WASHINGTON -- The estimated number of immigrants living in the United States illegally has increased by about 1.1 million people, to a total of 5 million people in the last four years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service said Friday.
The agency said its estimate of the average annual influx of immigrants who overstayed their visas or entered illegally slowed in the four-year period ended in 1996 as compared with the four-year period ended in 1992, but only to 275,000 immigrants a year, from 281,000 a year.
"The important thing is there hasn't been very much of a decline in illegal immigration, if any, in recent years," said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer who studies immigration trends at the Urban Institute, a research group.
In response to a growing popular resentment against illegal immigrants, President Clinton last year signed into law a Republican-sponsored bill that cracked down on undocumented foreigners, in part by hiring more agents for the U.S. Border Patrol.
Even before that legislation, the immigration service's annual budget had increased to $3.1 billion this year from $1.5 billion four years ago. But as the new law takes effect and the immigration service enjoys its new financing, Republican critics on Friday challenged the administration's commitment to enforcing the nation's borders.
"Congress doubled the INS budget, but I'm not sure we're getting double our money's worth," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who last year was author of the immigration bill in the House.
Smith and Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican of California, complained Friday that Clinton, in his newly proposed budget for the fiscal year 1998, would hire only 500 more Border Patrol agents, even though Congress authorized hiring 1,000 new agents. Administration officials had embraced the congressional goal last year.
But immigration agency officials said Friday they were coping with a legacy of neglect left by two Republican administrations. Only now, these officials said, is the immigration service beginning to make inroads in combating illegal immigration.
"Over the past two decades, the country has had insufficient resources and attention to illegal immigration problems," Robert Bach, the agency's executive associate commissioner for policy and planning, told reporters Friday.
Bach noted that the number of immigrants deported increased last year to 68,294 from 50,272 in 1995. He said the agency's goal was 93,000 deportations this year.
The figures the immigration service announced Friday are estimates based on Census Bureau
data and the numbers of immigrants the government knows are in the country legally. The 5
million figure has a margin of error of plus or minus 400,000 people.
California, which accounts for 40 percent of the nation's illegal immigrants, now has about 2 million illegal immigrants, up from 1.6 million in 1992. In Texas, which ranks a distant second, the number of illegal immigrants increased to 700,000 from 530,000 four years ago. In New York, which has the third highest number of illegal residents, the number increased to 540,000 in 1996 from 410,000 in 1992.
The agency's estimates showed that 54 percent of the 5 million illegal immigrants came from Mexico. The four other countries with the largest number of illegal residents in the United States are El Salvador, Guatemala, Canada and Haiti.
The agency on Friday updated and revised statistics it announced two years ago in its first effort to estimate the nation's illegal-resident population.
Based on new Census Bureau data, the agency said it now estimated that the number of illegal residents in the country before October 1992 was 3.9 million, compared with the previous estimate of 3.4 million. Virtually all of these additional illegal residents came from Mexico, immigration officials said Friday.
Individuals included in the estimates are those who established a residence in the United States and lived here illegally for more than 12 months. Thousands more enter the country illegally to work or visit relatives every year, but return home before the 12-month threshold, immigration officials said.
Immigration officials said Friday that about 41 percent of the 5 million illegal residents entered the country using tourist or worker visas but did not return home when their visas expired. The remaining 59 percent entered the country illegally.
How illegal immigrants entered each state varied greatly. In New York, for example, 490,000 of the 540,000, overstayed their visas. But in California, three out of four illegal residents entered the state without documentation. Illegal residents make up about 6 percent of California's total population, the immigration service said.
"The new INS numbers just illustrate what we already know: America has increasing problems with illegal aliens," said Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., who is the new chairman of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on immigration. "We need to give the new law time to work."