Herbert A. Weiss Immigration Law Blog on Lawyers.com

The November 14 edition of El Diario reminded me that this week marked the 25^th anniversary of the adoption of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, more commonly known as IRCA.  President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law.  Its chief sponsors in the Congress were Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and New Jersey Congressman Peter Rodino who chaired the House Judiciary Committee (from May through July 1974) during the Nixon impeachment hearings.

IRCA was a game-changing piece of legislation.  It had two main features.  The first was the amnesty it gave to millions of undocumented immigrants in the form of a two-step process involving obtaining temporary legalization followed by the ability to acquire lawful permanence after an appropriate waiting period.  The second feature was the adoption of employer sanctions that penalized U.S. employers for the act of employing undocumented workers.  It imposed civil fines and even criminal prosecution if there was a pattern of unlawful hiring. 

Both of IRCA’s two main features were favored by different constituencies.  The consolidation of the two features into one piece of legislation amounted to a mutual trade-off in the sense that the adoption of one without the other would have been a political impossibility.  Those who were hard-core anti-immigration would never have accepted an amnesty without employer sanctions.  Those who were pro-amnesty could never have hoped to receive IRCA’s generous legalization benefits without accepting the reality of greater enforcement to deter unlawful immigration.  In the end, close to three million undocumented aliens according to El Diario were able to receive green card status through IRCA’s beneficent provisions.

The editorial in El Diario reminded readers that even a staunch conservative like President Reagan was a strong supporter of amnesty.  Reagan was not soft on immigration enforcement, but he felt that the resolution of the country’s immigration problems should not involve the construction of fences along the border.  He also did not see the undocumented as an unmitigated drag on our country and noted that in many ways the undocumented had contributed something of real benefit to the country. 

Most people today realize that
IRCA’s employer sanctions provisions have been less than a stellar
success.  In reality they have appeared
to do little to stem the tide of unlawful immigration, and employers and the
undocumented have learned to adjust their behavior to avoid its penalties.  One can argue endlessly about who is to blame
for the failure of employer sanctions, but the truth is that there is plenty of
blame to go around on all sides.  The
issue of unlawful immigration is quite complex and defies easy solutions.  Gathering sufficient public support for any
one side of the immigration divide has always been difficult.

In the end IRCA has a legacy of
mixed success.  Most of the undocumented
aliens whom it legalized are leading productive, law-abiding lives, doing the
best they can to fit into the American way of life.  The history of employer sanctions, of course,
is a different story.  Only time will
tell whether the country can pull together and pass a new law that brings our
borders under control yet enables the normalization of life here for the
millions of undocumented who only want to be part of the American success
story.