Which president gave amnesty to illegal immigrants

In the years after its implementation, it mitigated unauthorized immigration and improved socioeconomic mobility for the immigrants who were legalized and their families, leading to a new surge of Latino political power. It was the result of more than 15 years of negotiations, with the anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant camps in Congress drawing strict battle lines. Failing to act will leave millions continuing to live in the shadows as kind of permanent underclass, vulnerable to exploitation and to removal from a country where many of them have laid roots.

Anti-immigration hawks often make the argument that enacting another mass legalization program would only set a precedent encouraging more immigrants to cross the border without authorization in the hopes that they, too, might one day achieve legal status.

Even though the overall number of unauthorized immigrants living in the US has grown significantly in decades since IRCA, it could have been even larger. He acknowledges that there might be other reasons not to endorse another mass legalization push, such as potential costs and effects on the US economy. Rather, what might have actually contributed to the rise in the unauthorized immigrant population was the rapid expansion of immigration enforcement in the years following , which actually caused more migrants to decide to settle in the US permanently, Princeton sociologist Doug Massey and his co-authors found in a paper.

What changed, however, was the costs and risks associated with returning to their home country and then attempting to reenter the US because of greater penalties for being apprehended. Migrants had to start crossing in more dangerous regions of the border, going through the Sonoran Desert and Arizona, and came to rely more heavily on the services of paid smugglers, which became more expensive. What might reverse the trend, the paper argues, is if the US legalizes the population of undocumented immigrants living in the US, or at least broad swaths of it, which might allow more people to return to their home country.

The benefits of the mass legalization are even clearer several decades later — and not just for the immigrants who were granted legal status. Those higher wages mean more tax revenue and more consumer purchasing power.

They became more likely to be naturalized citizens — with about a third of those legalized becoming citizens by — and less likely to work in occupations that traditionally hire many unauthorized immigrants.

One year study also showed that they laid down more permanent roots and contributed more to their communities as a result of legalization, opening bank accounts, buying homes and starting businesses. The economic payoffs of mass legalization could be even greater today given the demographic challenges that the US is currently facing, Chishti said. There is a widening gap in the number of working-age adults that are able to support an aging population of baby boomers, as evidenced by Census figures that showed the lowest population growth the US has seen since the s.

This puts the US both in danger of worker shortages in key industries like home health care, hospitality, transportation, and construction, but also of long-term population declines of the sort Japan and Italy are currently grappling with. Immigration has historically insulated the US from population decline and represents a kind of tap that the US can turn on and off.

Over the next decade, it is set to become the primary driver of population growth for the first time in US history. Legalization could help make it a more effective tool. The US has issued roughly about 1 million green cards annually for most of the 21st century, though those numbers dipped under Trump. Only about 14 percent of those green cards are reserved for people coming to the US for work and their family members. Increasing the current caps on green cards for employment-based immigrants across the skills spectrum would help address labor market need in the US while also creating new legal pathways for people to come to the US rather than trying to cross the border without authorization or pursue an asylum claim.

The amount by which employment-based immigration should be increased is debated. The Migration Policy Institute has suggested tying it to the number of new unauthorized immigrants who come to the US annually: about , Others have advocated for increases to all forms of legal immigration across the board , not just for those coming to the US to work.

Chishti said that legalization and increases in legal immigration should also be accompanied by a more robust employment eligibility verification system, such as some form of universal, mandatory E-Verify, which is currently optional for most employers.

Some have cautioned that expanding E-Verify on its own would end up hurting small businesses and their workers — but those negative effects might be mitigated if they have access to a new pool of legalized workers.

Still, Chishti questioned the feasibility of pairing new legal paths for immigrants, an employment based increase, and tougher employment eligibility in a comprehensive reform package, a format that has failed time and time again in Congress over the past two decades. The current conventional wisdom on the left is that, unlike in , bipartisanship on immigration is dead — that there is no point in seeking compromise with Republicans, and that reconciliation, which allows Democrats to pass policy on their own, is the only way to push through the Democratic agenda.

What ultimately drew more progressive Democrats to the bill who had initially been hesitant was a provision to extend temporary protections to citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters or armed conflict, he said.

That provision was eventually stricken from the bill before its passage, but it helped get more people invested in it. There might be similar bargaining chips that exist today. David Bier, now an immigration policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, researched the matter in and concluded the former president's so-called regret was an "internet myth.

Bier quoted Reagan as suggesting in a candidates forum that it would be better to allow immigrants to come in and out of the country legally with work permits instead of "talking about putting up a fence. It seems that Reagan would understand that his law failed to stop illegal immigration, not because we allowed people to stay, but because we refused to allow more to come — in his farewell address, he said he wanted an America 'open to anyone with the will and heart to get here,' " Bier wrote for the Daily Caller website.

In an email exchange with The Arizona Republic , Michael Reagan, the former president's son, said that his father never regretted the amnesty part of the compromise, but did regret that there was no follow-through on the enforcement measures or border security. If you follow the Google development of this thing, somehow it ended up in Ed Meese's mouth, but he told us back in that that didn't come from him, that he never heard that from Reagan.

The law's sanctions against employers who hired undocumented immigrants were never vigorously enforced and, when they were, received a strong backlash from business interests. The law also didn't include a mechanism to allow for the legal entry of low-skilled foreign workers.

So when the U. Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship. Reagan, who died in , indicated that he considered the law's employer-sanctions program to be crucial in preventing future illegal immigration.

John McCain, R-Ariz. Though he later became a champion of comprehensive immigration reform, McCain voted against the immigration law as a then-member of the U. House of Representatives. Nowicki is The Arizona Republic's national political reporter. Follow him on Twitter, dannowicki. Steve Bannon who? Kelli Ward seems to deny endorsement in CNN interview. Senate candidate Kelli Ward claims she shrunk government — is that accurate?