Ongoing Comprehensive Immigration Reform Legislation and Lessons from 1986 Immigration Reform
This country witnessed another comprehensive immigration reform in 1986 under the name of Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), legalizing en masse undocumented aliens. This legislation turned out to be a failure when it comes to the nation's policy on border security and immigration enforcement as 13 million undocumented aliens have flooded into this country during the 20-year period of time since the immigration reform. The IRCA failed to prevent flood of undocumented aliens and enforced immigration and the Congress should analyze carefully the sources of the failure and try to learn the lessons from the IRCA failure.
One of key reasons reportedly lies with the IRCA's failure to expand avenues for "legal immigration" to meet the U.S. economy's continuing demand for workers. According to the Immigration Policy Center report, no amount of encorcement, either at the border or in the work place, can compensate for the inadequacy of existing legal limits on immigration to the U.S. Thus unless legal channels of immigration are revamped to accomodate the actual demand for immigration workers in the U.S., the border and immigration enforcement efforts will continue to be undermined by economic reality.
The lesson from the failure of IRCA immigration reform is that the long term solution for the illegal immigration and the border/immigration enforcement lies with the adequate reform of the "legal" immigration system such that the system will provide adequate supply of the required workers to meet the market demand of the country's economy. However, unfortunately, the current comprehensive immigration reform debates in the Congress and the nation are indeed misdirected in that just as the IRCA, the reform debates are almost totally focused on the legalization of the undocumented aliens. The lessons from the IRCA clearly dictates that the comprehensive immigration reform should focus on "legal immigration reform" as the long-term and ultimate solutions to the illegal immigration problem. Even though there is a clear concensus in the Congress and in the public opinion that current legal immigration system has a serious flaw failing to meet the demands for the foreign workers, particularly high-end workers, the legal immigration reform including immigrant quota adjustment has benn placed in the back-seat of the "reform debate wagon." Unless the Congress quickly learns the lesson from the IRCA and redirects its focus to the right reform, "legal immigration," the Congress and the political leaders will repeat the same mistake and failure of the IRCA reform in 1986 and should politically pay price to the constituents for such mistakes and failures in the coming elections. In this regard, the study of May 2006 which has just been released by the Immigration Policy Center is very timely and there should be a massive campaign to educate the public and the political leaders with the importance of lessons to learn from IRCA. Read on.
( http://www.ailf.org/ipc/infocus/2006_comprehensive.pdf )
This does not change our strong support for both legal immigration reform and legalization of undocumented aliens. We just want to keep the record straight and call attention to the issues of legal immigration reform which deserves the center stage of the comprehensive immigration reform debates as the ultimate solutions for the nation's legal and illegal immigration problems.