Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA)

Large-scale immigration and foreign-born populations routinely spur political controversy, and sometimes harsh xenophobic reactions, in receiving countries. Although the United States has been celebrated as an open society offering a “golden door” to all people, the historical reality is that American policymakers began to impose draconian restrictions on immigration when newcomers of unfamiliar racial and ethnic origin sparked nativist backlashes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Starting with Chinese exclusion in the 1880s and followed by the establishment of a literacy test and national origins quotas in the early twentieth century, dominant conceptions of ethnic and racial undesirability dramatically shaped policy outcomes. After the liberalizing reforms of the civil rights era, the ethnic and racial composition of new arrivals changed markedly as Asian and Latin American inflows overshadowed traditional European sources in the 1970s and 1980s. Against this backdrop of “new” immigration, American policymakers focused their attention on a divisive issue most closely associated in the public mind with Mexicans: illegal immigration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) was the culmination of an acrimonious struggle among lawmakers over the issue of “porous borders.” The history of this struggle illuminates how a changing polity resolved contentious debates about race, vulnerable populations, labor, and security, and its outcome cast a long shadow on American immigration reform politics.

Illegal immigration inspired more public concern and media attention than any other migratory issue of the 1970s. Dramatic increases in apprehensions and deportations of undocumented aliens by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were seen as evidence that illegal immigration had reached a crisis level. While 1,608,356 undocumented aliens were deported from 1961 to 1970, the number of deportations rose to 11,833,328 from 1971 to 1980. At the same time, legal immigration soared to 4.5 million in the 1970s, with most immigrants originating from Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean countries. During the early 1970s, Representative Peter Rodino (D-N.J.) championed an employer sanctions law that would punish employers who knowingly hired undocumented aliens. Employer sanctions legislation had been a goal of the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations for years, and pro-labor Democrats like Rodino eagerly led the charge once the issue of illegal immigration assumed prominence on the national agenda. But the proposal placed new strains on old alliances. Major Mexican-American and Latino groups and leaders, joined by civil rights organizations, entered the fray to argue that such penalties would lead to job discrimination against Latinos, legal aliens, and anyone who looked or sounded foreign. Business lobbies also openly challenged the measure as a burdensome and unjustified regulatory demand on employers. In the Senate, bills addressing illegal immigration were held up by Senator James Eastland (D-Miss.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a friend of agricultural interests that relied on Mexican labor.

As Congress became deadlocked on the issue, President Gerald Ford established the cabinet-level Domestic Council Committee on Illegal Aliens to develop policy options for addressing porous borders and the presence of millions of undocumented aliens in the United States. The Domestic Council Committee ultimately proposed a broad reform package that included employer sanctions, tough penalties for smugglers, and amnesty for undocumented aliens residing in the country. The administration of President Jimmy Carter advanced reform legislation in 1977 that reflected a similarly comprehensive package of employer sanctions, amnesty for undocumented aliens, and tougher border controls. Yet the proposal met its demise in Congress, where conflicts between organized labor, employer groups, and Mexican-American, Latino, and civil rights organizations once again derailed reform proposals. Reluctant to take no action, Congress established the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP) in 1978. The committee membership included a cross-section of lawmakers, administration officials, and prominent civilians charged with investigating immigration and the national interest and recommending policy solutions to problems like illegal immigration. SCIRP’s final report endorsed a reform package of stronger border enforcement, legalization of undocumented aliens already living in the United States, and employer sanctions with tough worksite enforcement to weaken the magnet of jobs for migrants not authorized to enter the country. One of the controversial findings of SCIRP was that employer sanctions would not work in the absence of a secure system for verifying employee eligibility, raising the possibility of national identification cards (which would be linked to a national data bank) for all employees eligible to work in the United States. The legalization program recommended by SCIRP was billed as a “one-time only” measure.

Representative Romano Mazzoli (D-Ky.) and Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) took the lead from 1982 through 1986, championing immigration reform legislation that mirrored SCIRP’s recommendations. Their initial efforts encountered fierce resistance on all sides, as opposition to key provisions of the comprehensive legislation remained as formidable in the 1980s as it had in the previous decade. Agricultural lobbies complained that access to unskilled Mexican labor was crucial for economic success, and defenders of reform such as Governor Pete Wilson (RCalif.) proposed legislation that would establish a large farmworker program. Powerful business groups continued to argue that employer sanctions placed undue regulatory burdens on small and large firms alike, and they found support among members of Congress and the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Latino and civil rights organizations, joined by key leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, criticized employer sanctions for their potential to increase ethnic and racial discrimination against Latino job-seekers—or anyone else who might look or sound alien to an employer. Vilma S. Martinez, president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) warned that “well-meaning employers, fearful of government sanctions, will shy away from persons who appear ‘foreign.’ Racist or biased employers will simply use the ‘fear’ of sanctions as an excuse to avoid hiring qualified minorities” (Fallows 1983). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its allies challenged a national identification card linked with a national database on the grounds that it would endanger privacy by exposing confidential financial, medical, or other information. At the same time, the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations steadfastly defended tough employer sanctions backed by tight workplace enforcement. Finally, public opinion polls suggested that most Americans opposed a legalization or amnesty program for undocumented aliens already in the country, prompting several key lawmakers to echo these concerns.

