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Opinions Throughout History – Immigration

23 Aliens Are Out There

Introduction

The refugee crises of the Cold War discussed in the previous chapter led to a new conservative movement under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan was a moderate conservative whose immigration policies were a compromise between progressive and conservative concerns. This resulted in the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which was bipartisan legislation designed to appeal to moderates on both sides of the political aisle. The most controversial provision of the bill was a proposal to provide a path to legal citizenship for nearly 3 million Mexican migrants living illegally in the United States.

The source for this chapter is a speech on immigration policy delivered by Ronald Reagan in 1981. Like the 1986 policy proposal that followed, this speech demonstrates the Reagan administration’s attempts to craft a policy that might appeal to both sides of the immigration debate. The basis of the policy was threefold: increasing border security, penalizing American businesses that hired undocumented laborers, and creating a path to legalization for undocumented migrants living illegally in the U.S. Conservatives have since viewed Reagan’s immigration policies as one of the greatest failures of his administration, though the limited success of the bill in controlling immigration was largely the fault of far-right conservatives who prevented laws that would punish American businesses hiring undocumented workers from becoming part of the Simpson-Mazzoli Act.

Topics covered in this chapter include:

Refugee immigration
Jimmy Carter Administration
Ronald Reagan Administration
Cold War
Unauthorized migration
Temporary worker programs
Legalization of illegal migrants

Reagan, Ronald. “Statement on United States Immigration and Refugee Policy.” July 30, 1981. The American Presidency Project. University of California. 2017.

Aliens Are Out There Changing Attitudes on Immigration

In the 1970s and 1980s, illegal immigration developed from a relatively minor concern to one of the top controversies in American politics. During the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations, congressional debates and executive orders were more frequently targeted at addressing this problem than at any time in the past. In part, this was because the movement to embrace level immigration had been so successful, overall, that critics of immigration shifted much of their attention from legal to illegal migrants.

The First Illegal Immigration Debate

The first illegal immigrant controversy to become a national issue occurred after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States. The problem was that before the passage of the act U.S. law meant that Chinese people born in the United States to legal residents became U.S. citizens by birth and thus were protected by law. Furthermore, laws to that point allowed any native-born citizens to bring his or her blood relatives to join them in the United States. Nativists fought against this law but were overruled by the proportion of Americans who favored keeping the law to promote family reunification, which was part of a broad “family values” ideal in immigration law.

Thus, after the prohibition on Chinese immigration, but with U.S. companies in the west still eager for more laborers, tens of thousands of Chinese migrants, known as the “paper sons and daughters” migrated into the United States using forged identity documents to claim to be children or blood relatives of native-born Chinese-Americans. Immigration authorities passed numerous laws and provisions to prevent this, but many were admitted and remained in the United States, building many of the nation’s Chinatown neighborhoods and communities across the United States.²²¹

Had there been no work available, it is unlikely that illegal Chinese migration would have continued at such high levels. However, because Chinese laborers were still typically willing to work for less than white workers, and because as non-citizens without federal protections, they could more readily be exploited, the demand for cheap Chinese labor endured, and Chinese migrants continued trying to slip through immigration authorities.

The Origins of Illegal Mexican Migration

America’s next illegal immigration controversy focused on the Mexican immigrants who first began coming to the United States in much the same way as the Chinese migrants of the early 1800s, as temporary laborers or as indentured servants working in the farms, ranches, and factories of the west and southwest. Until the mid-1940s, there was little opposition to Mexican immigration. Many of the nativists and racial engineers who opposed Asian migration believed that Mexican migrants weren’t dangerous because few wanted to actually stay in the United States, but rather would migrate back and forth seasonally.

