The issue of illegal immigration in the United States has the status of a major social problem and sharp controversy over the proper public policy toward immigrant behavior. Illegal immigration achieved special resonance during the 1990s, which was marked by a series of public-policy initiatives that were fed by public opinion.
It is a commonplace of American history that the national population is make up almost entirely of immigrants. However, over the course of the 20th century, the ethnic and linguistic makeup of immigrants into the US shifted dramatically from the trends that dominated immigration in the previous centuries. Whereas in the 18th and 19th and in the first part of the 20th centuries the great majority of immigrants came from various countries of Europe, by the last third of the century the trend was markedly toward immigrants who were coming from Latin America and Asia. Furthermore, a significant portion of these immigrants entered the US surreptitiously and illegally, i.e., not through open and established channels of travel from country to country via visa, passport, etc. The shift in the pattern of immigration was accompanied by changes in the attitudes toward immigrants as well.
In the United States, the quintessential nation of immigrants, the influx of new arrivals has sparked a growing nativist backlash. While a Gallup poll in 1965 showed that only 33 percent of Americans believed too many immigrants were entering the country, the number increased to 42 percent in 1977, 49 percent in 1986, and 65 percent in the summer of 1993 (Andreas, 1994, p. 45).
Andreas cites the "national attention and frustration" associated with immigrants "who come without a formal invitation" (p. 45). The whole matter is complicated further by the widely shared view that there are no reliable figures that show how many illegal immigrants are in the country at any one time. In 1997, for example, the INS was estimating that some...