The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“President Biden and his allies in Congress recently unveiled their proposed immigration reform. The most important provision of the U.S. Citizenship Act is its path to citizenship for millions of undocumented Americans: . . .
“This kind of policy is very popular. Years of polling data right up to the most recent surveys indicate that about 67 percent to 83 percent of Americans favor legalization for undocumented people. However, the U.S. Citizenship Act draws vociferous criticism from anti-immigration hard-liners and Republican elected officials. To justify their position, they are already resurrecting their old talking points: falsely accusing undocumented people of being a drain on national resources, predicting a “catastrophe” on the U.S.-Mexico border and claiming that the law would lead to more illegality.
“All of these predictions ignore history. The Immigration Reform and Control Act t(IRCA) of 1986 included provisions that, among other things, allowed 2.7 million undocumented people to gain legal status in the United States. In point of fact, this “amnesty” provision proved to be by far the most successful part of a law that also sought to regulate hiring and spent billions of dollars reinforcing the nation’s southern border. If anything, the lesson of that reform is that it should have given legal status to even more people. . . .
“IRCA’s detractors typically fail to understand why this happened. One key reason was the law’s “border security” provisions. The 1986 act heavily militarized the U.S.-Mexico border, markedly increasing patrols, fences and other enforcement mechanisms. Paradoxically, these measures made it harder for migrants to move back and forth across the border, and those without legal status became much more likely to remain in the United States and to keep their spouses and children with them. The very provisions intended to lock migrants out had actually locked them in. . . .
“But in the decades since IRCA, restrictionists have used anti-democratic parliamentary maneuvers to frustrate the will of the majority. . . . [T]he American labor movement has come to favor more liberalized immigration policy, including a path to citizenship for the undocumented..“ [Link] – A Path to Citizenship for 11 million Immigrants Is a No-Brainer, A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, The Washington Post, 2/24/21
Fact Check of Above Quote: This article is dishonest, false, and brainless. One dishonesty is referring to illegal aliens as “undocumented Americans” No, they are foreign nationals living in the United States. Americans are American citizens. They have legal documents because they, as citizens, are legal residents. This misuse of language by illegal alien advocates aims to blur the distinction citizen and noncitizen, and it has the effect of denying the significance of our citizenship—and by extension the significance of our country.
It is not true that polling shows consistent support for amnesty. A recent Rasmussen poll, for example, found that that voters opposed amnesty, which would give work permits to illegal aliens, by a margin of 53 to 39 percent.
The claim that the 1986 amnesty (IRCA) was successful is totally false. That law was a legislative debacle of broken promises and fraud. Its backers promised, in exchange for amnesty, that they would never support another amnesty and that they would accept adequate steps to stop illegal immigration.
Little time passed, however, before illegal alien advocates were again crying for amnesty. And the promised actions to stop illegal immigration either took years to happen or didn’t completely happen. A key example was a system for businesses to check whether their job applicants are legal residents. That system, now known as E-Verify, didn’t come into being until ten years after IRCA, and it still isn’t mandatory at the federal level.
As a consequence, contrary to the author’s claim, illegal aliens faced little to deter them from settling in the U.S. The prospect of future amnesties gave them incentive to come, that’s exactly what they did. Why would anyone imagine that rewarding behavior wouldn’t encourage it?
The nearly three million illegals who applied for amnesty after IRCA quickly overwhelmed the resources of immigration authorities to process them. This left the process of application wide open to cheating. Fraud indeed was prevalent, particularly among more than a third of the applicants who claimed they were agricultural workers. How would the integrity of processing fare with 11 million applicants, or maybe a whole lot more?
Amnesty trivializes the worth of our citizenship and our rule of law. Opposition to amnesty is a no-brainer if there ever was one.