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I think Simpson-Mazzoli originally claimed that there were only one million illegals who would be granted amnesty. In reality, it was 3 million. It was also one of Reagan’s regrets. In retrospect, he said he should have never signed the Act.

The bit about Reagan's second thoughts is apparently a myth.

I think the freeper post from the Free Republic link in this Daily Caller opinion article says it best: “Reagan rarely made the same mistake twice.”
The author’s peroration is simply fatuous when he writes that the reason we’re having problems is that we “allowed” too few “illegal aliens” (Reagan’s phrase) rather than too many.
It’s just more of the ‘chicken v. egg’ false dilemma posed by amnesty supporters: “The system is broken. We must have ‘comprehensive immigration reform’”.
No, that’s B.S., as is most of this OpEd apparently.

What we must have is an executive branch willing to do its job and look out for what is best for America and Americans.

A few observations:

Reagan’s grand and compassionate gesture to the illegal alien population garnered no respect for he or his party as most all illegal aliens today support democrats.

How did Reagan’s experiment work out? The Center for Immigration Studies said in 2000:

“About 2.7 million people received lawful permanent residence (“green cards”) in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a result of the amnesties contained in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. But these new INS figures show that by the beginning of 1997 those former illegal aliens had been entirely replaced by new illegal aliens, and that the unauthorized population again stood at more than 5 million, just as before the amnesty.”

It did not work out. Reagan’s policy failed. But Reagan had no precedent to work from and hence no hindsight. Today we have hindsight; plenty of it.

Reagan also had Congress backing him when he signed the Amnesty bill into law. But there was a very important condition attached to that bill and that was that the border would be secured so that millions of lawless aliens would never again need to be dealt with. It was a one-time shot.

And to get an inside baseball look at what Rawhide was thinking before he died in 2004 it’s a good idea to go back to the raging storm of comprehensive immigration reform of 2006 where a person writes of it, a person that knew Rawhide’s politics better than anyone, his son Michael:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1634185/posts?page=101

Reagan’s 1986 signing of the Amnesty Bill was supposed to end forever the problem of amassing millions of illegal aliens.

Now the real question is: if illegal aliens having come to the USA over a time of loose border control, had availed themselves of the 1986 law to have themselves legalized, then what is the need now to legalize? If there are illegals today that were here in 1986, are they still in need of legalization? No.

Then who today is in need of legalization? The obvious answer is those in need today are a new crop of illegals that ignored America’s laws. This right here is an indictment on the 1986 law. It did not work then, it will not work now.

This is why Conservatives and almost all of the rest of American society are up in arms about what the democrats, Obama and the GOP Establishment are doing today.