The Democrats may have to learn the lessons of IRCA all over again.
Today is the 40th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, the big amnesty-for-enforcement deal that was supposed to fix illegal immigration for the future.
How’d that work out?
With the incoming 120th Congress far more radical on immigration policy than any predecessor — ever — that question is of more than theoretical interest.
The promise of IRCA was betrayed, and that betrayal has poisoned the immigration debate to this day. The betrayal was not the amnesty itself — giving scofflaws a pass is never appealing, but it is sometimes expedient.
The betrayal stems from the fact that those pushing for the amnesty did not — and never intended to — honor the “grand bargain” that the law represented. The enforcement that was the price for amnesty — specifically the first-ever enactment of “employer sanctions” sanctions, the prohibition on the employment of illegal immigrants — was never meant to be carried out.
That isn’t speculation or the imputation of motives to a political opponent. In 1991, once all the nearly 3 million illegal aliens amnestied by IRCA had received at least provisional legal status, two senators who had voted against the 1986 law because of its ban on hiring illegals, along with an important lobbying organization that had also opposed it, launched a campaign to welsh on the deal and make it legal again to employ illegal aliens.
Republican Orrin Hatch and Democrat Edward Kennedy co-sponsored legislation to undo the deal, teaming up with the National Council of La Raza (whose racist name has since been cleaned up to UnidosUS).
And they would have gotten away with it, too, except for one Coretta Scott King, who joined half a dozen other civil rights and labor leaders in publicly opposing repeal because it would have a “devastating impact . . . on the economic condition of un- and semi-skilled workers — a disproportionate number of whom are African American and Hispanic”.
So the Hatch-Kennedy-La Raza effort to formally restore what was called the “Texas Proviso” (authorizing the employment of illegals) failed, but only on paper. While the law remained on the books, enforcement essentially stopped; by 2004, only three employers nationwide were fined for employing illegal aliens.
After the final failure of the George W. Bush administration’s amnesty push in 2007 — precisely because no one believed the bill’s enforcement promises would be honored — DHS began a belated effort to show it could be trusted to enforce immigration laws. It rolled out E-Verify and tried to have ICE coordinate with the Social Security Administration when it would send out “no-match letters” to employers who submitted payroll information that didn’t match SSA’s files.
Alas, it was all too little too late, both because no one believed the Bush administration was serious, and because shortly afterwards the Obama administration arrived and launched its own transparently fake effort to show that it was serious about enforcement. No one believed that either, which is why the Obama administration’s Gang of Eight amnesty legislation also failed.
So, did amnesty supporters learn the lessons of IRCA and give up on the approach of amnesty now in return for promises of enforcement in the future? Well, sort of. At the beginning of the Biden administration the new crowd in the White House introduced legislation that didn’t even pretend to include any enforcement measures. And even if it had, the chances they’d enforce them was zero, as demonstrated by the next four years.
In between efforts to jail their political opponents and dismantle the Constitution, Democrats in the 120th Congress are likely to sponsor more amnesty bills, perhaps ones even more extreme than the Biden one. Here’s the actual immigration platform of the DSA, the source of grassroots energy among Democrats today:
End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.
This is not a fringe view. I wrote in these pages 20 years ago that open immigration was becoming an immutable value of the left, and it’s only gotten worse since then.
So if IRCA and its echoes down to this day suggest that “comprehensive immigration reform” — packaging a general amnesty with promises of enforcement — will fail, what should that teach us about how to proceed?
- Do the immigration enforcement first (though the current mix of body-armor enforcement vs. briefcase enforcement should probably be recalibrated).
- Then trade specific, concrete legislative changes for targeted, piecemeal amnesties, like one for Dreamers or for longtime TPS recipients, or for illegal-alien spouses of U.S. citizens. Rather than promises of enforcement, any piecemeal, non-comprehensive amnesty deal should include some combination of this non-exclusive list of needed changes: a numerical cap on immigration parole, a ban on the discretionary issuance of work permits and Social Security numbers, a narrower asylum law, mandatory E-Verify, or abolition of the visa lottery — all things that can’t simply be undone by executive order.
The specific mix of targeted, partial amnesties in exchange for substantive statutory changes (rather than enforcement promises) could take many forms, but the point is to not give away all your leverage through a general amnesty in exchange for a bag of promises that can be easily ignored or negated in the future. Such an approach avoids the IRCA trap and is more likely to actually succeed, both politically and administratively.
In fact, the White House during Trump I backed legislation of this sort, which would have amnestied Dreamers in exchange for a number of reforms, including asylum limits, E-Verify, and ending chain migration.
Would the White House back something along these lines in the wake of the shellacking Republicans endured this week? Maybe. But would Democrats play along? Almost certainly not, despite the professed desire to help long-term illegal aliens. After Tuesday, they imagine themselves the vanguard of history and in two years they’ll be able to enact the full DSA immigration platform.
Given that public support for immigration control remains strong (if not for Trump’s current approach), the Democrats may have to learn the lessons of IRCA all over again.