Interesting, that's how the INS has done it for decades.
Apprehensions have always been the way of judging the number of illegals crossing the border, at least in my lifetime.
If you work for the INS in Arizona, you only need ask yourself what is the scuttlebutt in the office and in your community regarding anecdotal evidence of immigration rates?
I do, and we all use the traditional method of apprehensions.
We know how many are caught and we know approximately how many are not.
When to BP responds to a call or a sensor hit, then take the number of illegals apprehended and then they compare the apprehension to the number of tracks on the ground and the number of hits on the sensor. From that information, they can get a very accurate number of aliens that got away.
The INS minimizes that number publicly, but if you take to the BP agents on the street, he’ll tell you the truth.
The BP apprehends approximately 10 to 20 percent of the illegals that cross. So, if you have 100 apprehensions, you pretty much guess that 1000+ got through. Now, that does not mean 1000+ illegals have made the US there new home, because some still head back home to Mexico or were ever they come from, but we know 1000+ made it through.
Like I stated before, the reason for the major increase in the permanent illegal alien population, is because they are not returning to their home countries, not because more are coming over, and that is because of the crack down on the border.
The current policy is causing the illegal alien population to take up roots here as opposed to moving back and forth across the border.
One must also understand that this applies to the Mexican illegals and not the illegals from other countries. The illegals from other countries are far more likely to stay here and never leave, due to the distance between their home and the United States.
I’m sorry, but counting the number of folks that speak Spanish in your neighborhood, is not a very good way to gage the increase or decrease of illegal aliens.
Everyone knows the numbers are increasing, but that does not correlate with an increasing number of border crossers. It correlates with an increased number of illegal aliens not returning home, like they did in the past.
Obviously not. An increasingly larger percentage of illegal aliens gain entry through birth on US soil. These aliens, while subject to deportation, are afforded certain protections by a recent Supreme Court decision (1982) and don't show up in the statistics because we've eliminated the neighborhood sweeps.
But ... illegal immigration (by birth and trespass) has been increasing steadily since 911.