Despite Tightened Security, Undocumented Immigrant Numbers Surge

SAN DIEGO--The tightening of homeland security since 2001 has not stemmed undocumented immigration into the United States, with a report released Monday showing the number of illegal immigrants growing by roughly 485,000 people a year.

An analysis of government data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a private research group in Washington, showed an estimated 10.3 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States last year, an increase of about 23 percent from 8.4 million in 2000.

"The numbers are astounding," said Cathy Travis, a spokeswoman for Rep. Solomon Ortiz, a Texas Democrat who has pressed for greater funding for border security and immigration control. "Until we match our budgetary priorities with our national security priorities, this is going to be the case."

Critics of illegal immigration said there is little political will to stop the trend, despite the lessons of the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, because businesses benefit from the supply of cheap labor.

"There's been a greater amount of lip service, but there hasn't been a greater amount of attention to border security," T.J. Bonner, president of the union representing Border Patrol agents. "It's a shell game, and the American public are losers in this game."

The union has sharply criticized the Bush administration's proposed 2006 budget, which would provide $37 million to hire 210 Border Patrol agents. The intelligence reorganization bill Bush signed last year called for hiring 2,000 more agents a year over five years.

Currently, there are fewer than 11,000 agents to patrol more than 6,000 miles of the nation's perimeter around the clock, Bonner said.

Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute in Los Angeles said the growth in illegal immigrants has risen with the U.S. economy, with American businesses such as Wal-Mart looking to contractors who rely on undocumented workers "to fill jobs no one else will fill."

Arizona and North Carolina have some of the fastest-growing populations of illegal immigrants. Both have metropolitan areas booming with new construction, restaurants and other service-oriented businesses -- job sectors that often hire undocumented workers.

Mexicans by far remain the largest group of undocumented migrants at 5.9 million, or about 57 percent of the March 2004 estimate. Some 2.5 million others, or 24 percent, are from other Latin American countries.

Pachon said immigration reform must be part of the answer. Immigrants who are forced to wait years to legally bring over family members have a strong incentive to look instead to smugglers.

Immigration will be a central topic of discussion when Mexican President Vicente Fox meets with President Bush in Texas on Wednesday.

Bush has promoted a guest-worker program that would allow migrants to work in the United States for a limited time. Critics of the plan say it will drive down wages for legal workers and encourage illegal immigrants.

Rep. John Hostettler, an Indiana Republican who chairs a subcommittee on immigration and border security, said the government has failed to punish employers who hire illegal workers or sufficiently fund efforts to find and deport illegal immigrants.

"The idea that we're going to completely seal the border, even with the National Guard or 20,000 to 30,000 Border Patrol agents is a little naive," he said.

"We need the manpower. Without that, we are just going to continue to grow the number of illegal aliens in the country. And we will build a huge haystack where it's going to be more difficult to find that needle -- which will be that terrorist or that terrorist cell -- that will strike this country."