Lobbying by farm owners, growers, and factory owners in the west and southwest fueled a long series of temporary worker programs that brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers through the nation on temporary worker contracts. This led to an increase in illegal migration as well; and this concerned nativists, white labor activists, and white supremacists. These disparate, but united groups, then fueled two major anti-Mexican movements, one in the 1930s that resulted in the forced deportation of thousands of Mexicans living in the United States (most of whom were actually native-born Mexican-Americans) and then the “Operation Wetback” program of 1954, which has often been hailed by nativists as proving the effectiveness of the “law and order” approach, but actually demonstrated how difficult and limited such an approach is when dealing with complex problems. Despite surges of opposition, lobbying by American business owners seeking to profit from Mexican migrants kept temporary worker programs going until 1975, when pressure from nativists and the growth of the illegal population resulted in the cancellation of the last of the temporary worker programs.

Interestingly, the focus on Mexican migration peaked even as the proportion of Mexican migrants in the U.S. workforce fell . The proportion of Mexican workers in states across the country, from Kansas, to Arizona and New Mexico, was higher in the 1920s than in the 1990s and yet, it was during the 1980s and 1990s that illegal Mexican workers became the primary symbol of America’s alleged immigration problems and were typically cited as the primary reason for various immigration reform efforts.²²²

Republicans Become the Anti-Immigration Party

In 1955, public opinion polls indicated that most Americans (76 percent) either wanted to reduce immigration (39 percent) or, at least, keep it at current levels (37 percent), with only a small percentage of Americans (13 percent) believing that the United States should increase immigration. This general breakdown in opinion remained relatively unchanged throughout the entirety of the 1960s and 1970s, with minor changes surrounding immigration controversies, like the debate over whether to admit Southeast Asian refuges (the so-called “boat people”) in the 1970s. Opposition to illegal immigrants peaked in the 1980s, following a massive conservative campaign to portray illegal migration as an economic burden to the United States and a threat to U.S. workers. In 1982, 89 percent of Americans overall believed that the nation should decrease (66 percent) or keep immigration at current levels (23 percent), with only 4 percent supporting increased immigration.²²³

The Republican Party’s anti-immigration push in the late 1970s was strategic in that it was the Democratic Party that had first liberalized the nation’s immigration policies. The influx of non-white immigrants into the nation between the 1960s and 1980s intensified racial tension and the perception of racial competition for employment, and the Republican Party thus portrayed itself as the party that would protect both American jobs and white American identity against the economic drain and racial strain created by what they portrayed as misguided Democratic liberalization. This remained the official Republican Party stance into the twenty-first century and, in fact, the political mobilization of racial prejudice and nativism were the fundaments of Donald Trump’s immigration policy proposals in 2017 and 2018. The essential message to voters in the lead-up to the Reagan-Carter presidential campaign, was that the Democrats had failed on immigration reform because they weren’t prepared to get tough on immigrants and to aggressively control the borders.

The Reagan Legacy

Ronald Reagan has been touted by Republicans as the father of modern conservatism. He was the last Republican President to garner support from the nation’s moderates and the last Republican who might’ve been able to win the presidency even without the most extreme elements of the far right. In a 2011 Gallup Poll, Reagan was rated as the nation’s best president of all time, garnering 19 percent of the votes by Gallup, and, therefore, right above Abraham Lincoln with 14 percent, and Bill Clinton with 13 percent. No other modern conservative in the poll reached higher than 2 percent of the vote.²²⁴ Reagan’s ranking on the list demonstrates that Reagan had bipartisan appeal, with policies that appealed broadly to moderates of both parties and, therefore, though often exalted with pride by modern conservatives, Reagan’s approach was fundamentally different than the standard GOP policies of the modern era.

President Ronald Reagan, via Wikimedia Commons

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By the time Donald Trump became the leader of the Republican Party, things had changed. With little to no moderate support, Trump managed only a narrow electoral victory, lost the popular vote by the lowest margin in history, and managed, at his most popular appeal during his first year in office, only 41 percent approval. Reagan, by contrast, recorded a peak of 68 percent approval during his first year.²²⁵ The difference between Reagan and modern GOP candidates like Trump, comes down to popular appeal and the ability to engender respect from one’s opponents. Reagan had this ability and moderates were willing to trust him, whereas Republicans like Trump and George W. Bush were too indebted to far-right interests to reach out to moderates and so failed to garner any serious degree of bipartisan respect or support.

