Otis Graham

Failing the Test: Immigration Reform

By Otis L. Graham, Jr., published in in W. E. Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency (University Press of Kansas, 2003)


Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman.... He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.
 
        -from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

There is no clear "conservative" position on the immigration problem, and no "conservative" solution.
 
        -from Charles Heatherly, ed., Mandate for Leadership (1981)


On the morning of September 11, 2001, one of the hidden and shockingly high costs of America's immigration policies was put on the books and harshly illuminated. Now the public understood what a few immigration policy critics and specialists had warned about for years. Our porous borders and governmental abandonment of virtually all interior immigration controls had allowed terrorists to glide easily in and out of the country for periods of their choosing, as they contemptuously trained in this affable society for their deadly suicide missions against it.

The national security hazards posed by America's broken immigration system could now be added to a long list of defects. By the 1990s, three decades of research and analysis, along with immigration-driven social change, had made it clear that the costs of America's immigration regime, the illegal and also the legal flows, were economically, politically, and socially very high.1 In its 1996 report the congressionally mandated Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by former congresswoman Barbara Jordan, found current immigration trends inimical to the national interest and urged cutting the volume of legal immigration by almost half, changing the criteria for admission to more closely reflect national needs, and taking serious steps to contain illegal entry.2 President Clinton accepted and weakly endorsed these findings. Nothing was done in any of these directions. The Brookings Institution in 2000 gathered a panel of historians and political scientists to reflect upon the federal government's greatest achievements and failures since World War II, and it ranked controlling immigration as second among the top five failures.3

Who was responsible for this extended failure? The blame must be generously apportioned, starting with the liberal immigration reformers who delegitimized the old and designed the new system that Lyndon Johnson signed into law in 1965. Then there are those-they came from both parties, from business, from religious and ethnic groups, from the academy-who defended the indefensible status quo over the years, denounced as racists and xenophobes those who were critics and reformers, and tirelessly worked for four decades to make American immigration policy and practice more expansive, and existing or proposed controls weaker.

Where does Ronald Reagan's government come into the story? He was the chief executive when the first opportunity for reform came. It is important who was first, for where large-scale immigration is concerned, there is often not a second reform opportunity at all, or as favorable a time. When immigration builds to mass levels, it generates political constituencies inside the host country who are dedicated to keeping the doors open so that relatives, or a cheap labor force, continue to enter. It also establishes networks of communication and aid that create momentum, from immigrant-sending countries to immigrant-receiving, from - in the modern world - south to north.

Looking back, there seem to have been few occasions on which the post-1965 system might have been successfully challenged and reformed toward lower numbers, toward a different system of selection, and the maintenance of effective border and interior controls. The first came in the early 1980s, with Reagan in the White House. If that moment was lost and that effort failed, immigration momentum and political dynamics would put immigration reform farther out of reach during any subsequent reform opportunities, with immense consequences for the future.

THE POST-SIXTIES SURGE OF IMMIGRATION AND THE CALL FOR REFORM

Those who threw out the national origins system in 1965 and liberalized U.S. immigration law had repeatedly assured the public that they were making no changes that would result in larger numbers or a shift in source countries. But they had done both. Source regions shifted from Europe to Latin America and Asia. Annual totals of legal immigration, which had averaged 178,000 (with considerable yearly fluctuation) over the duration of the national origins system of the 1920s, rose to 400,000 by 1973 and to 600,000 by 1978, reaching 1 million by 1989. An unknown number of illegal aliens - the official estimate in the 1980s was 200,000 to 500,000 - were thought to be entering the country annually, while apprehensions along the two-thousand-mile Mexican border reached .5 million by 1970 and topped 1 million by 1977-an "invasion," in the word of Leonard Chapman, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The impression of a border out of control was enhanced across the 1970s by bursts of refugee landings from Cuba and Haiti, over 550,000 refugees from Southeast Asia following American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1974, and a large flow of migrants asking asylum from civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala.4 The large numbers arriving outside the rules generated a resurgence of restrictionist sentiment. All polls reported national majorities in favor of lower immigration, and critics built a strong case that immigrants undercut natives in labor markets, fueled unwelcome population increases with resultant pressures on resources and environment, and burdened social services-and an unknown but substantial number of them were illegal.5

President Ford in 1976 created a task force that recommended sanctions on employers and a limited amnesty, but it was his last year in office. Jimmy Carter, acknowledging that "illegal immigration was reaching a crisis stage," sent Congress a similar legislative proposal in late summer of 1977, urging penalties on American employers for hiring illegal aliens and temporary legalization for those in the country over five years.6 Sensing political danger in both action and inaction with respect to the broken immigration system, Congress took a familiar way out. In 1978 it asked the president to establish the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP, or the Select Commission) to assess the immigration policy of the United States in its entirety.

The Select Commission was chaired by Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh, who had become quite concerned about illegal immigration. The commission report came on March 1, 1981, as the new Reagan administration moved in. Noting that public opinion was opposed to current high levels of immigration, both legal and illegal, SCIRP recommended "closing the back door" of illegal entry in order to shore up support for the legal flow, in which it saw net advantages though "there are limits to the ability of this country to absorb immigrants in much larger numbers effectively" and certain changes should be made. The central policy thrust was that the "jobs magnet" for illegals must be cut off by imposition of penalties on their American employers.

This required some reliable method of identification, and Hesburgh was able to rally a precarious 8-7 majority for what Jimmy Carter had first broached: a new secure worker identification card rather than relying upon existing documents. As for the estimated three million illegals already in the country, an amnesty was preferred to "mass deportation," framed as the only choices. But the commission voted unanimously that the amnesty was to be delayed until Congress was satisfied that "appropriate enforcement mechanisms have been instituted." The bargain was conditional. First things first.7

RONALD REAGAN: RELUCTANT PLAYER

Immigration reform was not a Reagan sort of issue. Like other Americans born on the eve of World War I (born 1911), he matured and took on his political outlook in the midcentury decades (and, in Reagan's case, in small-town Illinois settings) when large-scale immigration and the public issues it raised had been ended by the restrictionist reforms of the 1920s, supplemented by depression and war. One is thus not surprised to find nothing on immigration in Reagan's autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me? (1965).8 As California governor for eight years (1966-1974), he continued the state's political tradition of ignoring immigration despite its impact on the Golden State, since it was a federal responsibility and the state had governmental problems of its own.9 A recent book that is said to uniquely illuminate Reagan's core beliefs on the eve of his presidency has recently been constructed out of analysis of his radio commentaries from 1976 to 1980. The range of his interests was narrow, and immigration was not among them.10 His two terms in office did not change this. The effort to contain the illegal immigration flow, embodied in the long battle over what would be called the "Simpson-Mazzoli" legislation, is not even mentioned in Reagan's memoir focused on his presidency, Ronald Reagan: An American Life (1990), or in his weekly presidential radio addresses.11 It must mean something that he was not alone in this. His aides in their own memoirs, his biographers, and those writing on his presidency, either because they all took their cues from him as to what was important about his political career, or because they shared his instinct to avoid or ignore this awkward subject, almost universally have nothing at all to say about immigration or immigration policy. Their indexes do not have a place for it, and chief immigration reformer Senator Alan Simpson is rarely even mentioned.12

