Why This Is Not 1986 : Reagan tried this already, But it may indeed be different this time.

National Review ^ | 01/31/2013 | Michael Barone

[SeekAndFind]

Yesterday, as Barack Obama called for a bipartisan immigration bill in Las Vegas and Senator Marco Rubio called for one on Rush Limbaugh’s program, the chances for passage looked surprisingly good.

But from some quarters — mostly from the right, but also from liberals such as blogger Mickey Kaus — comes a complaint that deserves to be addressed.

We tried this once already, they say, in the 1986 immigration act. We were told that in return for the legalization of illegal immigrants we would get tough border control and strict enforcement against employers who hired illegals.

We got the amnesty, these folks say, but we didn’t get effective border control or workplace enforcement. We got instead a huge flow of illegals, who number 11 million now.

Why should anything be different this time? It’s a reasonable question, and I think there are reasonable answers. And let’s not charge anyone with racism here. After all, illegal immigrants have, by definition, done something illegal. And legalization involves some element of forgiveness.

The argument for granting legal status is that we as a nation have been complicit in tolerating a situation in which it’s easy and profitable to violate the law. The price of changing that is granting legal status to otherwise unobjectionable illegals, since we can’t deport 11 million people.

So what are the reasons to think such legislation would produce different results from those of the 1986 law?

* Border enforcement. It’s clear that we’ve been doing better and can do better still. Fences at some portions of the border have stopped illegal crossings, and we have unmanned aerial vehicles that were unavailable 25 years ago.

The eight senators’ framework called for an “entry-exit system that tracks whether all persons entering the United States on temporary visas via airports and seaports have left the country as required by law.”

That suggests something feasible now that wasn’t back then: an identity card linked to a database with biometric identification. India is now creating such a system for its 1.2 billion people. Why can’t we do that for many fewer immigrants and visa holders?

* High-skill immigration. The 1986 law left intact a system with more slots for collateral relatives such as siblings than for high-skill graduates. Today, there’s a big demand for the latter.

The senators’ framework calls for green cards for those with U.S. advanced science, math, and tech degrees. Why keep these people out? Why tie them to one employer?

* Employment verification. The 1986 law didn’t prevent illegals from getting fake identification. Americans on both left and right hated the idea of anything like a national identity card.

Americans today feel differently. Most of us seem content to carry cell phones that enable others to track our whereabouts at any time.

And we have the E-Verify system for employers to check the legal status of job applicants. It’s working well after initial glitches, and in states with high E-Verify usage, such as Arizona, illegal numbers have declined.

It could be even more effective to require identity cards with biometric links. Making it hard for illegals to get jobs would hugely reduce the incentive for illegal immigration.

* Source of illegal immigrants. Nearly 60 percent of illegal immigrants come from Mexico, with which we share a 2,000-mile border. But net migration from Mexico appears to have been zero since the housing bubble burst in 2007.

We don’t know whether it will resume again. But we do know (as we didn’t in the decade after our free-trade agreement) that Mexico’s economy can grow faster than ours, as it is now.

Mexico is becoming a majority-middle-class country, which reduces incentives to emigrate. I predict we’ll never again see Mexican immigration of the magnitude we saw between 1982 and 2007.

If that’s right, it means we won’t see a wave of illegals, as we saw after the 1986 law.

There were potentially significant differences between what Obama and Rubio said yesterday.

Obama wants a faster path to citizenship for illegals. Rubio insists that legalization only be triggered when enforcement is strengthened.

Putting together a comprehensive bill requires tradeoffs and compromises. Obama’s 2007 Senate votes for what John McCain and Edward Kennedy called killer amendments helped defeat an immigration bill when the political stars seemed more in alignment than they do today.

Obama now could demand provisions Republicans won’t accept and blame them for killing reform. It depends on whether he wants a political issue or a law.

