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Five hundred million travelers enter the US yearly at a Port of Entry (POE) after an Immigration &Naturalization Service (INS) interview. We describe a general method for sampling from a flow, and summarize results from random reinspections of travelers at 20 POEs. Analyses reveal that 47 in 5614 travelers (0.8% ??0.24%) were erroneously granted entry. Results suggest INS intercepts 9.3% to 16.0% of travelers attempting illegal entry at a POE, and that INS mistakenly admits 2.95 to 5.45 million illegal immigrants at POEs annually. Additional applications of our sampling method (e.g., for quality control, population studies) are briefly discussed.
KEY WORDS: immigration; illegal immigration; Immigration and Naturalization Service; INS.
INTRODUCTION
Approximately 500 million travelers enter the United States each year after a brief interview with an Inspector of the US Immigration &Naturalization Service (INS). Ever since the US began its concerted effort to control entry into the country in 1882, there has been a lingering controversy about illegal admission and the illegal immigration that it facilitates.1 When the Nationality Act was passed in 1906 many of the country's current policies and guidelines were codified, and they remain in place today with surprisingly little modification (United States Department of Justice-Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1991). For example, although waiver procedures do exist, INS still bars entry for "the insane, convicts . . . professional beggars . . . travelers likely to become public charges" and (as specified in the Immigration Act of 1891) those who have committed "crimes of moral turpitude." Research suggests that illegal immigrants constitute a surprisingly large portion of the current US population (e.g., Beck, 1997), a trend with important political, legal, clinical, cultural, and occupational ramifications (e.g., see respectively Alvarez &Butterfield, 2000; Goldman, 1999; Smart & Smart, 1995; Padilla, 1993; and Halcrow, 1987). But, despite considerable interest, no one has a precise measurement of how many illegal immigrants enter the United States annually by evading detection at an airport or traffic checkpoint.
This paper describes the outcome and the methodological details of a new process that INS has adopted to measure the number of illegal immigrants who come into the US at its Ports of Entry-the border stations and airports that ring the nation's borders;2 the research does not address illegal entry...