The Legacy of the IRCA Amnesty

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

Success, it seemed, was a threat to their reason for being.

“They didn’t want to document that the employer sanctions was working,” Taylor says.  “At risk was the budget for the whole program of investigations, detentions, deportations; the whole thing.”  “The real fear at that time,” Taylor repeated, “Was that the system was working.”  He also recalls that
BP officers were, “…not allowed to go within a block of the amnesty office.”

Once the wave of people began heading north and got into the process, in some offices up to 75% of the applications were fraudulent on their face. 

Taylor knew many working in the Dallas Adjudication Center and was told that they got chewed out for denying an amnesty application.  They were just supposed to stamp it “Approved”.  Some wouldn’t do it and sent the obviously fraudulent applications on as “denied.”  And, many times they would come back with a waiver, and the applicant received amnesty.

One agent from another sector said he heard that only “Approved” rubber stamps were issued.
Another agent described how he and a co-worker went to their supervisor to report that they needed more help to do a credible job with the amnesty applications.  They were told to go back and just do the best they could.  Shortly thereafter they returned to the supervisor and told him again that they really needed more help if they were going to it right and were told, “Look, this is the job.  If you can’t do it, then go back to enforcement.”

In implementing the IRCA in 1987-88, the INS determined that illegal aliens who received welfare assistance were ineligible for amnesty.  The Courts later overruled the INS, and told the agency to accept amnesty applications from unauthorized foreigners who had received welfare.  Drenched with fraud, the amnesty raised expectations around the world and in the 25 years since IRCA there have been millions of illegal entries into the United States.

Today, estimates vary on the number of illegal aliens currently in the country.  The 11 to 12 million number is laughable.  It is used because if the American people knew the real number they would demand enforcement and accountability at the ballot box. 

In 2005 the investment banking firm of Bear Stearns estimated the number of illegal aliens in the country to be 20-22 million, based on analysis of remittances (payments to Mexico), school enrollment in Mexican communities and other factors.

The “official” number in 2008 was 12.5 million, only half a million more than what some experts had estimated 24 years prior in 1984. Then the estimate dropped to 11 million.

What is the real number of illegal aliens in the United States?  The truth is, nobody knows.  And the federal government surely wouldn’t say if it did know.  All estimates are really guesses or made up for political reasons.

One way to estimate the number of illegal entries is what Border Patrol officers call the “got-away-rate.”  Trackers in the Border Patrol pride themselves in the ability to “cut sign” and would find the trail of a group walking through the desert.  They would estimate the size of the group from the number of footprints and follow the tracks until they caught and arrested them.  Based on the estimate of the group size, the number they caught and how many got away, they would calculate “the got-away-rate.”  For years the Border Patrol estimated that on a good day they caught one in five, on a bad day one in seven.  If it’s a good day and you catch one in five; that means four got away.  Border Patrol officers and supervisors used this calculation for years and while not precise, they believed it to be a good estimate of enforcement at the border.

With the exception of the last couple years, the Border Patrol and INS/ICE have, over the past two decades, arrested over 1 million illegal aliens a year.  That means that if every day was a “good day,” the United States has had over 80 million illegal entries in the past 20 years.  Many of them were multiple entries by one individual, of course.  Nobody believes there are 80 million illegal aliens in the country.  However, given several different demographic studies using different techniques, it is possible that 30-35 million illegal aliens live in America today. 

And, illegal aliens are still coming…to get an amnesty.