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Tamar Jacoby, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in a July 26, 2005 hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary entitled "Comprehensive Immigration Reform," stated:

“The problem is that our immigration quotas provide so few opportunities for most of them to enter the country legally. …there are only 5,000 visas available for unskilled foreigners seeking year-round work. A Mexican without family in the U.S. who wants to do something other than farm work has virtually no legal way to enter the country. And even a man with family here must wait from 6 to 22 years for a visa, depending on what kind of relatives he has and what their legal status is.

This is the heart of the current crisis. We need the labor; foreign workers want the jobs. But there are no legal channels – so inevitably people come illegally. And it is this mismatch – the mismatch between the size of the flow and our quotas – that creates most of the problems we associate with immigration.”

July 26, 2005