‘86 Amnesty Frames Immigration Debate

With the U.S. Senate’s approval of a landmark immigration bill last week, setting up a showdown with the House, some policymakers say moving forward depends on looking back.

Twenty years back, to be precise.

In 1986, President Reagan signed a sweeping immigration reform bill featuring, among other things, widespread legalization of illegal immigrants, tougher border enforcement and measures aimed at eliminating the hiring of unauthorized workers. The current Senate proposal includes similar features.

“Here we are again,” said Bill King, who headed up the 1986 amnesty program in the western United States for what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “It’s almost as if today’s politicians are resurrecting the transcripts and speeches from 1986.”

For better or worse, the law has become a key reference point in the current debate about how best to reform a still-dysfunctional immigration system.

The law awarded green cards to 2.7 million migrants, helping them climb out of the shadows and offering them the opportunity to rise into the American middle class.

For people like Apolonia Calderon, a 74-year-old Palm Desert resident, the amnesty was a “blessing” that helped her nearly double her wages and set her on a path to citizenship, which she obtained last month.

But the law failed to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, whose numbers have more than doubled from more than 5 million two decades ago to an estimated 12 million today. Several problems clearly were not resolved: porous borders, spotty employer enforcement and the national hunger for a stable, cheap workforce.

That track record offers lessons to the nation as Senate and House conferees prepare to reconcile their competing versions of immigration legislation in coming weeks. The House bill emphasizes enforcement at the border and in the workplace, and the Senate version, with less stringent enforcement measures, would create a pathway to citizenship for much of the nation’s illegal population.

Critics of the bills say that they lack sufficient money for enforcement in the workplace and that the Senate version creates elaborate criteria for legalization that could be unenforceable and vulnerable to fraud.

In a measure of how the 1986 law figures in the present debate, many critics derisively call the Senate bill “amnesty” legislation, though many defenders reject the term, emphasizing that qualified applicants must, among other things, pay fines and back taxes.

“The principal lesson learned is that if you reward illegal behavior you entice more of it,” said Rosemary Jenks of NumbersUSA, a Virginia-based immigration control group.

Supporters of the bill, however, say it contains major improvements over the 1986 law. One of the most important, they say, is a new program providing 200,000 new temporary visas annually for low-skilled workers. The program recognizes the U.S. demand for foreign labor and seeks to regulate it, they say.

“It’s like the difference between Prohibition and realistic liquor laws,” said Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy, a New York-based think tank.

California farmers, too, hail the Senate proposal for correcting what they say was a key problem of the 1986 amnesty: the widespread exodus of migrant laborers from the fields once they received legal status. The Senate bill requires newly legalized farmworkers to stay in their jobs three to five years before moving to other industries.

“I think the [Senate bill] will work much better for both workers and growers,” said Roy Gabriel, director of labor affairs for the California Farm Bureau. “It will stabilize the workforce and ensure the survival of the agricultural industry.”

Under the 1986 law, illegal immigrants who had lived continuously in the United States since before 1982 were eligible for temporary resident status, and for permanent residency within 18 months after that, if they met certain requirements, including learning English. The program, which took effect in 1987, also covered up to 350,000 people who had worked in U.S. agriculture at least 90 days in each of three years.

Many veterans of the 1986 reform effort agree that the law’s legalization program was, by and large, a success.

Father Michael Kennedy, a Roman Catholic priest who worked at Our Lady Queen of Angels parish near Olvera Street at the time, recalls the joy among his heavily immigrant flock when the amnesty bill passed. Many of his undocumented parishioners got better jobs and visited relatives back home for the first time in years. At last, they could then return to the U.S. without fear of arrest.

“After living for so long without any hope, it was an exciting moment,” he recalled. “Finally, here was an answer to living in limbo land, as we called it.”

Kennedy and his staff helped hundreds of parishioners apply for amnesty, part of a Catholic campaign that some estimate accounted for as many as one-third of the successful applications. By 2001, one-third of the green card holders had become U.S. citizens.

The amnesty dramatically changed lives -- sometimes creating a foothold in the United States not just for illegal immigrants but also for loved ones in their homelands.

Alfredo Ruiz, a 40-year-old Mexican native, earned his contractor’s license, obtained federal loans and went to college, bought a house in Palmdale and became a U.S. citizen. With his future secured, Ruiz paid a coyote to bring his girlfriend, Romana, across the border so they could get married and she, too, could become legal.

“After I got my papers, everything was much better,” he said.

But the amnesty also carried public costs. Some studies found that the newly legalized immigrants, eligible for a wider range of public services, consumed billions more in services than they paid in taxes.

The law’s failure to stop the entry of illegal immigrants disheartened people like Regina Atkins, 56, a South Los Angeles resident. Atkins said immigrants have transformed her neighborhood -- squeezing multiple families into homes and posing competition for jobs.

She opposes another legalization program.

“It’s not fair” to give green cards to lawbreakers, Atkins said. “I don’t think they should be allowed to stay here.”

To implement the 1986 law, immigration officials had only six months to prepare for the onslaught of amnesty applicants. The agency hired about 2,000 employees and opened more than 100 temporary offices.

Among the myriad challenges was persuading illegal immigrants that the program was not a trap to round them up and deport them, said Ernest Gustafson, who was the Los Angeles district director of the INS.

Despite the outreach, many illegal immigrants did not know about the opportunity until it was too late. There was also confusion about who qualified and what was required, he said.