We should not conclude from all this that Reagan did not have an orientation, a place in his mind and a rhetoric, on the matter of immigration. His was the simplistic, sentimentalist, Statue of Liberty conception so widely shared among assimilated Americans of his day who could not remember when immigration had been a problem. In one of the few references to immigration in his published state papers covering his eight years in office, Reagan displayed in 1984 the then-dominant language of diversity celebration when he told an audience of naturalizing immigrants that immigrants "enlivened the national life with new ideas and new blood" and "enrich us" with "a delightful diversity."13 And he closed his farewell address in 1989 with reference to the "shining city on a hill," a "city with free ports ... and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there."l4

But immigration control for Reagan had no attraction as an issue appropriate for policymaking or (as Reagan usually preferred) policy unmaking. The issue was fundamentally at odds with Reagan's entire political purpose and temperament. He was interested in shrinking the (nonmilitary parts of the) government, and here was an issue in which the government he was about to lead was widely charged with incompetence, with not doing enough, and on an issue of law and public order with a natural resonance among Republicans. Presidential leadership in this area could only mean making the government more effective and possibly even larger. This was not Reagan terrain. As he told reporter Lou Cannon, "I have always talked generally on one subject - the growth of government."15 And he did not like gloomy anything, or talk of limits.

Yet, just as he took office, a presidential commission reported with recommendations for sweeping policy change, and editorials in the nation's major newspapers were overwhelmingly supportive. Congressional action of some sort was sure to follow, and the executive branch had no choice but to participate energetically in the framing of laws it would be expected to enforce.

THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION STARTS UP THE ROAD TO REFORM

Accordingly, five days after SCIRP reported, a Reagan memo announced the appointment of the cabinet-level Task Force on Immigration and Refugee Policy, chaired by Attorney General William French Smith and asked to report by May.16 This has the look of leadership and certainly reflects Smith's personal views that illegal immigration must be curbed. But Smith was not in the White House inner circle. Historian Nicholas Laham describes the White House as "wary on the subject," which for the new administration had "only a marginal priority," to understate the matter.17 Nonetheless, the issue of immigration reform must be engaged. Laham argues that "the Reagan administration operated within the prevailing consensus on this issue ... viewing legal immigration as good, and illegal immigration as bad." This consensus was said to derive from "the experts" and to be shared by Congress.18 This summary is a mixture of the banal and the misleading. Politicians, fearful of offending ethnic voters, invariably saluted legal immigration as "good for America." This had been the tone of the opening pages of the Hesburgh Commission, which had nonetheless found legal immigration in need of changes. There existed even at this early stage in the era of post-1965 mass immigration a sizable critique of the legal immigration regime-its principles of selection, overall numbers, and especially the disarray in refugee and asylum policy, following the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba which had stirred up much public resentment and dismay.19 It is quite misleading to say that the Reagan administration moved amid a consensus that legal immigration reforms were off the table.20 As for illegal immigration, no one in Congress openly defended it, but there was a range of views on how seriously to take it, and on the policy options. Here a sort of potential "bargain" had emerged, as both the Carter administration and the Hesburgh Commission had linked employer sanctions with an amnesty for illegals long in the country. Still, the Reagan administration, like Congress, had some hard choices to make, including the SCIRP position that there must be a delay on any idea of amnesty until illegal immigration was under control. The six years required to resolve the issue do not testify to "consensus." Interest groups were sharply divided, and the public mood unpredictable and unfocused. Presidential leadership, or lack of it, would matter.

Some of these choices had to be faced quickly, as congressional leadership on the issue had suddenly emerged. The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration was chaired after the Republican victory in 1980 by Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), newly elected in 1978 but a respected Wyoming figure who had served on the Select Commission and made it clear he intended to produce legislation.21 Romano Mazzoli (D-Ky.) chaired the House Subcommittee on Immigration and shared with Simpson both cordial personal relations and the intention to carry the issue of immigration reform to a legislative result. Both men were somewhat more restrictionist than the Hesburgh commission majority, voting in that body to reduce legal immigration as well as fashion a remedy for illegal immigration.

Simpson sought a meeting with the president in May 1981, prior to Reagan's scheduled meeting with Mexican president Lopez Portillo, in order to urge the administration to keep American options open on immigration and to explain Simpson's own goals.22 The meeting hinted at the relationship ahead. Reagan and his top officials, including the attorney general, were there. But the meeting lasted only fifteen minutes, and Reagan, as instructed, listened to Simpson's views and limited himself to a broad promise of cooperation as the legislative process went forward.23 Congress was conceded the lead in immigration reform, though Simpson, in the words of a White House staffer in a memo to Reagan, had "indicated his willingness to `carry the administration's water' on this issue."24 They carried different water, as it turned out.

Simpson sensed from his early contacts with White House aides that cooperation with the Reagan White House was shaky, so he and Senator Walter D. Huddleston (D-Ky.), gathered fifty-one senators from both parties as signatories to a letter to Reagan declaring that both legal and illegal immigration numbers were too high, as public opinion polls confirmed. The president would, they were sure, be prepared to make "difficult and painful" rather than "easy short-term decisions" in the face of mounting immigration pressures.25

One important bias appeared to shape the task force's deliberations from the start. In the words of one White House staffer assigned to the task force, "the President is himself a firm believer in a high degree of freedom in immigration."26 This aide, Francis Hodsoll, sensed not only that the president was temperamentally uninterested in (if not philosophically opposed to) border control, but also that he and others in the administration underestimated the public's irritation at large illegal alien and refugee flows. Hodsoll's memos reminded participants of the agitated state of public opinion through citation of poll results and evidence of sizable congressional reform sentiment.27

But top White House staff were pushing in another direction. A memo from White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker and Counselor to the President Edwin Meese to Reagan on June 3 concluded that "immigration is a no-win" issue. They framed the issue as one of political points to be won or lost, with no larger national implications that should guide the administration. The numbers of illegal as well as legal immigrants were rising, and the public perceived this as a large national problem. But "immigration enthusiasts" in the United States, along with the Mexican government, would fiercely resist restriction. The Baker-Meese memo to Reagan did not attempt to reach any conclusion as to the national interest, a phrase they never used. The question for a new administration was framed as one of political feasibility and implications. To veer toward either side would be politically divisive and costly. The administration could not endorse the status quo but in moving toward reform must find "a middle ground." One part of a formula for a middle position might well be to offset - politically - an employer sanctions feature with a new guestworker program, easing the pressures for illegal entry and at the same time pleasing southwestern growers and the government of Mexico.28 They must have known that Reagan had expressed interest in guestworkers from Mexico in an interview with Walter Cronkite on March 3.

On July 1, 1981, the twenty-six-page task force report went to Reagan. For those familiar with the Hesburgh report, the Reagan task force had narrowed the agenda. It virtually ignored legal immigration but for two problems festering within U.S. refugee policy - what to do about the 13,000 Cuban and Haitian refugees that came during the Mariel boatlift of 1980, and the provision of welfare benefits to refugees. Fundamental questions about overall numbers and priorities for selection, as well as proposals to reform the floundering INS, all engaged by the Hesburgh Commission, were not addressed." Issues surrounding illegal immigration dominated the report and generated internal divisions that were unresolved by July 1. The task force had reached agreement to make a large part of the problem of illegals simply disappear through an amnesty making them legal, though the details of this were in dispute. And it agreed to make more future illegals disappear by admitting them as legal guestworkers in agriculture. But there was no final agreement on the proposed employer sanctions provision, let alone whether it should be enforced through a national identity card or system.

