NumbersUSA communicated with citizens in more than two dozen communities where immigration laws are violated openly and without apparent consequence.

The general mood and feeling of helplessness we found is perhaps best described in a May 7, 2001, Newsday article by Bob Weimer, a columnist for the Long Island Newspaper. He was specifically writing about the Long Island community of Farmingville where citizens have organized and met repeatedly with the INS and every other level of government--to no avail. Weimer describes the current scene in Farmingville, but he could easily be describing a hundred other communities:

"The [INS] service's well-documented inability to do anything about the rising influx of undocumented aliens on Long Island demonstrates a complete bureaucratic breakdown. It has failed to perform its mission.

"The word goes south; the aliens come north, and anarchy spreads and becomes routine. Every day in a thousand ways laws are broken. Congress made it a crime to aid, abet, conceal or induce an alien to enter and/or reside in the United States illegally.

"Farmingville teems with undocumented aliens, but Suffolk police, state officials and the hopeless INS manage consistently to look elsewhere while immigration law, tax law, labor law and local housing and sanitary codes are flouted. Landlords pack the aliens into hazardous and substandard housing. Contractors work them off the books, thereby avoiding all the nasty little charges and levies associated with legal labor transactions.

"Federal and state laws are broken in a thousand different ways every day at hiring sites on Long Island. [After all the efforts of citizens to persuade the INS to enforce the law] nothing has changed. The influx continues. The burden on the town's worn-out housing stock mounts. Local officials, state officials and federal officials continue to avoid the issue.

"The people of Farmingville feel they have been abandoned. They feel the cold wind of anarchy."

The evidence is strong that, except for deporting those who have committed aggravated felonies, the INS indeed has abandoned most American communities and left them outside the rule of law as far as immigration laws are concerned. Citizens cannot understand how illegal immigrants are allowed to openly gather in large numbers without any attempt by the INS to apprehend them, or at least disrupt their lawbreaking. To most citizens, the INS need never do any special investigating or tracking to apprehend scores of illegal aliens every day in most cities. They merely have to go where major numbers of illegal immigrants are well known to gather.

From Houston, a landlord described to me how the apartment complex she and her husband owned--as well as other neighboring complexes--began to be filled by illegal aliens. The owners called the INS with the information. "We got help only when there were murders," she said. Eventually, most of the residents were illegal aliens, living openly in a sanctuary where the federal law apparently refused to reach.

In Frankfort, Indiana, the newspaper reported that the head of a local immigrant services group said that, of 3,500 foreign-born residents of the area, about 70 percent are illegal. The uninitiated, upon seeing so much lawbreaking openly acknowledged in an easy-to-control rural area, might expect to see federal vans arriving the next day to start loading up the lawbreakers. But nothing happened. Illegal aliens are so sure that INS will never make them leave the country that they stage parades and rallies calling attention to their illegal status as they push for government benefits and U.S. citizenship.

Perhaps the greatest outrage to American citizens is the open congregating of illegal workers on their communities' streets. Although there are some legal foreign workers mixed in, the undocumented status of many or most is widely known by all in the community. Said one citizen: "In every job I have ever had, I have always been asked to prove my citizenship/legal residency. Can you tell me why the hundreds of day laborers that converge each day at the West Los Angeles site three blocks from my apartment do not have to do the same? The INS deliberately ignores this blatant, daily lawbreaking."

Refusal of the INS to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies is another source of bitterness. I spent six months in 1996 on a book tour for my immigration book published by W.W. Norton & Company. On nearly every call-in radio show, a local policeman, sheriff's deputy or highway patrol would call and tell me a story about apprehending a van-load or a worksite-full of illegal aliens, calling INS and then being told to release them if they hadn't committed a major felony. The problem seemed especially pronounced in states like Pennsylvania not known for high illegal alien traffic.

Increasingly, local law enforcement won't even bother paying attention to the illegality of residents or call the INS because of years of neglect by that agency. This breeds even more contempt among the citizenry for the idea that they live in a society of laws. A TV photographer in Georgia told me that he has gone on enough INS operations that he believes he can accurately spot cars filled with illegal aliens rather than legal foreign workers. He said, "I once followed a conversion van that was an obvious load of illegal aliens. I followed the van for 65 miles and called at least five law enforcement agencies, but not one would respond. I passed three patrol cars along the Interstate and called their dispatcher who would not dispatch them. I have tried to report the same at other times and had the same reaction."

Excerpted from Testimony to the U.S. Congress, May 15, 2001, by Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA.com