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 and illegal) has grown from 40 million to 44.5 million, or an 11.5 percent increase.
According to Pew Research Center 2016 estimates, there were 34.4 million lawful immigrants, 10.7 million illegal immigrants, and 2.1 million temporary lawful residents.
The Center of Immigration studies put a record 44.5 million in the country by 2017, counting both legal and illegal, and that number shows that one of seven US residents are immigrants, the highest percentage since 1910.
The Migration Policy Institute shows 43.7 million immigrants by 2016, with 11.5 million being illegal. Also, one-fifth of the entire world’s immigrants lived in the US in 2017.
The Center for American Progress professes that today, there are 43.3 million immigrants in the country, with 11.1 million illegal immigrants aboard and 1.7 million with temporary visas.
With all that said, see disclaimer below from one of the institutes.
Note: MPI is among a small number of organizations that generate estimates of the unauthorized population because the Census Bureau does not. It is important to acknowledge that the estimates issued by MPI and others (including the DHS Office of Immigration Statistics, Pew Research Center, and Center for Migration Studies of New York) are based on different methodologies and data sources. Hence, the estimates are not fully comparable.
Then in November of 2018, a report from Yale University School of Management shocked the arena with a new extrapolation of the data showing that in actuality, there are twenty-two million illegal immigrants residing in the US.
As the summary of their report stated, “After running 1,000,000 simulations of the model, the researchers’ 95% probability range is 16 million to 29 million, with 22.1 million as the mean.”
According to the United States Border Patrol statistics, there were 3,070,068 illegal immigration apprehensions on the Southwestern border from 2010 to 2017. That’s an average of 31,979 a month during that time.
On Thursday, 21st of February 2019, Steve Camerota, research director for the Center of Immigration Studies, stated, “A half-million new people settle illegally in the United States each year, marking numbers that are roughly equivalent to the population of Atlanta.”
“The five hundred thousand figure doesn’t necessarily mean the border,” Camerota told Fox News’s Fox & Friends. “That can include people that