When Americans turned on their TVs in the early 1990s, one contentious issue was hard
to miss: immigration.
Is immigration good for America?
The federal government won't stop them at the border.
You spend $5.5 billion a year to support them.
There’s a right way. And there’s a wrong way.
At the time, there were around 5 million undocumented immigrants in the US.
And most Americans saw immigrants as a burden on the country,
taking jobs, housing and healthcare,
and thought immigration as a whole should be decreased.
Our country is invaded by immigrants who are like cancer cells.
That same year, Republicans ran on a tough-on-immigration platform
and took control of Congress.
Democrats were pushed to adopt tough positions on immigration, too.
We are a nation of immigrants.
But we are also a nation of laws.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a major piece of legislation:
the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act,
or, IIRIRA.
It’s goal was to decrease the number of undocumented immigrants.
It did the opposite.
Before the 1990s, undocumented immigration into the US looked very different.
For one, it was usually temporary.
People used to go back and forth across the border.
They would go north for the harvest, and they would earn some money,
and they would go back to Mexico.
And if they wanted to come live permanently in the US,
there were a few legal channels, but not many.
If they married an American citizen, they could get lawful status.
Or if maybe their brother was a citizen already, he could sponsor them.
Or an employer could.
And these could be done after they were already living in the US undocumented.
Before 1996, the threat of deportation was relatively low.
People were commonly deported for committing a crime.
And it was usually limited to major crimes — like murder or trafficking.
But IIRIRA, together with other 1996 laws, drastically expanded deportable crimes
to even minor infractions, like shoplifting.
It was also retroactive.
So say it’s 1976, and someone is caught stealing some albums from the mall —
they wouldn’t be deported.
Over the next 20 years, they never commit another crime.
But after 1996, they could be deported because of that old misdemeanor.
And not just if they were currently undocumented:
this applied to immigrants with lawful status, too.
And previously an immigration judge could decide if the deportation should even take place.
Now things were a little more automatic.
Ignoring the fact that those deportations would be extremely
harmful to US citizen children or spouses.
Deportations skyrocketed.
And IIRIRA created the framework for future laws that further expanded
reasons people could be deported, especially after 9/11.
But IIRAIRA also made another huge, fundamental change in the US immigration system.
One of the aspects of the 1996 law that is particularly strict and I think
in many respects, inhumane, is the so-called 3 and 10 year bars.
Those 3 and 10 year bars made these legal pathways nearly impossible to obtain.
They work like this:
Anyone who’s been undocumented in the US for 6 months
and wants to gain legal status, first has to leave the country
and be barred from returning for 3 years.
If they’ve been undocumented for more than a year, they’re barred for 10 years.
So if they want to get lawful status through a job, they’d have to first leave the US,
for 10 years.
Or through their brother?
Leave, for 10 years.
Or through their spouse?
Leave, for 10 years.
It's family separation by another name.
The bars were intended to try to essentially create punishments
that were so severe to deter people essentially from coming here,
but as we’ve seen with many deterrent-based policies the practical effect is very different.
Instead, it incentivized people to stay in the US undocumented.
Before IIRIRA, Mexican immigrants who came to the US unlawfully
were about 50% likely to return to Mexico within a year.
But after 1996, more people started staying in the US.
There were around 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US before IIRIRA.
Today, it’s at least double that.
And we are somehow surprised by that outcome.
This is of our own doing.
Laws like IIRIRA shaped the way the US focuses on immigration enforcement as a deterrent.
But really it proved that stronger enforcement doesn’t actually stop undocumented immigration.
These laws, and the politics in the 90s, didn't really change
the reasons why people come to the United States,
Today, views on immigrants are very different than they were in the 1990s:
most Americans now see them as a strength, not a burden.
But the laws created here, haven’t changed.
Requirements and standards that were created decades ago that aren’t responsive
to our needs as a nation and certainly aren’t responsive to the needs of immigrant populations.
The idea that, if we only had more guns, if we only built a higher wall,
that would solve all the problems.
I think we learned from 1996 that's not the way it works. It's not that simple.