My law-school friend Mark sent me this link to a CSM story on the 20 year anniversary of the 1986 congressional “amnesty” program that ultimately allowed 3 million immigrants to gain residency or citizenship.

“An amnesty cleans people who have broken the law,” says former US Rep. Romano Mazzoli (D) of Kentucky. He and former US Sen. Alan Simpson (R) of Wyoming were the primary architects and cosponsors of IRCA. “But in our bill, you had to prove that you were a law-abiding person who honored the institutions of our country…. So you can take your pick of euphemisms, but if you use the word ‘amnesty,’ people will get angry, throw their hands up in the air, and scream: ‘They’re rewarding people for misbehaving!’ “

While I respect an aspect of the “law-abiding society” argument of the anti-immigration rhetoric, it has always bothered me how willing those same folks are to either turn a blind eye or just raise their hands in ambivalence to the law-breaking employers that hire undocumented workers and often pay below a legal wage. (Not to mention the social benefit to prices from all of those products & services).

William King Jr., was the Western regional director of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and responsible for carrying out the amnesty program. He says that he had hope that the legislation would work at first. But IRCA was a three-legged stool, he says. One leg was employer sanctions, another was increased border security, and the third was the amnesty program. “In truth, only the amnesty program became a fact,” he says, and the effort failed.

I think that three-legged stool is the only legitimate means by which the current immigration dilemma can be tackled. To address the issue from only 1 or 2 legs means we’ll only end up on our a$&es.

P.S. Family experience does add to my view of the ‘86 amnesty. Some members of my family rightly & legally benefited from it, a few others wrongly & fraudulently benefited from it, and even others wrongly & inexplicably were tossed under the bus despite meeting all of the requirements and goals. I’m not sure how to interpret that - all systems have their holes. But whatever it says, the immigration debate is not mere theory or simple political machination (see here for “machination”).

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