrorist-sponsoring Middle Eastern nations live in the United States illegally.
* Some illegal aliens from terrorist nations pay as much as $50,000 each to be smuggled into our country.
* Approximately one-third of all foreign-born U.S. residents are illegal aliens
* Over half of all Mexicans living in the United States are here illegally.
* In the last decade, 80 to 85 percent of the flow of Mexican immigrants has been illegal.
* A strategy of attrition through enforcement could reduce the illegal population by as many as 1.5 million illegal aliens each year. Currently about 183,000 illegal aliens per year depart without the intervention of immigration officials, according to DHS statistics.

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