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JK

Jerry Kammer

Series

Parsing Immigration Policy1 episode

Recent Episodes

Parsing Immigration Policy
Parsing Immigration Policy

Why Does Immigration Reform Legislation Fail?

Summary Since President Reagan signed into law the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), five presidents have supported legislation containing an amnesty for a large portion of the illegal immigrant population. All of these pieces of legislation traded amnesty for enforcement, except the most recent, the Biden-Menendez immigration bill (U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021). This bill would have legalized virtually all illegal immigrants in the United States, but actually weakened enforcement. Why have all these bills failed? Is there hope for a future immigration compromise? In this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jerry Kammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a Senior Research Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, explains how a left-right coalition of immigrant-rights groups, ethnic activists, business interests, and civil libertarians thwarted the immigration reform law enacted by Congress in 1986.
Host:
Mark Krikorian
Organization
Center for Immigration Studies