Illegal Immigration and the American Labor Force

Abstract

Excerpt] In late 1974, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) of the U.S. Department of Justice publicly stated that “the United States us being overrun by illegal aliens” and, he warned, “we are seeing just the beginning of the problem.” During that 1974 fiscal year, when 788,000 illegal aliens were actually apprehended by INS, the INS estimated that the number of undetected illegal aliens who entered the United States in that year ranged upward to 4 million people. Moreover, the INS estimated the accumulated number of illegal aliens currently residing in the United States in 1974 to be between 7 and 12 million.