The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimated that there were 7 million illegal aliens residing in the United States in January 2000. According to INS, 69% of this unauthorized immigrant population was from Mexico. (USINS, 2003) However, the top 15 sending countries accounted for 89% of the total illegal alien population and included Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, China, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Philippines, Brazil, Haiti, India, Peru, Korea, and Canada. This means that a significant number of illegal aliens entered the United States through other than the Mexico-US border and that they fall under the jurisdiction of the investigations section (interior enforcement), not the Border Patrol. These statistics further indicate that the illegal alien problem is both a border and an interior enforcement problem. More importantly, the interior problem seems to be far greater than the border problem. However, the INS never placed much emphasis on interior enforcement. As a matter of fact, there is very little interior enforcement of the immigration laws going on. Interior enforcement lags behind all other functions of the agency and the INS clearly prioritized the Border Patrol function.

The sheer number of apprehensions along the Mexico-U.S. border often lures the observer to accept them as representative of the illegal alien problem. In 2002, the INS apprehended 1,062,279 deportable aliens in the United States and 94% of those apprehensions were from Mexico.

Near the beginning of this year, President Bush was quoted as saying the United States needs an immigration system