Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [62]
Conservative critics of the Senate bill worried that the interior enforcement provisions, which called for cracking down on employers who hire illegals, would never be enforced, and that the rest amounted to rewarding people who’d broken the law by entering the country illegally. Anything short of requiring 12 million illegal immigrants, regardless of whether they’d been in the country twenty months or twenty years, to leave was denounced loudly and repeatedly as “amnesty.” And once amnesty entered the discussion, the discussion was over, as far as the restrictionists were concerned. They argued that we already tried amnesty, with the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986 (ICRA), and it didn’t reduce illegal border crossings. In fact, they said, it encouraged them, and now we have at least four times as many illegals as we did twenty years ago.
Ed Meese, a former attorney general under President Reagan and a critic of the Senate bill, laid this out in a New York Times op-ed, where he wrote, “Like the amnesty bill of 1986, the current Senate proposal would place those who have resided illegally in the United States on a path to citizenship, provided they meet a similar set of conditions and pay a fine and back taxes.” Like so many other opponents of the bill, Meese didn’t say what, exactly, should be done with the 12 million illegals already here, given that the public has shown no appetite for deporting them. He just wanted to reiterate that “the 1986 act did not solve our illegal immigration problem” and dismiss the 2007 Senate bill as, by and large, a replica of what Congress passed two decades earlier.
Meese mentioned in passing that there was “widespread document fraud” and “a failure of political will” to crackdown on businesses under ICRA. In fact the decision to deputize business owners as immigration agents was disastrous. In his discussion of the 1986 law in A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg says that the strategy was “doomed from the start.” Employer sanctions had been touted politically since the 1950s as an effective deterrent to illegal immigration, but few labor economists thought they’d actually work. Why? Supply and demand. “[T]he flow across the border was largely shaped by economic conditions on both sides,” writes Zolberg, “and these powerful ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors outweighed the costs that sanctions imposed on either employers or employees.”
But in addition to being at odds with Economics 101, the 1986 law added mounds of red tape to the process of starting and running a company in the United States—the type of protectionist hurdles that the left normally champions. The new regulations “entailed a wholesale transformation of American business practices, requiring each of the country’s 7 million employers to maintain on file for three years new forms attesting that they had checked the work eligibility and identification documents of every employee,” writes Zolberg. “On the government side, enforcement entailed a monumental and unprecedented joint undertaking by the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice, for which they lacked organizational capacity, and failed to obtain adequate funding, in keeping with the White House’s thorough lack of sympathy for any expansion of the regulatory apparatus.”
That would be the Reagan White House, by the way. When Meese and other restrictionist conservatives lament the “lack of political will” under Reagan to increase regulations and raid businesses for hiring willing workers, free-market proponents say, “Good for the Gipper.” Yes, Reagan signed a bill that included employer sanctions. He operated at the nexus of ideas