Reagan failed to understand the basic truth of psychology. Which is, rewarding bad behavior GUARANTEES more bad behavior in future. After Reagan gave illegals blanket amnesty, the flow of illegals expanded geometrically.
And those new laws would not be on our books today.
Had they been enforced, we would have had about 300,000 illegals here in 2000. Instead we had 9 million.
Bush was the one that went full in on massive scale amnesty. He campaigned on amnesty at first, then thought better.
During Bush’s first couple of years, illegal immigration reached 3.5 million per year, according to Time magazine. PER YEAR!
That means during the first ten years after 2000, upwards of 35 million illegals could have come over.
I think Time was gaming the numbers, but there very easily could have been 2 to 2.5 million per year.
Here’s something else to think about.
In the mid 2000s, there was a guy here that revealed the apprehensions for just one sector during one nine month period. In the busiest one sector alone, 900,000 illegal aliens were apprehended. That’s a 1 million rate per year in that one sector alone (albeit the busiest by far).
Border patrol agents have traditionally agreed that they only interdict about 10% of the actual numbers coming across the border. Even if they doubled that figure, that means that 6.0 million were making it across the border per year in those days.
That’s quite a bit different than the average 900,000 that made it across in the 1990s.
Reagan made it very clear, illegal immigration was not acceptable.
Had GHW Bush enforced those new laws and NOT done away with inland enforcement, very few illegal aliens would have come to the nation. They wouldn’t have been able to survive here without work.
Reagan was not the problem. His successor was a very big problem. He laid the ground work for very little illegal immigration enforcement, other than token ones.