On immigration, Reagan appealed to hardline conservatives by promising to crack down on illegal immigration. Immigration was a prime talking point of the 1980 elections and preceding debates, with Reagan promising a comprehensive immigration reform policy unlike anything ever attempted that would constitute the first legitimate effort to control the nation’s borders. Nativists and anti-immigration lobbyists were lulled into thinking that Reagan thought like they did, but they were wrong and failed to consider Ronald Reagan’s background.

Reagan was from California and had spent much of his life around Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and his familiarity fostered a more nuanced view. Social scientists have long understood that racial prejudice is quickly eroded by close contact, and that the most overtly racist or prejudiced attitudes are characteristic of individuals who have little to no direct familiarity with the target group of their prejudices. A white person living outside a predominantly black community and watching the behavior of black neighbors from a removed position, is, therefore, far more susceptible to racialized and biased thinking about that group than an individual who lives inside that community and so whose day-to-day interactions illuminate the failings inherent in racial generalities. Reagan knew Mexican people, both legal and illegal immigrants, and both groups were a familiar part of his environment. Although he agreed with the conservative line that the borders needed to be protected, he also believed that the migrants (both legal and illegal) were human beings deserving of consideration, empathy, and understanding.

After winning the election, Reagan continued to make immigration a focus of his presidency, though the reform policy he promised didn’t actually arrive until 1986. However, the nuance and humanitarian tendencies of the immigration policies that came through Reagan’s administration were reflected in how he spoke about the issue.

Statement on United States Immigration and Refugee Policy July 30, 1981 Source Document

Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands. No free and prosperous nation can by itself accommodate all those who seek a better life or flee persecution. We must share this responsibility with other countries.

The bipartisan select commission which reported this spring concluded that the Cuban influx to Florida made the United States sharply aware of the need for more effective immigration policies and the need for legislation to support those policies.

For these reasons, I asked the Attorney General last March to chair a Task Force on Immigration and Refugee Policy. We discussed the matter when President Lopez Portillo visited me last month, and we have carefully considered the views of our Mexican friends. In addition, the Attorney General has consulted with those concerned in Congress and in affected States and localities and with interested members of the public.

The Attorney General is undertaking administrative actions and submitting to Congress, on behalf of the administration, a legislative package, based on eight principles. These principles are designed to preserve our tradition of accepting foreigners to our shores, but to accept them in a controlled and orderly fashion:

We shall continue America’s tradition as a land that welcomes peoples from other countries. We shall also, with other countries, continue to share in the responsibility of welcoming and resettling those who flee oppression.
At the same time, we must ensure adequate legal authority to establish control over immigration: to enable us, when sudden influxes of foreigners occur, to decide to whom we grant the status of refugee or asylee; to improve our border control; to expedite (consistent with fair procedures and our Constitution) return of those coming here illegally; to strengthen enforcement of our fair labor standards and laws; and to penalize those who would knowingly encourage violation of our laws. The steps we take to further these objectives, however, must also be consistent with our values of individual privacy and freedom.
We have a special relationship with our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Our immigration policy should reflect this relationship.
We must also recognize that both the United States and Mexico have historically benefited from Mexicans obtaining employment in the United States. A number of our States have special labor needs, and we should take these into account.
Illegal immigrants in considerable numbers have become productive members of our society and are a basic part of our work force. Those who have established equities in the United States should be recognized and accorded legal status. At the same time, in so doing, we must not encourage illegal immigration.
We shall strive to distribute fairly, among the various localities of this country, the impacts of our national immigration and refugee policy, and we shall improve the capability of those agencies of the Federal Government which deal with these matters.
We shall seek new ways to integrate refugees into our society without nurturing their dependence on welfare.
Finally, we recognize that immigration and refugee problems require international solutions. We will seek greater international cooperation in the resettlement of refugees and, in the Caribbean Basin, international cooperation to assist accelerated economic development to reduce motivations for illegal immigration.

