population to “resemble the world” rather than the nation that had grown out of the thirteen British colonies (and thousands of black slaves).
By the end of the twentieth century, the policies put into effect by the Immigration Act of 1965 had greatly changed the face of the American population. Whereas in the 1950s, more than half of all immigrants were Europeans, and just 6 percent were Asians. By the 1990s, only 16 percent were Europeans, and 31 percent were of Asian descent, while the percentages of Latino and African immigrants had also jumped significantly. Between 1965 and 2000, the highest number of immigrants (4.3 million) to the US came from Mexico, in addition to some 1.4 million from the Philippines, Korea, the Dominican Republic, India, Cuba, and Vietnam. They were also leading sources of immigrants, each sending between seven hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand over this period.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, illegal immigration was a constant source of political debate as immigrants continue to pour into the United States, mostly by land routes through Canada and the Southwest border. The Immigration Reform Act in 1986 attempted to address the issue by providing better enforcement of immigration policies and creating more possibilities to seek legal immigration. The act included two amnesty programs for unauthorized aliens and collectively granted amnesty to more than three million illegal aliens.
Nearly everyone admits that the 1986 amnesty was a humane act that was supposed to be a “one-time legislation.”
IRCA is generally known for three key components, which the bill’s sponsors fondly referred to as a three-legged stool. The three legs of the stool were tougher border enforcement, penalties for employers who hired unauthorized immigrants, and legalization for unauthorized immigrants who had been in the US for five years or more. Supporters of the bill saw all three components as being critically important to solving the problem of illegal immigration.
IRCA’s proponents stressed that increasing border control and immigration enforcement had to be the first leg of the new immigration enforcement regime. To accomplish it, the law established new criminal penalties for fraudulent use of identity documents and for knowingly bringing in, harboring, or transporting unauthorized immigrants. It also increased appropriations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which handled immigration enforcement, and for the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), which adjudicated deportation cases. In addition, the law called on the INS to increase the number of Border Patrol agents by 50 percent from its 1986 level.
The second component of IRCA was to establish, for the first time, federal, civil, and criminal penalties for employers who knowingly hired unauthorized immigrants. Through a new employment verification regime, the I-9 process, employers were required to verify and document the lawful status and authorization to work of all new hires, including US citizens.
In addition, to ensure that “foreign-looking” workers were not subject to discrimination, IRCA made it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against a job applicant based on his or her national origin or citizenship status. The law created the office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices in the Department of Justice, which investigates and prosecutes claims of discrimination.
The bill’s legalization provisions—the third leg—were presented as a onetime measure that would “wipe the slate clean” of the problem of illegal immigration, given strengthened border and new employer enforcement.
Often referred to as amnesty, the legalization allowed unauthorized immigrants who had been continuously present in the United States since January 1, 1982, to apply for temporary, and later permanent, legal status if they met certain conditions. Such applicants could eventually qualify for US citizenship. A separate program allowed workers who had performed seasonal agricultural work during the twelve-month period ending May 1, 1986, to legalize their status. In signing the bill, President Reagan emphasized that it would enable unauthorized immigrants to come out of the shadows and “step into the sunlight.”
IRCA had an immediate and dramatic effect on the lives of millions of unauthorized immigrants who legalized their status under the law. Approximately 1.6 million individuals legalized their status through the general amnesty provisions, and an additional 1.1 million were legalized through the provisions for special agricultural workers (SAW). In addition, the new permanent residents and US citizens were able to sponsor qualifying relatives through normal immigration channels.
The legalization of IRCA beneficiaries and the admission of their sponsored relatives greatly contributed to the historic rise in family-based immigration that occurred in the 1990s. In particular, the law enabled Mexican national Californians, who constituted roughly 70 percent of IRCA time beneficiaries, to gain a solid foothold in the US legal immigration system. (Migration policy institute, at its twenty-fifth anniversary, the IRCA lives on.)
In retrospect, IRCA’s greatest failing was that it did not anticipate the dynamic nature of the country’s immigration need. Thus, the law provided no legal avenues for increased employment-based immigration, especially for low-skilled workers. This failing, combined with a high demand for low-skilled workers in a growing economy, led to a surge in the unauthorized population in the 1990s and in the early 2000s. By 2007, the US unauthorized population had reached a new peak of twelve million people.
IRCA is considered by many to be a failure. Illegal immigration grew by multiples since amnesty was instituted, while the reasons for the failure are many because few, if any, of the enforcement sanctions embedded in the bill were enforced. That includes fining and even arresting employers who knowingly hired immigrants without work permits. It is common sense to understand that amnesty without enforcement encourages more illegal immigration.
It is also good to note that four years later, the Immigration Act of 1990 modified and expanded the 1965 act as it significantly increased the total immigration limit to seven hundred thousand and increased visas by 40 percent.
The last immigration act we will review is the DACA program.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—or DACA—defers deportation proceedings for two years for qualified individuals who were brought to the United States illegally when they were children. The program also gives those who are approved work authorization, and the approvals can be renewed. DACA was created on June 15, 2012, in an executive action by then president Barack Obama.
In his 2012 announcement, Obama spoke about the failure of Congress to pass the “DREAM Act,” which would have provided a path to citizenship for certain immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. He said that in the absence of congressional action, the Department of Homeland Security would institute a temporary program to defer deportation for “eligible individuals who do not present a risk to national security or public safety.”
He called it “a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people.”
Chapter 2
So Where Are We Today, and Where Do We Go from Here?
“In approaching immigration reform, I believe that we must enact tough, practical reforms… We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace… But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America… The time to fix our broken immigration system is now.”
—Barack Obama (quote from 2008 campaign website)
Illegal migration, how do you measure something that, for the most part, has no concrete numbers? It is rather a subset of another larger number—all immigration.
From 2010 through 2017, the immigration population (legal
