Burning Atlanta

I won't get into all the particulars of the 1986 amnesty, that weren't covered in this article, because it stands on its own to point out some of the stupidity of granting another amnesty. It was wrong then and it will be 10 times worse now.

1986 Amnesty Disaster

Twenty years ago Monday, Congress passed the largest effort to date to curb undocumented immigration to this country. Under the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), employers were sanctioned for the first time for hiring undocumented workers. The bill also called for tighter controls along the Mexican border. But the bill was a compromise: Enforcement was balanced by an amnesty provision.

"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!' "

Today Mr. Mazzoli defends the bill as the best way to combat illegal immigration at the time. The six administrations that followed, he says, are to blame for not enforcing tighter restrictions. And now, "It's déjà vu all over again," Mazzoli says. "These are the same issues that we had 20 years ago."

Just a couple of quick points. The politicians didn't tell the truth about how many illegals would be granted amnesty under the plan. Also, this article doesn't mention how many other family members were allowed in under "chain migration."

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.

One of the big problems with the IRCA amnesty was all the counterfeit applications, especially from seasonal agricultural workers. Economists Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny studied the effects of amnesty programs on undocumented immigration and presented their findings in the August 2003 issue of Demography magazine. They say that the number of seasonal workers qualifying for amnesty was about 300,000. But in the end, more than 1 million applications were granted. "Most people agree that there was substantial fraud because the document requirement and the residency requirement were quite low for that part of the program," Ms. Zavodny says.

This country is totally insane when it comes to immigration and amnesties. They pulled this bullshit stunt 20 years ago, it was a total fiasco and directly led to the problems we now have with from 12-20 million illegals here, and these stupid ass clowns want to do it again. Brilliant!!