Immigration and refugee policy is an important part of our past and fundamental to our national interest. With the help of the Congress and the American people, we will work towards a new and realistic immigration policy, a policy that will be fair to our own citizens while it opens the door of opportunity for those who seek a new life in America.²²⁶

The Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986

Reagan’s immigration reform bill was authored by Wyoming Senator Alan K. Simpson and Kentucky Senator Romano Mazzoli. In its original form it contained funding for increased border patrol measures and laws that would prohibit hiring illegal immigrants, thus for the first time breaking with the tradition of prohibiting immigration without targeting those who hired illegal immigrants. The act also contained another, unexpected provision drastically at odds with all conservative immigration policies—a measure that would offer amnesty to all illegal migrants living in the United States since 1982. This ground-breaking provision provided temporary legal status to illegal migrants who came forward, paid a $185 fee, and agreed to an interview to determine if the person had “good moral character.” The legalized immigrant would then, after 18 months, become eligible for a green card, provided they learned to speak English.²²⁷

Immigration counseling at the National Amnesty Consultants help illegal immigrants get help with new immigration laws, by Bruce Berman, LIFE Images Collection, Getty Images

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Speaking to National Public Radio (NPR), former Wyoming Senator Alan K. Simpson explains that the amnesty provision was gently put forward in a law that was touted as being primarily about border control and protecting American jobs.

“We used the word ‘legalization,’ and everybody fell asleep lightly for a while, and we were able to do legalization.”

The controversial provision granted amnesty to 2.9 million illegal migrants and, though the bill was considered a failure by many Republicans at the time, Reagan and Simpson, two of the bill’s primary architects, were pleased with the amnesty portion of the law and its effect.

As Simpson explained to NPR,

“[Reagan] knew that it was not right for people to be abused. Anybody who’s here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially [or] physically. They have no rights.”

He added later in the interview.

“It’s not perfect, but 2.9 million people came forward. If you can bring one person out of an exploited relationship, that’s good enough for me.”²²⁸

The Simpson-Mazzoli bill has since been seen, especially by conservatives, as a major failure. Rather than reducing immigration, the bill actually led to an increase in illegal immigration over subsequent years, with the unauthorized population growing from 3–5 million to more than 11 million in 2018. However, the failure of the bill was guaranteed before Reagan ever signed it because labor interests and unwillingness to allocate sufficient funds made the enforcement provisions of the bill superficial at best.

First, the planned prohibitions and penalties for individuals or companies hiring illegal immigrants raised concern from pro-business lobbyists and politicians who needed their support and campaign contributions. Thus, when the bill was released, all employers had to do to avoid penalties was to demonstrate that the workers had papers in their possession that could “reasonably” be believed to be genuine, which meant that any decent fake document exempted the employer from penalties. Second, employers skirted the issue by hiring workers through contractors and subcontractors, and so weren’t directly responsible for making sure their workers were legal as that responsibility fell on the contractors. In total, nearly 80 percent of western agricultural work was handled through contractor staffing and, therefore, this loophole allowed employers to continue hiring illegal migrants (who were still cheaper) with impunity.

Finally, the effort to decrease immigration by providing a stronger Border Patrol was disastrous. Whereas illegal migrants had typically arrived in the United States through one of a few entry points, increased Border Patrol at those areas simply spread the illegal migrant population across more of the southwest. This made enforcement largely impractical and led, eventually, to the border fence and border wall proposals of subsequent Republican administrations. As immigrants spread across the border, finding new entry points to subvert border crossing patrols, even the possibility of controlling the border began to seem impractical if not entirely impossible. Subsequent studies have demonstrated that it would require military-grade deployment and billions in investment to create a program that will likely be only moderately effective.²²⁹

Lessons That Were Never Learned

In 2018, some politicians still refer to “amnesty” as the failure of the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, but this assessment is incorrect. The failure of the Simpson-Mazzoli Act was, like the failure to control illegal immigration from the 1880s through the 1980s, a product of the power of the pro-business lobby and American phobia regarding regulation. Whereas there may always be some who wish to migrate to the United States, illegal immigration is an “industry” in the United States—the result of the fact that there are individuals and businesses willing to hire illegal migrants to increase their profits and decrease their business costs. Simpson-Mazzoli was meant to cut off the demand, which they hoped would lead to a reduction in supply. Instead, the bill did not reduce demand, and in fact, the framers of the bill had not correctly assessed the level of demand that existed. Demand continued to increase, so immigration increased, and the symbolic efforts to control the borders (the favored Republican policy from Reagan to Trump) did little to stem this flow.

