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US: Border, yes, interior no
- Author: Philip Martin
- Main Title: Bordering on Control , pp 16-35
- Publication Date: April 2003
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.18356/1f1bb7a0-en
- Language: English
The United States is a nation of immigrants. The US accepts about 800,000 legal immigrants a year, and welcomes 32 million foreign visitors. The number of unauthorized foreigners rose by an estimated 700,000 a year in the late 1990s, bringing the stock to an estimated 8.5 million in 2000, suggesting that 3 per cent of foreigners present in the US are unauthorized residents. Most Americans believe that immigration is in their country’s national interest – immigrants arrive to improve themselves and thereby strengthen the US, hence the motto e pluribus unum (‘Out of many, one’). However, polls conducted in the 1980s and 1990s found that most Americans believed that legal immigration should be reduced, and that more should be done to reduce illegal immigration.
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