In July the president presided over at least one cabinet meeting to resolve intra-administration differences.30 While all cabinet meeting minutes have not been opened for research, Assistant to the President for Policy Development Martin Anderson has provided in his memoir an account of this crucial July cabinet meeting where the immigration reform project inside the administration was emasculated (in Anderson's view, cleansed of a very bad idea). At this meeting Attorney General Smith presented the task force proposals, including the idra inherited from the Select Commission of "an improved Social Security card" to help employers determine legal residency. After the mention of an identification card - we are not sure of the attorney general's actual wording - there was silence. Then Anderson, in his account, rallied the real Reagan antigovernment faithful, suggesting that it would be cheaper to "tattoo an identification number on the inside of everybody's arm." Secretary of the Interior James Watt at once pointed out that this brought to mind the biblical "Mark of the Beast." The image of Nazi concentration camps was in the air. Reagan was aroused and made his contribution. "Maybe we should just brand all the babies," he smilingly proposed, getting into the swing of bad analogizing.3'

Whatever happened in this July meeting, it was effectively the end of the administration's receptivity to beginning the national experiment with a single counterfeit-resistant identifier. Getting wind of the decision, the Washington Post criticized the cabinet for abandoning the "new and less easily forged Social Security card" and declared that "the test of any administration's determination to confront the problem seriously becomes a willingness to devise some national identifier," as recommended both by the Select Commission and the attorney general's task force. "The cosmetic substitute of requiring workers and employers merely to sign a piece of paper ... is meaningless.... Only the president himself can rescue [this] ... critical component." The newspaper was not alone in sensing a pivotal issue and turning point. "Sanctions won't work without it [the national identity card]," Simpson immediately declared, promising to restore the essential element in hearings. "We'll consider everything but tattoos."32

The president did not rescue this component. The Justice Department on July 30 put forward the administration's immigration proposals.33 The president simultaneously issued a short statement of his own.

If observers had expected a conservative government to shift the policy options toward firmer law enforcement while condemning liberal laxity, they were surprised. The administration, Attorney General William French Smith declared on July 30, agreed that there were problems: "Current laws and enforcement procedures are inadequate - particularly with regard to illegal aliens and mass requests for asylum." Illegal immigrants "are creating problems for themselves, as well as for the country." But the administration's proposals opened the borders more than firming them. The principal ones were (1) sanctions on employers knowingly hiring illegals, enforced through reliance on existing documents (the administration "explicitly opposed" a national identity card or system); (2) an "experimental" guestworker program admitting up to fifty thousand Mexicans to work in sectors of agriculture where it appeared that American labor was unavailable; and (3) a grant of amnesty for illegals in the country prior to January 1, 1980.34

Reagan's own short message could have been written by liberal Ted Kennedy. He began with the ritual incantation that "our nation is a nation of immigrants" that would always welcome more to our shores. But the "Cuban influx to Florida" required more effective policies that will "preserve our tradition of accepting foreigners to our shores, but to accept them in a controlled and orderly fashion . . . consistent with our values of individual privacy and freedom."35

The attorney general, who from the first had been the strongest and, it sometimes seemed, the only restrictionist voice in the administration's top leadership, adopted a slightly firmer tone in his testimony on July 30 before a joint meeting of the immigration subcommittees of the House and Senate. He opened with the ritual salute to immigration, which has "overwhelmingly enriched" America, and made the odd comment that the president "believes we must modestly expand the opportunities for legal employment to reflect the reality of America's attractiveness to much of the world." Then: "We have lost control of our borders," he said, with three million to six million illegals in the country and one-quarter to a half million more arriving each year. Remedies must include increases in INS budgets, sanctions on employers, a guestworker program for Mexican agricultural labor, and an amnesty.36 The questions from the Hill legislators were perfunctory, no one noting the crucial decision not to make the amnesty conditional upon effective controls on illegal immigration. The initiative would now shift to Congress, which had just been handed by the new administration a softer, more expansionist version of the Hesburgh recommendations, with a new "experimental" guestworker program added, along with a regime of employer sanctions built upon a legally weak and fraud-vulnerable worker eligibility verification process. Economist Vernon Briggs of Cornell justifiably characterized the Reagan proposals as "far more timid" than those of the Select Commission.37 A key role had been played by Anderson and other White House aides who used Reagan's past record and rhetoric to resist what they considered a federal bureaucratic campaign to make the government more intrusive.38

In The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform, James Gimpel and James Edwards argue that a political opportunity may have been lost at this early stage. Immigration issues, formerly without clear partisan configuration, had, under the pressure of the mass refugee and illegal alien flows of the late 1970s, taken on in the early Reagan years a partisan alignment. Some Republican politicians, formerly with no interest in or position on immigration, found that flows of Third World immigrants expanded the welfare state and angered their constituents who faced growing local social welfare costs. In this view, a restrictionist Republican complaint issue was emerging, but the Reagan administration, in 1981, had not recognized it.

IRCA: THE LONG ROAD TO PASSAGE, 1981 TO 1986

The administration's brief period of leadership had taken the form of a retreat, and it would now stand mostly on the sidelines. "The focus on immigration reform definitely shifted to Congress and remained there," wrote Thomas Maddox.39 On March 17, 1982, Simpson and Mazzoli introduced the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Unlike the Reagan proposals, they offered a comprehensive reform of both legal and illegal immigration law. On the legal side, they proposed a firm ceiling on the overall numbers, a shift toward skills and away from family reunification, and elimination of the fifth preference for brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, the source of so-called chain migration enlarging the total numbers. But proposals to deal with illegal immigration immediately attracted the most attention and conflict. The strategy, Simpson liked to say, rested on "a three-legged stool": improved border enforcement, penalties for employers who hired undocumented workers, and a counterfeit-resistant national identification card verifying eligibility to work.40

Employer sanctions was hardly a new idea. The House had twice passed employer sanctions bills, first proposed by liberal Senator Paul Douglas in the mid-1950s because of his long-standing concern for American workers. Hispanic organizations stridently warned of discrimination in the workplace, and in response liberal legislators added an amnesty into the package as a potential trade. During the legislative struggles of 1982 and 1983, the administration generally backed Simpson. Smith expressed concerns about the budgetary consequences of the amnesty as proposed, said nothing about making it conditional upon effective controls, and suggested moving the qualifying date back to 1976 to reduce the numbers and cost.41 Privately, he implored Reagan's top staff for more vigorous White House involvement.42

The Senate passed a complex package as the Simpson half of IRCA in 1982. But in the House it became entangled in multiple objections and delays. Speaker "Tip" O'Neill resisted a vote on the measure despite an appeal by the White House. Time ran out on the Ninety-seventh Congress.43

Simpson pushed essentially the same package through the Senate in May 1983, by an impressive 76-18 majority. Public opinion polls were running consistently and strongly in favor of Simpson's key idea, employer sanctions.44 The House version moved out of committee and appeared headed toward the floor in early October, when Speaker O'Neill announced that he would not allow the bill to come to the floor in 1983. He offered three reasons: the Hispanic caucus opposed it, he could find "no constituency" for it, and he had been told that the president intended to veto the legislation to curry political favor with Hispanic voters in the 1984 elections.45

