The Legacy of the IRCA Amnesty

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

In the early 1980s the Reagan Administration tasked the Social Security Administration, Department of Labor and the Census Bureau to estimate the number of illegals who would likely apply for amnesty.  Prior to IRCA it was illegal to work in our country if you were here illegally, but it wasn’t illegal to hire illegal aliens.  That double standard was erased by the Act.  But, those employers who paid the illegal worker on the books and reported taxes to the IRS and SSA gave these agencies a good idea of the number of workers without a valid Social Security number. The initial official estimate was that 1.1 million illegals would apply for amnesty.  

What the federal government apparently didn’t take into account was that many of those 1.1 million would bring friends and relatives back to America to claim five years residence in the same fraudulent manner as those who came and went on a regular basis.  That is one reason why the number of applications was three times higher than the original estimate.

When the knowledge of fraud got out, there was a literal stampede of people coming across the border illegally to apply for amnesty and the government was quickly overwhelmed.
Stoddard recalls that fraud was rampant in the application process.  Estimates of application fraud ranged between 66% and 75%.

He also remembers packages of counterfeit utility receipts, written receipts and anything else that would establish a 5 year residency was for sale and only required the name to be filled in.  And, these were in the days prior to personal computers.  “The adjudicators started out doing a bang up job in collaborating and investigating but the administration came down with orders not to look too closely if on the surface the application appeared to be legitimate.”

On the line, whole groups of illegals were turning themselves into BP officers as soon as they crossed the border saying they wanted to apply for the amnesty.

And then the Border Patrol was given orders not to interfere with an alien who was “en-route” to apply for amnesty.

The quid pro quo for the amnesty was enforcement.  There was going to be employer sanctions and the promise of more resources.

Regarding the amnesty and the promise of Employer Sanctions Stoddard remembers, “I thought, OK, I can live with this if we can prevent the employers from enticing more illegal aliens into the country.  I don’t like it, but I can live with it.”

And then…
“As a supervisor I took my men to training sessions where they were being trained on the Employer Sanctions provisions.  And I sent people out on instructions.  I sent people out to visit employers in the area to educate employers on how to fill out an I-9 and what to look for.  Then one day that all turned around.  The training was cancelled and we were told not to worry about the Employer Sanctions provisions.”

George Z. (Zach) Taylor was working in the McAllen, TX Sector in 1986 and was told by supervisors that he actually wrote up the very first amnesty case.  As he recalls, “It was Christmas Eve 1986 and a woman and her three sons aged 7, 5 and 4 were picked up in the McAllen Floodway walking south towards Mexico.  She had had a fight with her husband who had ripped the door and window out of the shack they were living in.  It was so cold it was sleeting and when they were picked up all four were suffering from hypothermia.  They were seven miles from the border and never would have made it.”

Taylor listened to her story as he wrote up the case and realized that she qualified for the Amnesty and prepared the paperwork.  Then, he took her and the boys to a local church where they were all fed and well taken care of.  Taylor saw her again when she returned to thank him for helping her and her sons.

Helping the woman and her sons is the best memory Taylor has of the IRCA.  He too knew of the massive fraud in the application process.  He too had heard the stories of picking strawberries off of trees as well as picking okra off a vine.

Taylor was a sign cutter, a tracker, and remembers, “All of sudden there were no tracks, nobody was going north…when the Employer Sanctions went into effect.”  Further, “Nobody was going north, but they were going south.  And they (his supervisors) made me stop picking these south-bounders up because I was documenting the fact that it was working.  Employer Sanctions was working.  The aliens were actually walking back to Mexico, they were self removing themselves.  And, there was a real fear within the immigration service that the illegal alien problem had been solved.”