If Congress passes another legalization program, immigration officials should plan a massive publicity campaign and allow enough time for applicants to come forward, he said.

Immigration attorney Bernard Wolfsdorf said the amnesty left out too many illegal immigrants because of the requirement that they had to have lived in the U.S. for at least the previous five years. Some experts estimate that the amnesty benefited only about half of the illegal population, perpetuating worker abuse and leaving largely untouched social networks that attracted more illegal migrants.

“It was sort of like a Band-Aid that didn’t cover the wound,” said Wolfsdorf, national treasurer of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

Fraud was apparently widespread, especially among farmworkers who bought letters from labor contractors, former officials said. Illegal immigrants also became victims of fraud -- by unscrupulous notaries, consultants and attorneys offering to help them through the legalization process for a fee.

David A. North, who assessed the amnesty program for the Ford Foundation in 1989, said stories abounded of people claiming farmworker status who told immigration officials that cotton was purple, cherries were plucked from the ground and ladders were needed to harvest strawberries.

Though some fraud cases were prosecuted, the INS lacked the resources to investigate all suspicious cases, said King, the former immigration official.

To avoid similar problems, experts say any new legalization program would have to require a massive increase in personnel to process the estimated 8 million eligible applicants, along with hundreds of thousands of petitions for family visas and guest worker jobs.

But so far, neither the Senate nor House bill supplies significant new resources, said Jenks of NumbersUSA.

“It’s absolutely absurd to think that [federal officials] can even begin to process any part of the new workload when we know they can’t handle their current load,” Jenks said.

One of the 1986 law’s biggest shortcomings, critics say, was weak enforcement of new bans on hiring illegal immigrants. The bill required employers to ask for legal documents but not to verify their validity -- a loophole that kept migrants crossing the border. Also, critics say fines against employers were too low to serve as a deterrent.

Over the years, workplace raids -- such as those in Georgia onion fields and Nebraska meatpacking plants --were discontinued after sparking a political outcry, Jenks said.

Less than 1% of money devoted to immigration enforcement is directed to workplace crackdowns, and only 127 employers were convicted of hiring undocumented workers last year -- a small fraction of the thousands of businesses thought to be using illegal labor.

Each current proposal seeks to correct the problem of lax employer enforcement by increasing fines for violations and implementing a new worker verification system.

Other flaws in the 1986 law, critics say, were the complex rules and conflicting interpretations of who was eligible for legalization, prompting an avalanche of litigation that continues today.

Peter Schey, a Los Angeles immigration attorney, has filed several suits against the federal government since the law took effect. One of them, which was settled in 2004, successfully challenged the government’s decision to turn away about 250,000 applicants because they had traveled briefly out of the country during the time they were required to be here.

The Senate rejected a proposal by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to simplify the legalization process and allow all illegal immigrants the chance to apply. Instead, the upper house passed a three-tiered system that excludes those here for less than two years.

Ultimately, many experts say the success or failure of any new immigration law will depend as much on how vigorously it is enforced as its actual content.

“Everyone says the devil is in the details, but the devil is in the implementation,” said Michael Fix, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute.

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Contrasting immigration policies

Legalization

1986 law: * Provided temporary resident status for those in the U.S. continuously since before 1982, with permanent residency after 18 months, with learning of minimal English and U.S. civics.

2006 Senate bill: * Provides for people who have been in the United States:

a.) At least five years to seek eventual permanent residency, with payment of back taxes, $3,250 in fines and fees, and learning of English.

b.) Two to five years to go to point of entry at the border and apply to enter legally.

c.) Less than two years to be required to leave.

2006 House bill: * Contains no provisions providing a path to legal residency or citizenship. Makes illegal presence in the country a felony.

**

Enforcement

1986 law: * Increased funding of Immigration and Naturalization Service.

* Provided for an increase in Border Patrol and other inspection and enforcement activities.

* Beefed up penalties for smuggling illegal immigrants.

2006 Senate bill: * Includes hiring an additional 1,000 Border Patrol agents this year, for a total of 3,000 new agents in 2006.

* Authorizes the construction of 370 miles of triple-layer fencing.

2006 House bill: * Makes it a felony to help anyone enter or try to enter the United States illegally.

* Establishes mandatory sentences for human smuggling and for illegal entry after deportation.

* Requires building two-layer fences along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.

**

Employer sanctions

1986 law: * Established employer fines and prison terms for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Fines could be as high as $10,000 per worker after the third offense.

2006 Senate bill: * Requires use of an electronic system within 18 months to verify new hires’ legal status.

* Increases maximum fines to $20,000 per worker and imposes prison time for repeat offenders.

2006 House bill: * Increases maximum fines to $40,000 per violation and imposes up to 30-year prison sentences for repeat offenders.

* Requires use, within six years, of a database to verify the Social Security numbers of all employees.

**

Temporary worker program

1986 law: * Revised and expanded an existing temporary foreign worker program, mostly for farm laborers.

* Provided temporary resident status for up to 350,000 people who had worked in U.S. agriculture at least 90 days in each of three years.

2006 Senate bill: * Creates a special guest worker program for an estimated 1.5 million farmworkers, who could also earn legal permanent residency.

* Provides 200,000 new temporary visas each year for low-skilled workers.

2006 House bill: * Contains no new temporary guest worker program.

Sources: Times reporting; Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report; Associated Press; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986