The reaction included much anger at, in Mazzoli's words, "the Speaker's abrupt, unnecessary, thoroughly unfounded action," and criticism of the whip hand over the Democratic Party apparently held by a small group of Hispanics.46 Taken aback by the outcry and reassured by Simpson that the president would not veto any bill acceptable to both houses in 1984, O'Neill a month later promised that the full house could take up the measure. In House Rules Committee hearings in June, the departments of Labor, Agriculture, and Justice, along with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), took different positions, presumably with White House knowledge or approval.47 On June 20 a dramatic vote of 216-2 I 1 registered House approval of H.R. 1510. The outcome was in doubt to the end. The package included employer sanctions, a guestworker program for agriculture, and an amnesty for those in the country prior to 1982.48 Immigration "reform" had moved ahead, but to many it looked like immigration expansion and facilitation. Politicians on all sides seemed to care most about claiming credit or assigning blame. Speaker O'Neill claimed that it is "a Reagan bill more than anybody else's," and the president in a press conference said it was long overdue, though Robert Pear of the New York Times reported that "administration officials have not been active or outspoken in pushing the bill this year."49 Presidential politics continued to complicate the picture. At the Democratic National Convention in July, under Hispanic delegates' pressure, nominee Walter Mondale promised to do what he could to kill Simpson-Mazzoli: "We're going to fight it, we're going to beat it!" The Reagan White House declared the House version "unacceptable," due to the fiscal costs of the amnesty.50 The conference committee began work in September after the nominating conventions and could not bridge all the differences. For the third year in a row, immigration reform expired in Congress.51

At this point, the package of compromise measures called "Simpson-Mazzoli" or "immigration reform" had no clear identity. Two well-known historians took diametrically opposite views, Oscar Handlin of Harvard lamenting the defeat of "the most liberal measure ... in 90 years," and Richard Wade of the City University of New York happy that legislation "identical with the restrictionist legislation of the 1920s" had failed. The New York Times, while editorially deploring "the death of a humane idea," reported that analysts could not agree on whether the principal message of the bill was "come in" or "keep out."52

So the Simpson-Mazzoli marathon, one of the most complex legislative struggles of recent years and a case study in modern policy paralysis, resumed in 1985. Simpson reintroduced the legislation with a few changes, most notably making the amnesty contingent on proof of sanctions' effectiveness as attested by a presidential commission. This time, the administration was more supportive of Simpson, though it still did not speak with one voice. The new attorney general, Edwin Meese, and INS commissioner Alan Nelson both praised the Simpson version of the legislation, though Meese did not express support for amnesty conditionality and Nelson did.53 The administration (and Simpson, who said of the growers' lobby that "their greed knows no bounds") objected (unsuccessfully) to an expansion of a large guestworker program proposed by Senator Pete Wilson (R-Calif.).54 The Senate measure passed 69-30 on September 19. Simpson grumbled openly at the concessions forced on him, and the administration was said to be ambivalent on the whole package, for different reasons.55 It was late, and the House, stronghold of opposition to guestworkers, did not complete work before the end of the session. Throughout 1985 and into 1986, the deteriorating Mexican economy pushed rising numbers of illegals northward,and several California politicians called for troops at the border. Reagan's commissioner of the INS, Alan Nelson, reported "the greatest surge of people in history across our southern border."56

As the idea of immigration reform entered its fifth year, it had narrowed its target to illegal immigration and appeared to be frozen in a "bargain" structure (employer sanctions traded for amnesty and guestworkers) that generated internal disagreement and endless wrangling, without producing a majority coalition. The chance that 1986 might bring agreement on a new immigration policy seemed darkened in the first month, as the Reagan administration's internal divisions on immigration became exposed-again. A preliminary draft of the 1986 CEA (Council of Economic Advisers) report was leaked to the press and was found to conclude that illegals do not take American jobs and that excluding them from our labor markets would cost the nation a loss of output. This leak provided additional evidence that "the Reagan administration is of two minds about immigration reform, The Economist observed.57 Congressman Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), dean of immigration legislators who had emerged in 1986 from a prolonged lethargy, demanded that the president clarify his own views. After a February New York Times editorial urging the president to back the legislation, Reagan met in March with key members of Congress to express support for legislation to stop the flow of illegal aliens.58 The media that spring carried many statements - by Rodino, Father Hesburgh, the New York Times editorial board - that if reform did not come now, the growing restrictionist mood in the country would force tougher measures and outflank years of work on a moderate solution. But the House was a swamp of disputes, and in September Rodino declared the bill dead, blaming Republicans. The New York Times blamed both political parties and urged the president to "intervene ... to put partisan Democrats on the spot."59 Attorney General Meese urged the House to vote. Congressman Charles Schumer and others led negotiations over another package, with gloomy results. For their part, the outmanned restrictionist forces, led by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),an organization of environmentalist and population limitationists formed in 1978, were deeply dissatisfied with a 1986 "reform" package so riddled with concessions that it appeared to be actually expansionist, and debated whether they should declare defeat rather than victory.

Suddenly, the White House announced that Reagan would meet with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland in mid-October, providing more time for congressional action on a number of matters. The leadership of the long stalled immigration reform struggle suddenly mobilized. The house passed IRCA by a vote of 230-166 on October 9. "I guess we just jump-started a corpse," Simpson commented.60 The bill was now so expansionist-riddled with amnesties, loaded up with a program for agricultural workers allowed to become citizens and vacate the program for more foreign laborers, all traded for an unenforceable ban on hiring illegal workers - that Republicans in the House had voted 105-62 against it.6l A conference report was ready in four days, and both Houses ratified by October 17. The media reported that the administration had misgivings. Simpson and Rodino sought to reassure Reagan that everybody had misgivings, and Mazzoli declared the result "the least imperfect bill we will ever have before us."62 Reagan signed the legislation on November 6, 1986.63

ASSESSMENT OF IMMIGRATION REFORM UNDER REAGAN

The outstanding features of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 were, in broad outline: making it unlawful to hire those illegally in the country, enforceable through employer acceptance of a range of existing documents; offering an "amnesty" for aliens who entered illegally but had resided continuously in the United States before January 1, 1982, who now could apply for permanent resident alien status and, eventually, citizenship; expanding the existing H-1 agricultural guestworker program and creating a new guestworker program by granting permanent resident alien status to up to 350,000 agricultural workers, with a "replenishment" foreign labor force if the original workers left the farm sector.64 The problems on the legal immigration side that had been highlighted by the Hesburgh Commission were left for another day.

