The Legacy of the IRCA Amnesty

      By Rick Oltman, SF Immigration Examiner (Part II of VI)

The Western Region ultimately processed more amnesty applications than was estimated for the entire country.

They allowed illegals to mail-in their amnesty applications to prevent their offices from being swamped.  When the applications were received, the applicant was given a date and time to appear. 
Morale was good at the beginning of the process even though, “Those managers that they brought back, like myself, were not in favor of amnesty,” King says, “I don’t think any full time employee of INS thought it was a good idea, but we all agreed to make it work.” 

King stayed with the process for 5 years into the early 1990s. “1.7 million applicants was surprising,” he says, “3.1 million applicants overall, blew our minds.”  2.7 million received amnesty.

“The fraud in that program was out of sight,” said King.  “The biggest fraud in California was establishing the five year residency.  Fraudulent documents, rent receipts, food receipts anything needed was for sale on Los Angeles streets…There were document vendors all over the place and fraud was rampant,”

Some of the fraud was so obvious that 400,000 applicants were rejected during the interview.  Some applicants would claim to be farm workers and would say they had picked strawberries from trees and were immediately rejected.  Fraud in the agricultural program exceeded 30% because of a lack of investigative resources.  Final decisions for approval or denial were made at the Region Processing Offices. 

The one resource King was short of was an investigative team.  He told Western Region Director Ezell that they needed a “sanitized group of investigators” to work the amnesty program solely to clear up the fraud.  Current investigative staff was offered to help, but never produced the kind of investigations required to deal with the fraud.  King had one investigator in his regional office for the 36 offices in 5 states and remarks wistfully that they currently have more people in Headquarters than he had in a sector.

“The illegals actually thought the 5 year requirement was real and at first, didn’t come,” King remembers.  That thinking didn’t last long.

David J. Stoddard was a USBP supervisor in the Tucson Sector in 1987.  His experiences of the amnesty were from the enforcement point of view.

Stoddard remembers that the government was stunned because not many people began applying right away.  The IRCA was signed on November 6th at a time when many illegal aliens, most harvests over, had returned to Mexico for the Christmas holidays.  And, he believes, that many didn’t immediately return because they couldn’t prove 5 years continuous residency as required by the Act. 

That means, ironically, that many of the illegal aliens actually thought that there was integrity to the process, that the United States actually would enforce the law.  If that is what they thought, they soon got over it.

The Spanish language press in Central and South America began reporting sensational news stories about the United States giving amnesty to everyone without a criminal record.  “It was like gasoline on a flame, it just burned up the Press,” says Stoddard. And from the Mexican border to the tip of South America people began to return to the USA to apply for amnesty.  And, many decided to bring their wife, kids, brothers, sisters, cousins and other relatives back to the United States to apply for the amnesty, too.

“Prior to IRCA of ’86 I encountered illegal aliens working who gave the employer a Social Security number of 000-00-0000 and it was accepted,” Stoddard recalls.  “There were probably tens of thousands of illegal aliens who were using that Social Security number.  When they were asked, some of them would pull up a nine digit or a five digit number, or whatever would come to mind; numbers belonging to a friend or a relative.  They were obviously fictitious… Some of them were real numbers because in the ‘60s and ‘70s the USA would send Social Security numbers to applicants applying from foreign countries.”