“You had a wink-and-a-nod system, where the employer was in compliance and the [illegal immigrant] could find a job,” Meissner said.
“The only real beneficiaries of some of the IRCA reforms was the counterfeiting industry,” Martin added.
Immigrants living in and leaving the United States.
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Simpson and Mazzoli had advocated a new “identifier,” using biometrics or tamper-proof cards. But something so close to a national ID card drew opposition from civil libertarians on the left and the right, as well as concerns about the practicality of issuing new identification to 250 million Americans.
That issue, however, is certain to be revisited.
The set of principles drawn up by a bipartisan group of senators, which is expected to serve as a starting point for comprehensive immigration overhaul, promises: “Our proposal will create an effective employment verification system which prevents identity theft and ends the hiring of future unauthorized workers.”
That would include coming up with what the senators described as “non-forgeable electronic means” to determine an employee’s legal status before he or she is hired.
Questions about legal entry
Another area where past reform efforts — including the 1986 law — have fallen short is on the question of legal immigration.
Unlike many politicians of both parties today, Reagan was unafraid to use the most loaded word in the immigration debate.
“I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here, even though some time back, they may have entered illegally,” Reagan said during a 1984 presidential debate.
The law offered legalization to those who had been in the country for at least five years but excluded those who had resided here more briefly — leaving what Meissner called “a nucleus of today’s illegal population.”
If a new legalization measure is passed, experts say, it is likely to give amnesty to those who entered the country illegally much closer to the moment that a bill is enacted.
More important, the 1986 law did nothing to address the future flow of immigrants, which increased dramatically during the next decade’s economic boom.
A 1990 law did increase the limits on legal immigration. But those quotas did not keep pace with the drastic changes in the labor market or the desire of many immigrants to reunite with family members they had left behind.
Revamping the legal immigration system is an area that has had little debate. The key, experts said, will be coming up with a system that can accurately gauge the demands of the labor market, sorting out actual labor shortages from cases in which businesses are simply unwilling to pay enough to attract legal residents.
“We have no mechanisms to make rapid changes in the legal immigration system, to meet family demands and to meet employer demands,” Martin said. “If it continues to fail, people will find a way around it.”
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