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2013 The Washington Examiner

[kabar]

When the history of this Great Republic is written and why it fell, the historians will point to the 1965 Immigration Act as the one single event that led to the destruction of this nation. Demography is destiny.

The 1965 Immigration Act: Anatomy of a Disaster

[showme_the_Glory]

Olly Olly, in come free.

[ExTxMarine]

I agree!

It is nice to know that the Democrats were already using word-ology to cover their true intent in the 1960’s!

For ANY Congressman to call our current immigration system “merit based,” is obviously high on bat crap! The Hispanics are the most family-based ethnic group migrating to the US and that makes them the most likely to use the kinship rights to bring other family members to America. And those family members then sponsor their extended family members. And when their children turn 21 years old, they then are able to sponsor MORE family members to the US.

Thus, Hispanics make up close to 50% of ALL LEGAL immigrants into the US. So, we have a major demographic shift like this, we can foresee a major shift in politics, culture, etc...!

[SeminoleCounty]

Michael Barone: Amnesty Liberal

The Rubio-Obama Amnesty is much worse than the 1986 Reagan Amnesty. And, where does Barone think the money is going to come from to fund Rubio-Obama?

[SeminoleCounty]

Rush has always been a closet Amnesty supporter

And, conservatives do not move from New York to liberal Palm Beach and Palm Beach County. Florida has many wealthy neighborhoods very conservative areas...you do not escape liberals in Palm Beach

[Will88]

Barone seems to miss the mark more and more these days.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

Click the keyword Aliens to see more illegal alien, border security, and other related threads.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

The means are there.. but is the will? Yes? OK. How about 1986 (again!)? During the Clinton years take a look.

This may not come through it is linked to a google "quick view" and is

FIGURE 1: STATUS OF THE EARNINGS SUSPENSE FILE (Tax Years 1937-2000) in CONGRESSIONAL RESPONSE REPORT Social Security Administration Benefits Related to Unauthorized Work, A-03-03-23053 (March, 2003 PDF), shows some interesting things about the Earnings Suspense File (ESF).

Notice the rocketing that occurred during the Clinton years. It represents millions and millions of people working on SS numbers that do not match Social Security master files for one reason or another. The mis matches are saved in a suspense file (the Earnings Suspense File, ESF).

They will never be deleted until they are transferred to the master files and credited to someone. Data are there from day one of SS. The ILLEGALs will all get SS credit for work done once they are legal and the suspended data are move to SS master files. That appears to be what happened following 1986.

Notice how the data dropped following the 1986 "reform". Then shot up and still blasting upward until the economy itself seems to have leveled it off (not shown).

[Cboldt]

-- you do not escape liberals in Palm Beach --

I bet you did that with one hand tied behind your back.

Limbaugh is a tolerated social/political pressure release. The left has them too.

[CowboyJay]

"What really needs to be done is to change our legal immigration policies. Basically we need to go to a merit based system like Canada and Australia have vice the kinship system we have now and we need to reduce significantly the number of legal immigrants from 1. 2 million a year to around 300,000."

BTTT!

There's no way any society can sustain that kind of influx of foreigners. We have a huge glut of unskilled labor in this country. Mass immigration is so 1850.

[kabar]

For the decade ending in 2010, we had the largest number of legal immigrants enter our country in history--13.9 million. At the same time, we had a net loss of 400,000 jobs. There is no correlation between immigration numbers and job needs.

Note: The chart is for the period 1900-2010, not 1970-2010.

[rmlew]

Barone is a wealth of information. He forgets nothing, but has not learned anything on immigration. Certainly not from the 1968 act, where Reagan was rolled by the left and there was no funding for enforcement. Obama has already made it clear that he wants no enforcement. Rubio has been forced to admit that the commission is not an enforcement-first approach. This is worse than the promises in 2007. This is not 1986. In 1986 we had a growing economy and low unemployment. Neither is true today. Between 2000 and 2010, we lost 400,000 total jobs while importing over 13 million people legally. No one knows how many illegals are in America. There is no rationale for this bill other than as dane geld to the Hispanic Lobby, who will thank Obama and blame Republicans. It is bad policy, bad politics, and suicide for the country. But rational thinking is all but a crime in DC.

