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EDITED BY Dara Lind
2014-09-03 14:33:40 -0400
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The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, also known as the 1986 amnesty, allowed millions of unauthorized immigrants to apply for legal status. It also made it illegal for an employer to knowingly hire an unauthorized immigrant.
Before the law passed, there were 3.2 million unauthorized immigrants in the country; 2.7 million of them obtained legal status under the law. Yet many unauthorized immigrants failed to meet the bill's requirements. So, in 1988, the unauthorized population of the country was still 1.9 million. And it kept rising for the next 20 years, to 12 million in 2006, before decreasing slightly during the recession to 11.5 million today.
Critics of immigration reform today argue that the 1986 law took a flawed amnesty first approach that didn't pay enough attention to workplace enforcement. The bill essentially let employers off the hook if they accepted fake documents from employees — and so, spurred a growth in the market for fake documentation. What's more, employers who paid unauthorized immigrants off the books only got caught if the government happened to raid their workplace or audit them.
Immigration reform supporters, meanwhile, say that the big problem wasn't the 1986 law that granted amnesty. Instead, the problem was a subsequent 1996 law that escalated border security and made it harder for unauthorized immigrants to get legal while in the US. That law, they say, had the paradoxical effect of encouraging immigrants to stay in the United States and settle here with their families, rather than risking a dangerous border crossing, while forcing them to stay unauthorized.
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