Reagan’s immigration legacy is complex, because the administration on one hand proffered and attempted a far stronger prevention policy than ever in the past, but also considered the human rights aspects of the immigration situation to that point. In the future, Republicans would more closely mirror the attitudes of the far-right anti-immigration opponents who had little concerns for the impact of their policies on the immigrants and saw this portion of the American population as criminals whose criminal behavior (as well as non-citizen status) negated the need to consider their welfare.

Conclusion

Reagan has remained one of the most popular Republican presidents in history, in part because he was able to garner significant support from moderates on both sides of the political divide. As a result, there was little controversy in terms of public backlash, when Reagan and allies outlined the policy ideas that became the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. The administration was addressing both fears of nativists, by promising to get serious about border control and enforcement, and concerns of liberals who felt the illegal migration situation was also a human rights issue. Although public opinion polls continued to demonstrate resistance to immigration overall and staunch support for a broadly restrictive immigration policy, the human rights dimension of immigration had become a more important part of the public debate and Reagan was the first conservative president who attempted to address this issue in his immigration policies.

Discussion Questions

Was the amnesty program developed under the Reagan administration good or bad for America? Explain your position on the issue.
Should politicians of either party promote policies that represent a compromise between conservatives and progressives in the United States or should politicians represent the majority political view in their area? Explain.
Is unauthorized migration a major problem in the United States? Why or why not? How important a problem is immigration in the United States? Explain.
Would you support an amnesty or legalization program for migrants already living in the United States? Why or why not?

Works Used

“A Reagan Legacy: Amnesty For Illegal Immigrants.” NPR. National Public Radio. 4 July 2010.

Fussell, Elizabeth. “Warmth of the Welcome: Attitudes towards Immigrants and Immigration Policy.” Annual Review of Sociology. July 2014, Vol. 40, pp. 479–498. PDF.

Koslowski, Rey. “The Evolution of Border Controls as a Mechanism to Prevent Illegal Immigration.” MPI. Migration Policy Institute. Reports. Feb. 2011.

Newport, Frank. “American Say Reagan Is the Greatest U.S. President.” Gallup. Gallup News. 18 Feb. 2011.

Peters, Gerhard. “Presidential Job Approval Ratings Following the First 100 Days.” The American Presidency Project. U of California. 2017.

Plumer, Brad. “Congress tried to fix immigration back in 1986. Why did it fail?” Washington Post. Washington Post, Co. 30 Jan. 2013.

Reagan, Ronald. “Statement on United States Immigration and Refugee Policy.” 30 July 1981. The American Presidency Project. U of California. 2018.

Robert Siegel and Selena Simmons-Duffin. “How Did We Get To 11 Million Unauthorized Immigrants?” NPR. National Public Radio. 7 Mar. 2017.

Wang, Hansi Lo. “Chinese-American Descendants Uncover Forged Family Histories.” NPR. National Public Radio. 17 Dec. 2013.

Citation Types

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MLA 9th

, . "23 Aliens Are Out There." Opinions Throughout History – Immigration, edited by Micah L. Issitt, Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=OP2IM_0027.

APA 7th

, . (2018). 23 Aliens Are Out There. In M. L. Issitt (Ed.), Opinions Throughout History – Immigration. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

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,. "23 Aliens Are Out There." Edited by Micah L. Issitt. Opinions Throughout History – Immigration. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2018. Accessed May 17, 2024. online.salempress.com.

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