The (W)right numbers on illegal immigrants
Other than chairing the convention that nominated Michael Dukakas for President of the United States in 1988, no one has ever called Jim Wright a fool. A guy who served 34 years in Congress, was House Majority Leader and Speaker of the House at least knows how to count.
Nobody knows exactly how many legally unauthorized immigrants are in our country today. The most commonly cited estimate is 12 million. That’s about 4 percent of all the people living within our borders.
The sheer immensity of the job of locating and dislodging this many individuals scattered in thousands of communities would stagger the most elastic imagination. Attempts at a task of such magnitude (catching and deporting 12 million people) would dwarf history’s best-known efforts at ethnocentric purging.
Last year, enforcement agents apprehended and U.S. courts ordered deported almost one-quarter million illegal aliens. Attempting to expel 12 million would be a task more than 48 times greater and 48 times more costly.
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