The Legacy of the IRCA Amnesty

     

      By Rick Oltman, SF Immigration Examiner Part I of VI)

November 6, 2011 marks a dubious anniversary in the history of America.  On that day 25 years ago President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, IRCA.  Also known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, it was an amnesty for illegal aliens, the effects of which we live with today.

IRCA was the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952.  In 1981 the Reagan Administration asked Congress to pass a comprehensive legislative package that included employer sanctions, other measures to increase enforcement of immigration laws and the legalization of illegal aliens. The Employer Sanctions program was supposed to be the key element that would remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which was, and is, the number one reason that illegal aliens come to our country.

Whatever its intention, it is undeniable that the IRCA Amnesty of millions of illegal aliens failed to solve the problem of illegal immigration.  Instead, the legalization of people who broke our laws and sneaked into our country and were allowed to jump the line in front of legal immigrants only encouraged more illegal immigration by creating a worldwide expectation that if you could just get to the United States, that you too would eventually get amnesty.

The plan was controversial at the time.  There were doubts that it would work.  It was remarked by some that the bill was proceeding amid massive confusion about how it would work, how much it would cost and how many people it would amnesty.

In June of 1984, amidst the Presidential campaign, three candidates for the Democrat Presidential nomination; Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson opposed Simpson-Mazzoli.

Cesar Chavez, who had his union members calling the INS to report illegal aliens working in the fields so that they could be deported, encouraged the U.S. government to include provisions in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986) applying sanctions against employers who knowingly hired illegal aliens.

How many would apply for, or qualify for, amnesty was never known, nor even closely estimated.  In 1981 the estimate was one million illegal aliens in the country.  By 1984 that estimate had been raised to 1.6 million.  Depending on the cutoff date, prior to which the illegal alien could apply, some estimates were raised to 2.2 million.

In 1984 it was believed that the total number of illegals in the country, not all of whom would qualify for the amnesty, was, “somewhere around 6 million.”  Some experts, according to TIME Magazine (June 2, 1984), estimated that the real number of illegals in the country in 1984 could be as high as 12 million. 

If the number 12 million seems familiar, it is.  It is the number that is most used in discussions today by those who want to mask the reality of the immigration anarchy that our government’s failure to enforce our laws has wrought.

This anecdotal chronicle of the 1986 IRCA Amnesty contains points of view from three men who were involved with the amnesty process and immigration enforcement during the amnesty period.

Bill King ran the amnesty program in the Western Region.  His service to the country includes; Chief Patrol Agent of the Border Patrol Academy, Acting Chief of the Immigration Academy and Chief Patrol Agent of the El Centro, CA sector.

He remembers that the original talk about an amnesty began in early 1981.  It was determined early on that whatever the number of illegals was, they were going to need a bureaucracy to adjudicate the amnesty and people to run it.  The INS reached out to retired Border Patrol and INS supervisors, including King, who began to huddle up in 1985 to figure out how to do it.

Bill King, Ed Wildblood, Bill Zimmer and Jim Bailey, one for each INS Region, began discussing the process in late 1985 and went to the Central Office in Washington, DC in early 1986 to begin planning what it would take to make it work.  With an estimated 1.5 million applicants, they decided that they had to open 112 offices and hire over 2,000 people. They brought back into the Service a number of retirees and had to develop training programs and establish liaisons with cities and federal law enforcement.

By law, they had 180 days after President Reagan signed the bill on November 6th  to be up and running to begin accepting amnesty applications.  All the offices in the country opened on May 5, 1987.  It was a Herculean effort. 

The INS ran the operation.  Harold Ezell, Western Region Director and Bill King did seven press conferences in seven cities in two days on the amnesty.  “The people we hired did a hell-of-a job,” says King.  The Immigration and Naturalization Service in those days was a stepchild in the federal law enforcement community and was perennially underfunded by the Department of Justice.  “It was believed to be the greatest undertaking ever by INS.”

“We were going like a group of madmen,” says King, who remembers many back-to-back-to-back 16 hour days.  “Ezell was adamant that the program would work properly.  The Western Region had 36 offices in five states and 15 offices in the greater Los Angeles area and we ultimately processed the most applications, 1.7 million.”