In a brief message on signing IRCA, Reagan called "this landmark legislation ... an excellent example of a truly successful bipartisan effort . . . to control illegal immigration.... Future generations of Americans will be thankful."65 Few others knowledgeable about the problem declared victory. Simpson, ever the realist, had little to say. "Nobody's certain it's going to work," said Representative Schumer (D-N.Y.), "so if it doesn't work we'll have to go back to the drawing board."66 IRCA, commented FAIR's Roger Conner, "could be the turning point in regaining control over our nation's borders, or it could turn into an immigration disaster" if sanctions were not enforced and further measures to reduce legal immigration did not follow.67

The skeptics were right. IRCA was a dismal and costly policy failure. Arrests at the border did drop somewhat in 1987, as prospective border crossers waited to see if "El Norte" was serious about controlling illegal entry. By 1990 arrests were at pre-IRCA levels and rising. Employers continued to hire illegals, since IRCA was built around a huge loophole that had been pointed out repeatedly: documentary proof of eligibility to work was easily counterfeited. As historian David Reimers concluded in a book published at the end of the century: "It might appear that it [IRCA] was a restrictive law, but Congress failed to provide for an effective system to keep out undocumented aliens. It thus turned out to be a rather generous amnesty traded for employer sanctions" without teeth.68 "To no one's surprise," wrote Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks in a 2001 review of several end-of-century books on American immigration, "the new rules against hiring illegal aliens proved unenforceable.... [IRCA] failed because it did not offer employers a simple, reliable way of determining workers' legal status.... [so) IRCA's only enduring legacy was the amnesty," the law "a victory for the expansionists."69

These judgments came at the end of the century, when the law Ronald Reagan signed in 1986 could be seen in a larger and longer perspective. The "Reform and Control Act" reformed, but not toward control. When the Census Bureau analyzed the 2000 census, it released the estimate that 8.7 million illegal aliens now resided in the United States, suggesting an annual flow of 400,000 to 500,000. This was a devastating verdict on IRCA, signed and praised by Ronald Reagan.70 And those who warned that one amnesty invites others were confirmed in the summer of 2001 when U.S. and Mexican presidents Bush and Fox pressed, without opposition, the idea of another large amnesty and new guestworker program.

The 9/11 attacks ended such talk, at least for a time. "If a Mexican day laborer can sneak across the border, so can an Al Qaeda terrorist," wrote Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, noting that three of the September 11, 2001, airplane terrorists had been illegal aliens, and the INS had no information on several others who turned out to be in violation of immigration law.71

REAGAN AND IMMIGRATION REFORM

America's immigration policy disarray is not, of course, attributable only to the fumbling architects of IRCA, of whom Reagan was only one. But presidents play large roles, and Reagan was in the White House during one of the only two occasions in the last three decades of the century in which illegal immigration so vexed the national mind that not only was serious "reform" intensely discussed, but a legislative result was produced. The only historian to undertake a book-length assessment of Reagan and IRCA, Nicholas Laham, concludes that the administration's deliberations during the task force and after were "crippled" by "mistaken or unproven assumptions" provided to them by the community of experts, who at that time thought and wrote that illegal immigration brought economic benefits. Scholars like Vernon Briggs, George Borjas, and Barry Chiswick were even then arguing the opposite, but they could not get Reagan or his advisers' attention. So the administration took a soft position, which was a "mistake," Laham thought. IRCA turned out to be "a dismal failure," and "the blame for the failure of employer sanctions must be assigned to the Reagan administration." In Laham's view, Smith, Meese, and others made "dishonest and deceitful statements" to public and Congress, since they, and Reagan himself when he signed IRCA, "knew these provisions would fail." But they preferred a symbolic victory over a workable system because of ideological objections to federal invasion of privacy and the anticipated costs of a national worker identification card. "Reagan must assume a substantial share of the blame" and "failed to provide leadership."72

Laham offers no alternative scenario for what that leadership might have achieved, so I will offer one, in order to probe the possibilities. The assumption must be that, with Reagan communicating his full support for the hard choices to "fix" the immigration problem, we get a far better Simpson-Mazzoli, and probably earlier. Recalling that Simpson and Mazzoli in 1981 and 1982 proposed to reform both legal and illegal immigration, the Smith task force could have helped "carry Simpson's water" by addressing at least the most glaring of the flaws in legal immigration that were vexing the public at this time of unprecedented refugee and asylum pressures from the Caribbean and Central America. James Gimpel and James Edwards present evidence that many conservative Republicans in Congress had recently come for the first time to see refugee flows and illegal immigration as "redistributive policy," bringing into the country large numbers of impoverished and unskilled foreigners who would swell the welfare rolls. Broad immigration reform appeared ripe to become a popular Republican issue.73 By implication, a case can be made that the Reagan administration squandered the available political and policy opportunities. A strong stand against amnesty would have had considerable support in Congress and, more important, with the public.74 If this fight is made, and it seems that the Democrats in the House (whose edge in that chamber was 243-192 in 1981-1983 and 269-165 in 1983-1985) can block any legislation without an amnesty commitment, the White House reinforces Simpson's basic leanings, insisting that the amnesty be narrowed and made conditional on proof of border and entry control, and that employer sanctions are backed by a secure worker identification card for use at the point of hire. The three-legged stool. If this package cannot clear the House before the 1984 election, the president makes the obstructionism and expansionist leanings of Tip O'Neill, Walter Mondale, and the Democrats an issue before an electorate strongly supportive of effective border and workplace controls. The immigration issue is injected into national electoral politics, where it belonged. The president is reelected, and with this mandate, effective reform comes in 1985. More important, the Republican Party would have chosen the right, and the winning, voice on immigration, marginalizing its open border wing. This scenario implies that not only a public policy improvement but also a political opportunity was lost.75

This scenario is not immune to skepticism. Even if we heroically imagine Reagan in such a leadership role on an issue he disliked, we must reckon with the deeper forces at work upon the American political system. Immigration analyst David North first pointed out what has subsequently become a matter of gloomy consensus: Democracies in the West demonstrably cannot cope with the massive immigration pressures that began to build globally in the 1960s and 1970s and which promise for at least another century to wash uncontrollably from south to north as impoverished and overpopulated societies send their surplus populations to the developed world. Politicians in the West, most especially in the United States, fear to make immigration restriction an issue, lest the name-calling and backlash of a swelling pool of ethnic voters cost more than is gained from the diffuse approval of an ambivalent and ill-informed public.76

In this perspective, the enfeeblement of immigration policy and enforcement in face of these pressures is and will continue to be widespread in all countries in the West and has deep roots. The U.S. case, as always, is congruent if a bit different. If there is one policy area in U.S. governmental life that is regularly and more than all others encumbered by irresolution and incompetence, it is immigration. For immigration policymaking in America is emotionally entangled in the special irrationalities born of out of (misremembered and mythical) history, pride at the image of asylum, and the conflicting claims of homeland loyalty and contemporary ethnicity. Americans' outlook on immigration, even, for many, on illegal immigration, has been aptly called "ambivalent romanticism," in the words of Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter.77

And along with these confused sentiments among the general public there are rational special interests at work to keep the borders and entry points open to those with or without official permission to enter. Our political institutions elevate interest-group claims over the more diffuse concerns of the larger public, giving an advantage to the intense and well-financed lobbies for pliable, cheap labor or more kinsmen to augment group power.

In view of these and other factors making for policy irresolution and a pervasive liberality and avoidance, how much leadership on immigration reform can we expect from presidents? Senator Simpson and William French Smith, two serious reformers in the battles of the early 1980s who knew that public opinion was behind them, repeatedly complained then and later about the multiple sources of their extended frustration. As loyal Republicans, they left Ronald Reagan entirely off their list of troublemakers, and it is substantial without him. Simpson was especially scathing about his daily antagonists, the defenders of the broken, discredited, open-border status quo. They included the unprincipled boss of the House Tip O'Neill, liberal Democrats in the House, and Ted Kennedy in the Senate who responded spinelessly to a bizarre lobbying coalition of membership-less and Ford Foundation-funded Hispanic ethnic lobbying organizations running under the "civil rights" flag, big western growers, religious leaders, immigration lawyers, and the ACLU. And Simpson's allies were scarce. The many and militant patriotic societies, veterans' groups, and the firmly restrictionist labor movement who massed behind immigration control in the first decades of the century had either failed to show up or proven irresolute as players in the battles over Simpson-Mazzoli. FAIR's scant twenty-five thousand national members were "nice people, but they have no troops," in Simpson's words."

