The case of marijuana laws has been widely noted: After years of outlawing possession of the drug. the number of American users is steadily growing. reaching. by the users own account. 20 million peopleand that is almost certainly a conservative estimate. (The Impossibility of applying marijuana possession laws even prompted the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Earl J. Silbert. to declare late last year that he would no longer enforce them. but he was forced to back down by the local police.) The situation with illegal aliens is also familiar. According to one reliable estimate. 1.5 million illegal aliens are in District 3 of the immigration service (which encompasses New York City) alone. Over the last five years. 5.300 were deported and 55.000 were allowed to leave voluntarily. but the annual increase seems to keep exceeding the number deported or forced out under other circumstances. And the same theme runs through practically all the postmortems on the myriad New Frontier and Great Society programsthe difficulty trying to make their strictures stick. So we revise old programs and launch new ones and talk about making existing laws work.
Keywords matched
deported immigration illegal aliens