Page 10 The Skanner August 24, 2016
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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.