You must be young, the immigration situation was out of control 35 and 40 years ago.
Note the size of Reagan’s proposed anmesty: tiny in comparision with what a present day one would. For the first ten— fifteen years the immigrants had competition. That began to fall away around 1985 as the effects of the birth dearth began to be felt. Of course, one has to distinguish between pro and anti-birth people. Already by 1960, the Protestant Establishment and the main-line protestants had begun to abandon their earlier views on marriage and child-bearing. Back in the ‘50s there was a lot of talk about Catholics and the number of kids they had, especially when the Catholics were Mexicans. The mantra was: child-birth causes poverty, and the one-boy, one girl family begins to become the norm. The invention of the pill, though, was what began to knock the birth rate down and “necking”began to go out of fashion.