Even this brief summary conveys the impressive difficulties in the way of gaining control of an unusual invasion, by people who mostly wanted (at least for one generation) to work cheap. From the 1960s to September 10, 2001, many people seem to have reluctantly accepted North's proposition that in democracies and especially in America, border and interior enforcement of immigration limitations was a good idea backed by majorities but nonetheless was an impossible dream. Now, after 9/11, the mood is, at least for the moment, different. The security of the nation is the government's first business, and its legitimacy is on the line. The media now convey a broad consensus that regaining control of the borders is technologically and politically a live option. If it becomes so, it may alter our historical perspective.

After September 11, 2001, when we revisit Ronald Reagan's presidency, immigration reform must have a different look and importance. Reagan's chief law enforcement officer, the attorney general, felt - as did much of the Republican electorate and most of the general public - that, in the words of the Republican senator from Wyoming, "widespread flouting of our Nation's immigration laws leads to a disrespect for our laws and institutions in general."79 This is the conservative position, and it requires combating that lawbreaking with, among other things, a secure identification system for all immigrants and possibly all Americans. A similar conservative position is opposition to an "amnesty" for illegal aliens, a setting aside of law that rewards lawbreakers and permits forgiven criminals to butt in line in front of millions of people following the earlier rules. These are the hard choices that realism - another conservative attribute - requires and that public opinion supported when Simpson-Mazzoli was debated. And Ronald Reagan called himself a conservative.

But a key to the outcome was that he was not, and neither were thousands of Republican operatives Reagan brought to Washington and installed in places where they could implement his revolution. The Republican Party had two souls, one devoted to law and order and respect for the institutions of family, church, and nation, and the other a more animated one steered not by those cautious and preservative instincts but by a libertarian, free-market, government-hating ideology. For the latter, "immigration reform," in the meaning of control, had never been on their agenda, but they quickly understood that it meant strong government somewhere. So with religious conviction they moved quickly from a total lack of interest in the subject to vigorous opposition. As a result, throughout the five-year immigration reform episode, reporters found themselves noting that the administration "was not of one mind" and kept sending mixed signals. But the libertarian wing had very early won the key victory at a meeting with Reagan in July 1981, when in an emotional moment the president, under prompting, ridiculed the very idea of adequate documentation of national identity. The Wall Street Journal editorial writers had won, without needing their desired constitutional amendment, "Let There Be Open Borders."

The "struggle for the soul of the Republican Party" did not last long because Ronald Reagan's heart was not with the conservatives but with the rightist ideologues. Indeed, the reality was more startling. He swam comfortably in a sea of liberalism. Yale law professor Peter Schuck has argued that the 1980s produced two (IRCA and the 1990 immigration law) expansionist policy changes despite much public sentiment in the opposite direction, because of the contribution of the "role of ideas." But when he names them, it is clear that he uses a relaxed definition of "ideas" and has in mind several sentimentalisms: the genuflection to "diversity," universal humanitarian principles of human rights, a muddled notion that global free labor markets offer a sort of economic free lunch, and the idea that national sovereignty is obsolete. Schuck finds these sentiments among policy elites, the media, judges, church leaders, and other activists. But Ronald Reagan could mouth these sentiments with the best of them and never smelled their distinctive ideological odor or glimpsed their implications.80

Apart from Reagan's political values, he was an uncommonly passive leader because of the limitations of his intellect and curiosity. His outlook had been formed years earlier, and, in the words of one historian, "when the subject was not supply-side economics or the military budget ... he left its resolution to others." His aide Donald Regan made the revealing observation that "President Reagan essentially never told anyone what to do."81 The Tower Commission inquiry into the Iran-Contra episode depicted the president, in the summary of the New York Times, as "a confused and remote figure ... gliding gracefully across the national stage with an optimistic smile."82

So it came about that President Reagan, and those who shared his gut-level sentiments that immigration policy should be decided with reference to the same core beliefs in weak and frugal government and sunny California optimism, had kept the nation on the road the Democrats put them on with the Immigration Act of 1965. That road amounted to what Christopher Jencks has recently called "a vast social experiment of the kind that Republicans normally detest." Noting (to his apparent surprise and dismay) that by reasonable projections, the U.S. population may be propelled by immigration to exceed five hundred million or about twice the current total by 2050, Jencks sees this experiment with mass immigration as aimed inexorably toward a crowded and troubled United States contributing rising pollution loads to the global environment and struggling with a faltering assimilation process.83 Others stress the possibility that mass immigration amounts to an unannounced reshaping of the nation's ethno-racial composition and, inevitably, culture. Decades of mass immigration from Latin America and Asia, with increasing flows from the Middle East, have actually generated a vigorous discussion of "the National Question," such as we have not heard since Teddy Roosevelt's era a hundred years ago.

Liberal Democrats, whose mission in our system-is to launch social experiments, sent down the rails this parallel-track experiment in the 1960s but without formal announcement. Then they fought off intermittent and ill-focused efforts by (some) conservative Republicans in the eighties and nineties to question and slow it. Conservative Ronald Reagan, in a moment of critical reassessment and decision, lined up with the liberals, on the "keep the experiment going" side. His historical reputation should reflect this.


NOTES

1. For a lucid review of recent literature, see Christopher Jencks, "Who Should Get In?" New York Review of Books, pt. 1 (November 29, 2001), pt. 2 (December 20, 2001). For a summary of the state of the immigration debate at end of century, see Otis L. Graham, Jr., "The Unfinished Reform," in Debating American Immigration 1882-Present, ed. Roger Daniels and Otis L. Graham (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 89105.

2. U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, Becoming an American: Immigration and Immigrant Policy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, 1997), and U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, 1994).

3. Paul C. Light, Government's Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Security (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000). The failures were devolving responsibilities to the states, immigration control, simplifying taxes, expanding urban mass transit, and renewing poor communities. The top achievement was rebuilding Europe after World War 11.

4. Vernon Briggs, Jr., Mass Immigration and the National Interest (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 120-33, 151; Daniels and Graham, Debating American Immigration, 152-59.

5. For a brief account of the "New Restrictionism," see David M. Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn against Immigration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), chap. 3; and Otis L. Graham, Jr., "Illegal Immigration and the New Reform Movement," FAIR Paper #2, 1980.

6. Briggs, Mass Immigration, 154.

7. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, U.S. Immigration Policy and the National Interest (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, March 1, 1981). For an outsider's view, see the oral history by Roger Conner, FAIR Tenth Anniversary Oral History Project. January 27, 1989, 64-68, in the Gelman Library, George Washington University. Fuchs's view is presented in The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990), 250-52.

8. Ronald Reagan with Richard G. Hubler, Where's The Rest of Me? (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Conservative Book Club, 1965).

9. Robert Lindsey, "California Rehearsal," in Hedrick Smith et al., Reagan the Man, the President (New York: Macmillan, 1992).

10. Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan, In His Own Hand (New York: Free Press, 2001).