[moonshinner_09]

Originally published April 03, 2006...Are We Really a Nation of Immigrants?It used to be that only open-borders activists said it. Now the entire political leadership of the United States is saying it. President Bush is saying it. Sen. Specter is saying it. Even Sen. Bill “enforcement-only” Frist is saying it:

“We are a nation of immigrants built upon the rule of law.”

Of course, that cute little addition about “rule of law” is nothing but boob bait for the Bubbas (a category of persons that, in the minds of our leaders, seems to constitute about three-quarters of the country); our leaders have as much intention to enforce the immigration laws as I have to fly to Mars next week. The part of the statement that counts is the business about “nation of immigrants.” To see the entire political leadership of our country pronouncing in unison this slogan, all as a part of an effort to push through the most catastrophic open-borders scheme in our history, is an Orwellian experience. If we’re a “nation of immigrants,” how can we be a nation of Americans?

To say that America is a “nation of immigrants” is to imply that there has never been an actual American people apart from immigration. It is to put America out of existence as a historically existing nation that immigrants and their children joined by coming here, a country with its own right to exist and to determine its own sovereign destiny—a right that includes the right to permit immigration or not. No patriot, no decent person who loves this country, as distinct from loving some whacked-out, anti-national, leftist idea of this country, would call it a “nation of immigrants.” Any elected official who utters the subversive canard that America is a “nation of immigrants” should, at the least, find his phone lines tied up with calls from irate constituents.

Of course, at first glance it seems indisputable that “we are a nation of immigrants,” in the sense that all Americans, even including the American Indians, are either immigrants themselves or descendants of people who came here from other places. Given those facts, it would have been more accurate to say that we are “a nation of descendants of immigrants.” But such a mundane assertion would fail to convey the thrilling idea conjured up by the phrase “nation of immigrants”—the idea that all of us, whether or not we are literally immigrants, are somehow “spiritually” immigrants, in the sense that the immigrant experience defines our character as Americans.

This friendly-sounding, inclusive sentiment—like so many others of its kind—turns out to be profoundly exclusive. For one thing, it implies that anyone who is not an immigrant, or who does not identify with immigration as a key aspect of his own being, is not a “real” American. It also suggests that newly arrived immigrants are more American than people whose ancestors have been here for generations. The public television essayist Richard Rodriguez spelled out these assumptions back in the 1990s when he declared, in his enervated, ominous tone: “Those of us who live in this country are not the point of America. The newcomers are the point of America.” Certainly the illegal-alien demonstrators in Los Angeles last week agreed with him; America, they kept telling us, belongs to them, not to us.
more@ http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=4976

[Altura Ct.]

Why This Is Not 1986 : Reagan tried this already, But it may indeed be different this time.

Charlie! Lucy swears she will not move the football...

[dennisw]

This is how the Democrats elected a new electorate. Just wait until the tidal wave of anchor babies start voting

[Fledermaus]

E-verify won’t work if you can’t enforce it’s usage. In 1986 we got the I-9 form. It was a joke and still is a joke. It’s never audited and requires some clerk in HR to just “look” at documents.

It’s like a Chinese menu...one from column A, one from B or C.

[kabar]

Yep. One out every 10 babies born in this country is to an illegal alien. They are by law American citizens entitled to Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other welfare assistance. There are 300,000 to 400,000 anchor babies born annually. It has been going on for decades. And these anchor babies are not included in the estimated 42 million foreign born in this country.

[dennisw]

Illegal aliens often claim gov’t housing and food stamps via the anchor baby. This baby gives them entree into a panoply of social welfare programs. Obvious they get free pregnancy care, free delivery of babies and free post birth care. Free infants formuale, free Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) | Food and Nutrition Service