'86 Amnesty Frames Immigration Debate

With the U.S. Senate's approval of a landmark immigration bill last week, setting up a showdown with the House, some policymakers say moving forward depends on looking back.

Twenty years back, to be precise.

In 1986, President Reagan signed a sweeping immigration reform bill featuring, among other things, widespread legalization of illegal immigrants, tougher border enforcement and measures aimed at eliminating the hiring of unauthorized workers. The current Senate proposal includes similar features.

"Here we are again," said Bill King, who headed up the 1986 amnesty program in the western United States for what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "It's almost as if today's politicians are resurrecting the transcripts and speeches from 1986."

For better or worse, the law has become a key reference point in the current debate about how best to reform a still-dysfunctional immigration system.

The law awarded green cards to 2.7 million migrants, helping them climb out of the shadows and offering them the opportunity to rise into the American middle class.

For people like Apolonia Calderon, a 74-year-old Palm Desert resident, the amnesty was a "blessing" that helped her nearly double her wages and set her on a path to citizenship, which she obtained last month.

But the law failed to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, whose numbers have more than doubled from more than 5 million two decades ago to an estimated 12 million today. Several problems clearly were not resolved: porous borders, spotty employer enforcement and the national hunger for a stable, cheap workforce.

That track record offers lessons to the nation as Senate and House conferees prepare to reconcile their competing versions of immigration legislation in coming weeks. The House bill emphasizes enforcement at the border and in the workplace, and the Senate version, with less stringent enforcement measures, would create a pathway to citizenship for much of the nation's illegal population.

Critics of the bills say that they lack sufficient money for enforcement in the workplace and that the Senate version creates elaborate criteria for legalization that could be unenforceable and vulnerable to fraud.

In a measure of how the 1986 law figures in the present debate, many critics derisively call the Senate bill "amnesty" legislation, though many defenders reject the term, emphasizing that qualified applicants must, among other things, pay fines and back taxes.