How self-sufficient are today's immigrants, how skilled are they and how do they fit into American society? The answers to these questions are highly significant to the making of immigration policy.

• Immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- have been growing as a share of the total population to about 9 percent in 1994 from a recent low of 4.8 percent in 1970.

• The U.S. now admits about 700,000 new, legal immigrants each year.

• More than one in four of all immigrants lived below the poverty line last year -- compared to 13 percent of native-born Americans, according to the Census Bureau.

• About one-third of immigrants did not have health insurance -- compared to 13.6 percent of those who were native-born.

Some contend that America's growing welfare state has lured immigrants in search of handouts. While today's immigrants have more education than their predecessors, their educational levels have not kept pace with those of the native-born. Moreover, experts say, the newcomers tend to be either low-skilled or high-skilled -- with few in the middle.

• On average, recent immigrants earn about one-third less than natives, according to George Borjas of Harvard University.

• He found that 21 percent of immigrant households are on welfare, compared to 14 percent of native households -- with immigrants tending to stay on welfare longer.

• He estimates that 30 percent of the growth in the gap between rich and poor in America can be attributed to the impact of immigrants.

Mark Regets, an economist with the National Science Foundation, reports that after about ten years in the U.S. recent immigrants are earning wages about equal to those of natives with similar levels of schooling. But since they don't have the same educational levels of Americans overall, an earnings gap may persist for up to four generations.

Barry Chiswick, an economist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, says that while competition for jobs between low-skilled immigrants and low-skilled natives does not seem to disadvantage natives, the immigrants compete for housing -- thus driving up rents -- and the natives move elsewhere.