Given these enormous political obstacles, Representative Mazzoli and Senator Simpson were not optimistic about the chances of enacting comprehensive immigration reform in 1985. But then, as Simpson quipped, “a finger on the corpse began to twitch.” At the eleventh hour, a handful of congressional entrepreneurs hammered out a compromise package that included employer sanctions, enhanced Border Patrol resources, a seasonal agricultural worker program, a provision aimed at providing new job antidiscrimination rights for aliens, and a legalization program for immigrants who entered the United States prior to January 1, 1982, and lacked a serious criminal record. This controversial bargain was ultimately passed by Congress as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, surviving a number of tight votes on key provisions of the compromise. The final version of employer sanctions, the initiative at the vanguard of immigration reform efforts begun more than a decade earlier, was a mere shadow of the blueprints spelled out by SCIRP. The employer sanctions provisions of the IRCA lacked any reliable employee verification system, exempted small businesses from regulation, and included an “affirmative defense” clause that released employers of any obligation to verify the authenticity of documents presented to them. Thus, the major policy innovation that was originally meant to curb future illegal immigration lacked teeth.

Although President Reagan signed the IRCA bill into law, his administration was lukewarm about several of its provisions. For instance, Reagan officials openly refused to equip the Justice Department with sufficient resources to counteract potential job discrimination related to new employer sanctions. The administration, which had been instrumental in scrapping proposals for national identification cards tied to employee eligibility, also demonstrated little interest in tough worksite enforcement of the sanctions. To be sure, some Reagan officials shared the view that illegal immigration was a potent threat to national sovereignty. One of the most influential of these law-and-order conservatives, Attorney General William French Smith, argued that the country had “lost control of its borders,” and that tougher border enforcement, employer sanctions, and national identification cards were necessary to restore “faith in our laws.” But at a time when the Reagan White House pledged “regulatory relief,” little effort was made to enforce employer sanctions vigorously. Moreover, the absence of a secure verification system of employee eligibility (which was crucial to the efficacy of employer sanctions, according to SCIRP) made it easy for undocumented aliens to secure jobs via fraudulent documents.

While IRCA’s enforcement mechanisms were quite limited in discouraging unauthorized entries, it was more effective in extending new opportunities for legal status to undocumented aliens residing in the country before 1982, as well as to new seasonal agricultural workers. Consequently, the law marked a significant break with federal policies of the past in which Mexican undocumented aliens were targeted for mass deportations. One of the most infamous of these dragnet efforts was the so-called Operation Wetback of 1954, in which President Dwight Eisenhower authorized mass raids in Mexican-American neighborhoods across the southwestern United States, with local police and INS Border Patrol agents rounding up tens of thousands of “Mexican-looking” people for deportation. The IRCA legalization program reflected very different official conclusions about how to respond to the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants living in the shadows of American life. Tellingly, when Reagan administration officials attempted to exclude certain undocumented alien groups from the IRCA’s amnesty program, a variety of immigration and civil rights defenders won judicial vindication of a more generous set of legalization program regulations. If national officials once responded to worrisome illegal immigration by launching dragnet raids and mass deportation campaigns, the IRCA ultimately conferred legal status to roughly three million undocumented aliens. Illegal immigration, however, though dampened briefly after the IRCA was enacted, soon returned to peak levels of the pre-reform era, requiring a new generation of leaders to confront the divisive politics of immigration reform.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cose, Ellis. 1992. A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America. New York: William Morrow.

Fallows, James. “Immigration: How It’s Affecting Us.” Atlantic Monthly November 1983.

Joppke, Christian. 1998. “Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration.” World Politics 50 (2): 266–293.

Laham, Nicholas. 2000. Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Immigration Reform. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Lee, Kenneth. 1998. Huddled Masses, Muddled Laws: Why Contemporary Immigration Policy Fails to Reflect Public Opinion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Tichenor, Daniel J. 2002. Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Daniel J. Tichenor
Byoungha Lee