The Immigration and Naturalization Service has released a new report which confirms what millions of Americans have been saying for a long while - that the sovereignty of our nation is at risk from a flood of illegal immigrants who are usurping the benefits of being American citizens.

The INS report indicates that the number of illegal immigrants who live within our borders has increased to about 5 million, and is swelling by about 275,000 a year.

According to this newly released data, the illegal popu-lation has increased 28 percent in the past four years, and illegal immigrants now represent as much as 2 percent of the popu-lation.

Ken Hamblin is a syndicated columnist. This article is © 1997, New York Times News Service and is reprinted by permission. I suggest that this new data be accepted for what it is - evidence of the implementation of liberal policies in Washington and aimed at doing away altogether with immigration restrictions, perhaps even doing away with the border between the United States and Mexico.

If that seems absurd, how else can we explain such a flagrant disregard for our immigration statutes?"...the effort to prevent illegal immigration has been reduced to little more than a recreational game of socio-political dodgeball between would-be illegals and the sympathetic U.S. government."

The truth is that the effort to prevent illegal immigration has been reduced to little more than a recreational game of socio-political dodgeball between would-be illegals and the sympathetic U.S. government.

Rather than enforcing the law by expelling illegals, the liberals who hold sway over the INS are likely to send them - particu-larly those who fit into the romanticized category of the beleaguered Mexican poor - into the waiting arms of some human-rights group that enter-tains the notion that Mexicans still have a legal claim to the Southwestern United States.

This bizarre notion has been advanced into mainstream poli-tics by a ragamuffin cadre of political activists.

Their stance would be humor-ous were it not encouraged directly by generally liberal media bemoaning the circum-stances of the runaway Mexican peasants. This support is secon-ded by turncoat conservatives such as former Housing Secre-tary Jack Kemp and former Education Secretary Bill Bennett.

Kemp and Bennett contri-buted to this absurd extremist movement by siding with the opposition to California's Propo-sition 187, a 1994 referendum intended to free the state's overburdened taxpayers from footing the bill to support illegal aliens flowing across their state's borders.

At the time, according to the Urban Institute, Californians supported some 15,000 illegals in their prisons. They paid another $166.5 million annually for emergency medical care, and $1.3 billion annually to educate illegal immigrants' children.

The federal government re-fused to reimburse Californians for these unjust costs. Believing that they had been abandoned by the federal government and by opportunistic politicians such as Kemp and Bennett, California voters overwhelmingly voted Proposition 187 into law.

However, that victory was stolen from them when state and federal judges recently ruled that illegal immigrants could not be denied services and that their children could not be expelled from California schools.

Is it any wonder that the illegal population in the United States continues to rise?

The INS report spotlighting the ever-increasing number of illegals represents a glaring failure of the liberal Immigration Reform Act of 1986.

This grandiose plan granted amnesty to almost 3 million illegal immigrants living in the country at the time. It was supposed to be an act of compassion which, according to liberal logic, would stem the flow of Mexicans across the border from that time forward.

Once again, though, time has proven what the average American already knew and could have told the politicians in Washington: cruel as it may seem, we cannot afford compas-sion - the more lenient and kind-hearted we become, the more illegals Mexico flushes north for us to support.

The proof is in the pudding - or in the latest INS report to be precise.

"The illegal population has now reached the level that it was before the 1986 amnesty," says a spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies quoted in the Washington Post. "The past ten years have essentially canceled out the entire effect of the amnesty."

The fact is, we don't need any new political solutions. This is a matter of law. And the American people know - even if the Washington politicians don't - that all we have to do is enforce the law.