11. Ronald Reagan, An American Life: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). In the memoir Reagan remarked that fear of a larger "flow of illegal immigrants who ... were already overwhelming welfare agencies and schools in some parts of our nation" was one of his reasons for fighting communism in Central America, a public issue that was important to him (473). And he recalled that when Gorbachev had chided him on proposals in the United States to build a fence on the Mexican border, he had replied that building a fence to stop people who wanted to join our society "was hardly the same thing as building the Berlin Wall" (698). There is no mention of immigration in Fred L. Israel, ed., Ronald Reagan's Weekly Radio Addresses: The First Term, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Scholarly Resources, 1987).

12. There is no reference to immigration issues in the memoirs by Edwin Meese III, George P. Shultz, Donald T. Regan, David Stockman, and Michael Deaver. The sole exception among memoirists is, unsurprisingly, William French Smith. In his 1991 memoir he gave the issue extended treatment, claiming in the end that they had fixed the problem in 1986. See his Law and Justice in the Reagan Administration: The Memoirs of an Attorney General (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), 193-201. There is no mention at all of immigration issues in the Reagan biographies and presidential studies by Lou Cannon, Edmund Morris, Ronnie Dugger, Bob Schieffer and Gary P. Gates, Deborah H. and Gerald S. Strober, William F. Pemberton, and Robert Dallek. Dinesh D'Souza, in Ronald Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1997), touches the issue only in one paragraph. There is no mention of immigration issues in the leading studies of Reagan's presidency by Haynes Johnson, Laurence I. Barrett, John L. Palmer, Sidney Blumenthal, and Thomas Byrne Edsall.

13. "Remarks at Naturalization Ceremonies in Detroit, Michigan, October 1, 1984," Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1984 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1985), 1394-95. See also his radio address on the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty, July 5, 1986 (Public Papers, 1986, 924-45), and remarks on awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom, January 19, 1989, in which he said "if we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost" (Public Papers, 1989, 1751-53). For another Reagan speech deploying the myth of the Statue of Liberty as "a woman holding a torch of welcome.... She represents our open door," see Reagan's remarks in Shanghai, China, April 30, 1984, in Emil Arca and Gregory J. Pamel, eds., The Triumph of the American Spirit: The Presidential Speeches of Ronald Reagan (Detroit: National Reproductions Corporation, 1984), 40-42.

14. Public Papers, 1989, 1722.

15. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 20. One organization with an intense interest in the new president's views, FAIR, did turn up two brief comments in the 1980 campaign that reveal much about Reagan's basic outlook on both legal and illegal immigration. When asked by a reporter what he thought of the Hesburgh Commission report, he apparently was not familiar with it and simply gave the California growers' answer to any question about immigration: "We ought to have a worker program where they could have visas to come up here and work, and then they could go home at the end of the period." Then, in Texas, in response to a reporter's question: "The way to solve the problem of the undocumented aliens was to give them all documents" (Conner oral history, 70).

16. Memorandum, Ronald Reagan to the Attorney General et al., March 6, 1981, box 3, Francis M. Hodsoll Files, OA12739, Ronald Reagan Library (RRL).

17. Briggs, Mass Immigration, 155; Nicholas Laham, Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Immigration Reform (Westport, Conn.: Praeger), 1.

18. Laham, Ronald Reagan, 6-7.

19. See Michael Teitelbaum, "Right versus Right: Immigration and Refugee Policy in the United States," Foreign Affairs (fall 1980), pp. 21-59.

20. Useful anthologies capturing the contemporary debate are Nathan Glazer, ed., Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1985), and David E. Simcox, ed., U.S. Immigration in the 1980s: Reappraisal and Reform (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988).

21. On Simpson's immigration involvement, see Mary Elizabeth Brown, Shapers of the Great Debate on Immigration: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 247-60.

22. Simpson had earlier been busy acquainting the White House with his "rather conservative" views as a SCIRP member. See Simpson staffer Richard Day to Frank Hodsoll, March 16, 1981, box 2, Hodsoll Files, Immigration and Refugee Policy Development file, RRL.

23. Laham, Ronald Reagan, 36-41.

24. "Suggested Talking Points for Meeting with Senator Alan Simpson," cited in Laham, Ronald Reagan, 41.

25. Walter D. Huddleston and Alan K. Simpson to Ronald Reagan, July 8, 1981, box 2, Hodsoll Files, RRL. This letter was FAIR's idea, according to FAIR director Roger Conner. See Conner oral history, 71.

26. Memorandum from Francis M. Hodsoll to Martin Anderson, May 4, 1981, Hodsoll Files, box 16, RRL.

27. Hodsoll was not alone in reading public and congressional opinion as increasingly restrictionist and requiring an administration response. See White House aide Charles P. Smith, "Immigration Policy Opportunities," March 14, 1981, box 1, Jan W. Mares Files, RRL, and a lengthy memorandum from the director of the National Security Council, Richard V. Allen, commenting on the Baker-Meese briefing of the president, discussed in Laham, Ronald Reagan, 88-96. On public opinion polls on a variety of immigration options, 1980 to 1981, see Kenneth Lee, Huddled Masses, Muddled Laws: Why Contemporary Immigration Politics Fails to Reflect Public Opinion (New York: Praeger, 1998), 7-9, 21-31. For the task force, see Thomas R. Maddox, "The Reagan White House and the Task Force on Immigration, 1981" (paper delivered at the Ronald Reagan Conference, Santa Barbara, Calif, March 27, 2002).

28. Memorandum, James A. Baker III and Edwin Meese H to Ronald Reagan, June 3, 1981, box 2, Hodsoll Files, RRL. See also Laham, Ronald Reagan, 78-88.

29. See Jason Juffras, Impact of the Immigration Reform and Control Act on the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1991), 10-11.

30. The Washington Post reported that four cabinet meetings were devoted in July to discussion of the Smith task force proposals, and historian Nicholas Laham writes that there were three (Washington Post, July 19, 1981, A19; Laham, Ronald Reagan, 106). The newspaper's count must be too high, and Laham's count may be an incorrect reading of the disorganized Hodsoll files. The confusion may arise from the administration's fastchanging system of "cabinet councils" made up of only a part of the cabinet. Martin Anderson's memory of only one full cabinet discussion of the task force's recommendations is probably correct.

31. Martin Anderson, Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 27277. Several versions of the idea of a worker identification card of some sort remained in discussion in the Cabinet Council on Legal Policy into 1982, but soon the administration's dislike of any hint of "a national identity card" hardened. See Cabinet Council on Legal Policy, Agenda of April 16, 1982, "Arguments for and against National Identity Cards," Edwin Meese Files, OA 11841, RRL.

32. "Card Tricks," Washington Post, July 21, 1981; Simpson quoted in Charles Babcock, "Migrant Policy Said to Benefit Western Bosses," Washington Post, July 19, 1981, copies in WHORM subject file, Task Force on Immigration and Refugee Policy, RRL.

33. "Report of the President's Task Force on Immigration and Refugee Policy," July 1, 1981, box 10, Hodsoll Files, RRL; Department of Justice, "U.S. Immigration and Refugee Policy," July 30, 1981, Hodsoll Files, RRL.

34. Department of Justice, "U.S. Immigration and Refugee Policy," July 30, 1981, Hodsoll Files, RRL.

35. "Statement on United States Immigration and Refugee Policy," Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington, D.C.: GovernmentPrinting Office, 1982),676-77. Liberal professor Lawrence Fuchs of Brandeis, former executive director of SCIRP, wrote the White House that "the overall tone is good," but "without a secure means of identification" the proposal will be "marginally effective." Lawrence Fuchs to Frank Hodsoll, August 28, 1981, Hodsoll Files, Box 5, RRL.

