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Immigration Sanctions: Time for Reform
| Article
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18409 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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9 / 1990 |
1,906 Words |
| Author
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Annelise Anderson
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Immigration policy - this time, how many and whom to admit - is once again before Congress. But the most important issue is whether to repeal employer sanctions - the legislation passed in 1986 that made it illegal for employers to knowingly hire illegal aliens and established criminal penalties for doing so.
There are three basic reasons for repealing this legislation: (1) The problems it was supposed to address are far less severe than many people believed when the legislation was passed - or even nonexistent; (2) the legislation is only minimally successful; and (3) the legislation poses increasing threats to civil liberties and has already been shown to be a cause of discrimination against those who look and sound foreign.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was passed to deal with the problem of illegal aliens - primarily people who had crossed the border without going through immigration but also those who had overstayed a temporary visa. The idea was that if it was not possible to get a job, the main reason for coming to the United States - or staying - would be gone.
The politicians who supported employer sanctions and the reporters who covered the issue (especially for television) promoted two claims: that the number of illegal immigrants was enormous and that they were taking jobs from Americans. The United States had supposedly lost control of its borders - a misleading claim since it never had control of its borders. We were supposedly subject to a flood, a rising tide, a startling surge, a living scandal of illegal immigrants who would cause strife, violence, and joblessness.
This emotional rhetoric played on the correct perception of an increasing number of foreigners among us, especially non-European foreigners. Legal immigration increased decade by decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, and more of the entrants - from 28 percent in the 1950s to more than 75 percent in the 1980s - were Asian and Hispanic. The percentage of foreign-born residents in the United States increased from 4.8 percent in 1970 to 6.2 percent in 1980, even though it was still only half of what it had been in 1910. And in 1965 illegal immigration, primarily of Mexicans providing a seasonal labor force for U.S. agriculture, took a big jump - not because more Mexicans were coming in to harvest perishable crops but because the temporary worker program under which they had been coming in legally was ended in 1965.
Spurious Claims
The claims of the politicians and the media were unsupported by facts or reason, and recent evidence against these claims is even stronger. In his new book, Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy, George J. Borjas, a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, surveys the studies done in the late 1980s, when more data became available to researchers. His conclusion: “The methodological arsenal of modern econometrics cannot detect a single shred of evidence that immigrants have a sizable adverse impact on earnings and employment opportunities of natives in the United States.” Contradicting the statements of many government officials over the years, there is also, he finds, “a growing consensus among demographers that the number of illegal aliens in the United States is nowhere near the 5 to 10 million persons widely reported in the late 1970s,
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