Most people don’t, and haven’t, had time to follow all the ins and outs of immigration policy in Washington. It’s convoluted and complex, and its responsible for our current immigration mess. Joe Guzzardi does a good job of summarizing the current ins and outs. From Guzzardi at theburningplatform.com:
Amnesty spawns illegal immigration, a talking point enforcement advocates repeatedly make. Because the math conclusively proves that amnesty leads to more illegal immigration, the pro-amnesty contingent rarely counters. Here are the statistics: In 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, 2.7 million people were amnestied, including those covered as part of Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) provisions.
Today, the estimated illegal immigrant population is 11 to 12 million, curiously, the same popularly cited statistic for roughly the last 20 years. To be sure, not every illegal immigrant that resided in the U.S. in 1986 applied. Still, it’s safe to assume that the illegal immigrant population has increased by at least five million during the last three decades.
The major reason that illegal immigration grew is that Congress never delivered on its promise to implement interior enforcement and to crack down on employers who hired workers present illegally. And despite widespread congressional insistence back in 1986 that IRCA would be the last amnesty, six others have passed since then, including the 2000 Late Amnesty for 400,000 illegal immigrants who claimed that, for various reasons, they couldn’t participate in IRCA.
Having learned nothing from IRCA’s fallout – that amnesty encourages illegal immigration and that chain migration from previous amnesties continues today – the U.S. House of Representatives is poised to vote on two legalization bills this week, one dramatically better than the other, but neither perfect.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Robert Goodlatte introduced his bill which would codify deferred action for childhood arrivals, end the visa lottery, cancel some chain migration categories, and provide full funding for a border wall. Also, parents of U.S. citizens could only relocate on nonimmigrant visas that would not lead to citizenship, and with evidence of pre-paid health insurance. A downside to Goodlatte’s proposal is that it transfers the 55,000 lottery visas to employment-based categories, already bulging at the seams.
To continue reading: Paul Ryan Pushing Towards Amnesty? The Latest in the Immigration Fight
