New Immigrants

The United States continues to accept more immigrants than any other country; in 1990, its population included nearly 20 million foreign-born persons. The revised immigration law of 1990 created a flexible cap of 675,000 immigrants each year, with certain categories of people exempted from the limit. That law attempts to attract more skilled workers and professionals to the United States and to draw immigrants from countries that have supplied relatively few Americans in recent years. It does this by providing "diversity" visas. In 1990 about 9,000 people entered the country on diversity visas from such countries as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Peru, Egypt, and Trinidad and Tobago. Despite policy variations the US continues to be a major magnet in the world receiving about 900,000 legal immigrants annually.

 

Illegal Immigration

The US Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that some five million people are living in the United States without permission, and the number is growing by about 275,000 a year. The Federal Government currently faces a big challenge — the

construction of a special fence along the US-Mexico border to curtail the number of illegal immigrants. By overwhelming majorities in both Houses, the Congress voted to build a t, 125 km fence along the most vulnerable sections of America's almost 3.200-km border with Mexico. This project costs 1.2 billion dollars, and is part of the 34.8 billion Homeland Security bill signed by President Bush in October, 2006. The fence is still criticized as most analysts regard illegal immigration as economically positive overall. For example, a Democratic Senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, stated that the farming

industry "is almost entirely dependent on undocumented workers." Conventional wisdom

reckons illegal immigration depresses wages for unskilled Americans by 4 per cent or more. But illegals certainly don't increase unemployment. But the fears are still there.

In New Jersey, for example, the illegal population more than doubled during the 1990s, and in Georgia increased by 571 per cent. Atlanta is one of the so-called 'new gateways' for immigration — sprawling cities, with abundant low-end jobs that are attractive for immigrants because legal citizens don't want these jobs. Much of America's south-east has in recent times seen immigration levels jump, a surprise to anyone who thinks the problem is restricted to the Mexican border.