36. "Testimony of William French Smith, Attorney General, before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Policy and the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and International Law," July 30, 1981, Hodsoll Files, Box 5, RRL.

37. Briggs, Mass Immigration, 154.

38. See Maddox, "Reagan White House," 30. Anderson had allies in White House counsel Fred Fielding and pollster Richard Wirthlin.

39. Maddox, "Reagan White House," 29-30.

40. Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 97th Cong., 1st sess., 1981, 422-24.

41. Memorandum from William French Smith to Cabinet Council on Legal Policy, April 20, 1983, Edwin Meese Files, OA 9945, RRL.

42. William French Smith to Jim Baker, Chief of Staff, June 10, 1982, Michael Uhlmann Files, OA 9445, RRL.

43. Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 97th Cong., 2d sess., 1982, 405-10; James G. Gimpel and James R. Edwards, The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999), chap. 4.

44. This was evident in all the Gallup polls of the 1980s. See, for example, George Gallup, Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1984 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1985), reporting that 75 percent of Americans in 1984 thought it should be illegal to employ a person without papers, and 20 percent disagreed; among Hispanics the proportions were 56 percent to 33 percent (250 to 52).

45. Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 98th Cong., 1st sess., 1983, 287.

46. Mazzoli quoted in Smith, Law and Justice, 218.

47. Aristide Zolberg, "Reforming the Back Door: The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 in Historical Perspective," in Immigration Reconsidered, ed. Virginia YansMcLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 324.

48. Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 98th Cong., 2d sess., 1984, 229-36.

49. "House Moves Briskly on Immigration Law Change," New York Times, June 17, 1984, 4:1; Robert Pear, "Bill on Aliens," New York Times, April 22, 1984, 1:1.

50. Mondale quoted in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (July 21, 1984): 1733; Robert Pear, "Chief Sponsor Moves to Rescue Immigration Bill," New York Times, August 4, 1984, 24.

51. Robert Pear, "Conferees on Alien Bill Again Fail to Compromise," New York Times, October 10, 1984, A22; Robert Pear, "Amid Charges, Immigration Bill Dies," New York Times, October 12, 1984, A16.

52. Zolberg, "Reforming the Back Door," 323-26; Robert Pear, New York Times, October 12, 1984, A 16.

53. Laham, Ronald Reagan, 198-200.

54. "Action Starting on Immigration Legislation," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 43 (July 20, 1985): 1421.

55. Zolberg, "Reforming the Back Door," 328-29; Robert Pear, "Immigration Bill Still at Sea," New York Times, May 4, 1985, 4:5.

56. Philip Shenon, "Startling Surge Is Reported in Illegal Aliens from Mexico," New York Times, February 21, 1986; Peter Applebome, "Surge of Illegal Aliens Taxes Southwestern Town's Resources," New York Times, March 9, 1986, 1:2.

57. The Economist, February 1, 1986, 22.

58. Robert Pear, "Reagan Agrees to Press for Immigration Bill," New York Times, March 12, 1986, A12.

59. Editorial, "To Control Aliens, Control Partisans," New York Times, September 29, 1985, A14.

60. Quoted in Peter Schuck, "Politics of Rapid Change: Immigration Policy in the 1980s," in Marc Landry and Martin A. Lewin, eds., The New Politics of Public Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 60.

61. Robert Pear, "Conferees on Bill Pressing to Reconcile Differences," New York Times, October 11, 1986, 1:9.

62. Zolberg, "Reforming the Back Door," 335.

63. "Remarks on Signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986," November 6, 1986, Public Papers, 1981, 1521-22.

64. Congressional Quarterly, Congress and the Nation, 1985-86, vol. 7 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1990), 717-23. As Vernon Briggs points out, there was not one amnesty in IRCA, but four. One was for illegals who had been in the country since January 1, 1982, one for "Special Agricultural Workers," one for Cubans and Haitians, and one moving forward the registry date, which allows the attorney general to adjust the status of long-term illegals (Briggs, Mass Immigration, 160-61).

65. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1986 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987), 1521-22.

66. Mary Thornton, "Immigration Changes Are Signed Into Law," Washington Post, November 7, 1986, A3.

67. FAIR Immigration Report, November 7, 1986.

68. David Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers, 27. On IRCA as a "toothless tiger," see Barry Chiswick, "Immigration Reform and Control Act," in U.S. Immigration Policy Reform in the 1980s, ed. Francisco Rivera-Batiz (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991).

69. Jencks, "Who Should Get In?" pt. 2, 100. See the longer web version at www.nybooks.com/articles/14942. For an early prediction that IRCA would disappoint due to flaws in the method of enforcement and the institutional weakness of the INS, see Michael C. LeMay, From Open Door to Dutch Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1820 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), 146-51. The dollar cost of the amnesty, direct (social services) and indirect (services to workers displaced by foreign workers, plus services provided to children of amnesty recipients), brought the cost to U.S. taxpayers over ten years to $78.7 billion, according to David Simcox, "Measuring the Fallout: The Cost of the IRCA Amnesty after Ten Years," CIS Backgrounder, May 1997.

70. Center for Immigration Studies, "Census Bureau: Eight Million Illegal Aliens in 2000," October 24, 2001.

71. The Census report can be read at www.census.gov/dmd/www/ReportRec2.htm.

72. Laham, Ronald Reagan, 8, 16, 23-28, 202-19.

73. Gimpel and Edwards, Congressional Politics, 132-34, 143-44, 153. 74. Ibid., 137-38.

75. The party platform statements on inunigration were sharply different. The Democrats said, "Our first priority must be to protect the fundamental human rights of American citizens and aliens" and made it clear that the rights of Americans they were concerned about were Hispanics who might be discriminated against under employer sanctions. The Republican tone was quite otherwise: "We affirm our country's absolute right to control its borders." Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 42 (July 21, 1984): 1768, (August 25, 1984): 2109-10.

76. David North, "Why Democratic Governments Cannot Cope with Illegal Immigration" (paper delivered at the International Conference on Migration, Rome, March 1315, 1991) (Paris: OECD, 1991).

77. A Question of Numbers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998), 145. For the misuses of history, see Otis L. Graham, Jr., "Uses and Misuses of History in the Debate over Immigration Reform," Public Historian 8 (spring 1986): 41-64.

78. Alan Simpson, conversation with Otis L. Graham, San Diego, California, August 15, 1985.

79. Congressional Digest 62 (August-September 1983): 214, 218.

80. Schuck, "Politics of Rapid Change." Reagan's liberal instincts on immigration stand in sharp contrast to those of a real conservative he was said to admire, Margaret Thatcher. In the 1976 speech that earned her the label "the Iron Lady," Thatcher remarked that she could well understand why "people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture." Kenneth Harris, Thatcher (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 80-81. For Reagan as a liberal, see Ted V. McAllister, "Reagan and the Transformation of American Conservatism," this volume.

81. Thomas S. Langston, Ideologues and Presidents: From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 67.

82. Steven Roberts, "Inquiry Finds Reagan and Chief Advisers Responsible for `Chaos' in Iran Arms Deals," New York Times, February 27, 1987, 1.

83. Jencks, "Who Should Get In?" pt. 2, 96-97.