The Best Immigration Policy or the Worst?

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The Best Immigration Policy or the Worst

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) is viewed as one of the most important policy implementations in U.S. immigration history. As drafted, IRCA proposed to be a policy to control and deter all illegal immigration into the U.S., but the policy was truly directed at stopping the flow of Mexican immigrants that continues to be the largest immigration flow in the world. Daniel Tichenor writes in Dividing Lines that, “Originally designed as a restrictive enforcement measure, IRCA proved to be surprisingly expansive in both design and effect.” By identifying the unintended consequences of the law, this paper explores why the policy failed. Ultimately, this paper shows that IRCA expanded immigration by creating a greater need for it as well as by unintentionally breaking the traditional patterns of temporal and seasonal migration.

The Objectives of IRCA

The drafters of IRCA developed three objectives: to regularize the status of millions of undocumented migrants, to deter immigration through tougher enforcement, and to prevent the need for immigration. Each objective strived to ultimately solve the “immigration problem” by greatly decreasing the number of migrants coming to the U.S; however, each in fact increased immigration.

The first objective of IRCA sought to regularize the status of millions of undocumented migrants by legalizing those who entered before January 1982, as well as those that performed temporary services or labor, mainly seasonal agricultural workers. This appears contrary to IRCA’s purpose of limiting immigration into the U.S.; however, legislators saw this first objective as necessary. First, amnesty dealt with the problem of the presence of ...

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... AL., supra note 1, at 344.

William Robinson, Aquí estamos y no nos vamos! Global Capital and Immigrant Rights, 48 Race and Class no. 2, 2006 at 81.

Julie A. Phillips & Douglas S. Massey, The New Labor Market: Immigrants and Wages After IRCA, 36 Demography, no. 2, 1999 at 224.

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