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Page 10 The Skanner August 24, 2016 News Hunting for the Root of Immigration Woes? Look Back a Few Decades By Alicia A. Caldwell Associated Press WASHINGTON— For more than a decade, lawmakers have been pointing at their counterparts to take the blame for what just about everyone agrees is a broken immigration system. Republicans say President Barack Obama’s immigration enforcement pol- icies encourage more people to sneak into the country. Democrats blame Re- publicans for blocking legislation that would allow people already here to gain legal status and create a path for future, legal immigration. But whatever speciic policies are be- ing fought over now, immigration ex- perts say the problem took root at least 30 years ago, when President Ronald Reagan signed a 1986 immigration law that has become known as the “Reagan Amnesty” and allowed roughly 3 mil- lion people in the country illegally to gain legal status. The 1986 law was intended to create a new era of enforcement, including strict enforcement of the new law that barred employers from hiring workers who don’t have permission to work in the United States. But that never fully “ system, build a wall along the border with Mexico and perhaps deport many of the estimated 11 million people liv- ing in the country illegally. But this week he has indicated he may back of from that idea. “We’re going to build the wall, and we’re going to stop it. It’s going to end,” Trump said earlier this year. “We’re go- ing to have a big, beautiful wall.” Democratic presidential nomi- nee Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has pledged to push comprehensive immi- gration reform and to act on her own, as Obama has, if Congress doesn’t ap- prove such a measure. Trump and Clinton have laid the blame for the current state of immigra- tion — and the estimated 11 million peo- ple living and, in many cases, working illegally in the United States — on the other party. But experts disagree. “I think there’s a lot of blame to go around and spread around for de- cades,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director for Center For Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank de- scribes itself as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant.” ‘’There isn’t one per- son responsible.” I think there’s a lot of blame to go around and spread around for decades. There isn’t one person responsible materialized. Immigration laws were overhauled again in 1990 under Republican Pres- ident George H.W. Bush and again in 1996 under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Obama has tried in his eight years in oice to overhaul them once again, but nothing has passed. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said he will ix the Instead, he said, the problem lies in how the Immigration Control and Re- form Act of 1986 was implemented. He described the passage of the bill as something of a “con-job” that allowed millions of immigrants in the coun- try illegally to have legal status with a promise of workplace enforcement and other measures to curb future ille- gal immigration. But that didn’t happen, he said. And AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS, FILE Immigration experts say current problems date back at least 30 years, with Reagan’s policy shift In this April 18, 2016 ile photo, supporters of fair immigration reform dance in front of the Supreme Court in Washington. For more than a decade lawmakers have been pointing to their counterparts to take the blame for what just about everyone agrees is a broken immigration system. there was little incentive to follow through on promises of strict work- place enforcement, he said, once mil- lions of people were legalized. “I deinitely view this as the 30-year problem,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service under Bill Clinton and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Wash- ington. Meissner said the 1986 bill was in- tended to “clear the decks” of most peo- ple living in the country illegally while curtailing future illegal immigration. But thirty years ater the amnesty bill became law the stringent workplace enforcement many expected, and man- dated use of the government’s E-Verify system for employers to check the legal work status of prospective hires, is still being debated by lawmakers and the business community. Multiple itera- tions of federal legislation to require employment veriication have been de- feated in Congress. Meissner said the ability of people in the country illegally to continue to ind work during the economic boom of the 1990s was a signiicant incentive for more to come. And while an average of about 1.3 mil- lion people a year were caught crossing the border illegally over the decade of the 1990s, the Border Patrol was rela- tively small, not growing above a force of 10,000 until 2002. Meissner says part of the problem was the two immigration laws that fol- lowed in 1990 and 1996 that she said did very little to create a legal path to the United States for low-skilled workers. The government does have a pair of visa programs for seasonal agriculture workers and others who are considered seasonal, nonagricultural workers, but Meissner and other critics of the pro- gram argue that it is not suicient. “There is no line to get into,” Meiss- ner said. “This is why at the end of the day we need updated laws, we need im- migration reform.” Instead, she said, the focus was on enforcement and making it easier to deport immigrants in the country ille- gally. As that happened, the estimated pop- ulation of people living in the country illegally rose from a few million in the late 1980s and early 1990s to today’s es- timated 11 million people. The focus on enforcement may also have created an inadvertent incen- tive for immigrants in the U.S. illegal- ly to stay in the country for fear that it would be harder if not impossible to get back in if they let, said Stuart Anderson, executive director at the non-partisan National Foundation for American Policy. Many people made the decision to stay and try to avoid federal law en- forcement as long as they could, he said.
