PRELIMINARY REPORT Domestic Council Committee on Illegal Aliens Introduction Immigration to the United States is intended to be governed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Under the provisions of the Act, approximately 400,000 aliens are admitted annually for permanent residence. Actual immigration, however, bears little resemblance to the program administered under the law. In 1975, 766,600 aliens who had entered or remained in the U.S. illegally were located, about twice the number permitted to enter by law. It is believed that the number of illegal aliens residing and working in the United States is considerably in excess of the number apprehended and can be expected to increase. Historically, apprehended illegal entrants to the United States have been largely Mexican in origin concentrated on the Southwest border in rural areas doing agricultural work. Increasingly in the last decade concentrations of illegal aliens are found in industralized urban as well as rural areas throughout the country. Metropolitan centers such as New York and Chicago report illegal populations numbering in the millions although hard numbers which are reliable do not exist. In addition, the illegal population, while predominantly Hispanic, is from many parts of the world. We are a nation of immigrants and have throughout our history been the most hospitable nation in the world for immigrants. Immigrants have and continue to contribute much to this country individually and in the development of our social and political values. We are also a nation of laws with a commitment to systems which enforce those laws fairly and effectivley. A growing influx of unauthorized immigrants has important implications for the United States. The overwhelming majority of illegal aliens who come to the United States are in search of economic opportunity. Many compete for jobs of interest to native workers. Others accept employment for which Americans are seemingly unavailable. All, due to their illegal status, live in fear of apprehension. As a result, they are susceptible to economic exploitation and other forms of abuse, and often live in an invisible subculture outside the boundaries of law and legitimate institutions. Because illegal aliens are in a sense invisible, the issue is not only difficult to anlayze as a practical matter but is controversial to acknowledge for policy purposes in contexts other than law enforcement. Furthermore, illegal migration in times of prosperity tends to be viewed as a handmaiden of economic growth but it becomes transformed into a threat in times of economic downturn. Recent awareness of the finite nature of resources and of population issues has tended to render the cyclical nature of a concern over illegal aliens an ongoing concern. In January, 1975, President Ford, established a Domestic Council Committee on Illegal Aliens. Chaired by the Attorney General, the committee consists of the Secretaries of Agriculture; Commerce; Health, Education and Welfare; Labor; Treasury; State; and the Office of Management and Budget with the Council of Economic Advisors acting in a technical advisory capacity. In January, 1976, the Attorney General reorganized the committee into five task forces as follows: Immigration Law and Policy Chair: Immigration and Economic and Labor Market Impact of Illegal Aliens Social and Community Impact on Illegal Aliens Chair: Enforcement - Chair: Immigration and Naturalization Foreign Relations 1/ Chair: Department of State The task forces are chaired by senior officials selected by the respective Department Secretaries and have functioned as working committees. The task force chairmen comprise a Steering Committee which has provided coordination between full committee meetings. 1/ This task force. is also known as the Interagency Committee on Mexican Migration to the U.S. which had been previously constituted pursuant to meetings between President Ford and President Echeverria of Mexico in 1974. The scope of its activities as originally defined has been broadened for purposes of the Domestic Council inquiry. The task forces were charged with undertaking a comprehensive review of the illegal alien issue and were asked to submit reports of their work by June 1, 1976. Those reports have been combined and integrated to create this preliminary report of the Domestic Council Committee. The report has a fourfold purpose: to provide an overview of the issues and policy to catalogue and assess current efforts to deal The terminology used in the report is as follows: illegal aliens are citizens of other countries who are not authorized to be in the United States. Basically there are two categories of illegal aliens. Some illegal aliens were never authorized to be in the U.S. and possess no immigration documents. Such persons are known as EWI's (Entry Without Inspection) because they entered the country surreptitiously. The second category of illegal aliens is individuals who originally entered the U.S. legally and in possession of a visa issued by a U.S. Consul overseas but have since violated or overstayed the terms of the visa. Such persons are known as visa abusers. They may have obtained the visa through misrepresentation of their intentions, they may have changed plans for a variety of reasons after having arrived in the U.S., or they may have obtained counterfeit documents and escaped detection at the port of entry. The method of entry and reason for being illegal are important to certain aspects of this report and will be treated as such. However in many contexts the terms illegal alien, visa abuser, undocumented worker, illegal immigrant, clandestine migrant and unauthorized worker are used interchangeably. Conversely, the terms used to describe persons legally admitted to the U.S. for permanent residence who are eligible to work are permanent resident alien, immigrant, legal immigrant, or commuter. Apprehension figures will be cited throughout the report and are one important index of the existence of an illegal alien problem. It is important to note that apprehension figures denote the occurrence of an event, i.e., they are a workload measurement, not a total number of people. Many apprehended illegals are known repeaters. Thus the number of people apprehended each year by INS is less by an unknown proportion than the number of apprehensions. |