GAO report finds porous U.S. borders

WASHINGTON, June 16 (UPI) -- U.S. officials testing the difficulty of crossing illegally into the United States from Mexico say they successfully entered the county 93 percent of the time.

Undercover investigators said in a U.S. Government Accountability Office report that they were able to enter the country easily merely by using oral assertions and counterfeit identity documents in 42 attempts from 2003-07, the Deseret Morning News newspaper in Salt Lake City reported Monday.

The GAO report noted that "as a result of the tests, GAO concluded that terrorists could use counterfeit identification to pass through most of the tested ports of entry with little chance of being detected," the newspaper said.

The GAO report was released only a week after a study performed by the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies of the University of California, San Diego, which concluded after more than 3,000 interviews with illegal migrants from four Mexican states that fewer than half of them had been apprehended even once and that nearly all of them got through eventually, the Deseret Morning News reported.