ABSTRACT
The fear that the United States is about to be overrun by unwanted illegal immigrants has a long history, much of it amply described by historians and policy analysts. 1 In the absence of careful research, popular and political opposition to the admission of additional legal immigrants has been justified on the basis of a variety of ad hoc theories and popular impressions of the behavior of undocumented immigrants. Demographers or other social scientists who have attempted to empirically examine the accuracy of such expectations have generally had to rely on relatively crude measures of border apprehensions as the primary dependent variable.
