Speech #980005008

I had to speak of numbers then. and. unfortunately. I must speak of them again today. At the present time. net immigrationlegal plus illegalprobably exceeds 750.000 per year. Although refugee admissions have been substantially reduced since 1980 when legal permanent admissions alone numbered over 800.000. the United States still accepts more immigrants and refugees for permanent resettlement than the rest of the world combined. Our asylum application backlog continues to grow and our ability to deal with it remains impaired. Last year I reported to you that asylum applications exceeded 105.000. Today that backlog is over 140.000. In addition. hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants now cross our borders every year. Some estimate the net annual inflow at 500.000. The number of illegal aliens already in the country is unknown. but the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy used the figure of 3.5 to 6 million as the number for 1978. There are surely more now. Total immigrationlegal plus ilegalnow appears to account for 30 to 50 percent of our annual population growth of about 2 million. Thus. a net annual immigration of 750.000 would lead to a U.S population in 100 years of over 300 million. Onethird of this 300 million would consist of immigrants arriving after 1980 and their descendants. The problems which may be caused by excessive population growth are well known and I shall not discuss them here. Not only do we observe this high total of legal and illegal immigrants. but only a small fraction of them are individually admitted for qualities which are likely to benefit the Nation as a whole. and this is limited only to an analysis of job market impact. Less than 5 percent even of new legal immigrants are certified by the Labor Department as not causing unemployment or adversely affecting the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers. As a result of this and of the fact that the present labor certification process is probably of limited effectiveness. I believe that there are indeed adverse job impacts. especially on lowskilled Americans.