politics – Immigration Reform: The Corpse that Will Not Die

I. Flashback

Unauthorized entries across the southern border are the highest on record with no end in sight, and even centrist observers are calling it a “border crisis.” The political asylum system is overwhelmed such that left-leaning editorial boards like the Washington Post are demanding reforms. Congress is in gridlock on the issue, having failed to pass meaningful reforms for decades.

Beyond immigration, inflation has hit record levels, the federal budget deficit is growing rapidly, and unemployment is increasing. A major crisis in the Middle East has eroded confidence in American supremacy on the world stage. Progress on racial justice is stalling, amidst a major backlash against recent advances in civil rights. The leading Republican presidential candidate is demanding that the nation “regain control of its borders” and is promising sweeping changes across the full spectrum of traditional domestic and foreign policies: reversals of longstanding civil rights gains, a much more muscular foreign policy, massive tax cuts, and a budget proposal to reduce almost all domestic spending programs. It promises to “reform” the federal judiciary, in part through the appointment of more conservative jurists. And it proposes a campaign to “Defund the Left” by cutting federal grants to institutions it deems ideologically unacceptable.

Think this describes the 2024 presidential campaign? Think again. It’s actually the 1980 campaign. As recounted in my book, Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die, unauthorized migration across the U.S.-Mexico border had hit record highs. The Mariel boatlift from Cuba resulted in some 125,000 asylum seekers, on top of 40,000 Haitians fleeing the notoriously repressive Duvalier regime. The administration of President Jimmy Carter had tried to enact its own immigration reforms, building on failed efforts that had twice passed the House in the 1970s only to die in the Senate. But the Carter proposals never gained traction, and in 1981, incoming President Ronald Reagan embraced an immigration proposal introduced by conservative Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and the centrist Kentucky Democrat Romano “Ron” Mazzoli.

The Simpson-Mazzoli bill proposed tougher enforcement at the border and in the interior, cutbacks in legal immigration, massive restrictions on asylum seekers and legalization of a few—but by no means most—of the undocumented immigrant population already in the U.S. The new administration was also hostile to the growing numbers of people fleeing civil strife in Central America, warning of an invasion of “feet people”—to differentiate them from “boat people” arriving from Cuba and Haiti. And it ramped up workplace raids and other forms of enforcement that critics claimed were largely for show.

II. Fast Forward

By 1990, the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reforms were enacted, albeit with significant changes. Bills passed in 1986 and 1990 did include some new enforcement measures, but they also put more than three million previously undocumented people on a path to citizenship and protected more than a million others from deportation. The new legislation more than doubled legal immigration. The asylum system largely was left intact. These outcomes were far more balanced and generous than any political pundit would’ve predicted at the beginning of the debate and were largely the product of an intensive, decade-long lobbying campaign by a small coalition of Latino civil rights groups and their allies.

Previous posts in this series have explained some of the tactics pursued by the coalition: resisting the less generous elements of the bill, offering new innovations that shaped the final compromise version of the legislation, and then implementing the new law by relying heavily on community volunteers. All of these have much relevance to the current debate. But they don’t, in and of themselves, offer specific guidance to advocates seeking to replace the Trump administration’s indiscriminate mass deportation policy with more progressive reforms.

Designing and executing a strategy to achieve progressive reforms should be guided by a simple principle: advocates must win public opinion. And four decades ago, pro-immigrant advocates largely prevailed on this front. Even this tiny coalition “amazed” one informed observer who noted, they “seemed like a huge machine, in every article, every day, on every issue, getting their message out.” Shaping public opinion today is a far more formidable challenge than it was in decades past, when policy influencers mainly were concentrated in three national television networks and a few emerging cable channels, editorial boards of major newspapers, and a small number of think tanks.

Still, having widespread public support is an essential precondition for progressive reforms. And as disastrous as the current administration’s policies are, they create openings for advocates promoting a more generous, and humane pro-immigrant future. While a comprehensive plan is beyond the scope of this little essay, four key strategies seem obvious. First, advocates need to recognize that fundamentally they are engaged in a battle over public opinion. So far, largely organically, ordinary people stepping up to document the worst abuses of the mass deportation scheme and bring them to the attention of the media are performing heroically. But national advocates need to go beyond attacking mass deportation and offer a positive future vision to win hearts and minds.

Second, part of this vision must acknowledge past failures. The 2024 election was, at least in part, a rejection by the voters of what they perceived as uncontrolled mass immigration. Our vision of the future should therefore acknowledge the need for an orderly and secure border and the prompt removal of violent criminals and serious threats to public safety. Beyond that, we should remake the case for a balanced approach to immigration, arguing that our economy and values require “opening the front door” of lawful pathways for people to enter the country, thus disincentivizing use of the “back door” of unauthorized migration. There are many policy options that can achieve this outcome, but by most measures the public is less focused on the details and more interested in the broader vision.

Winning public opinion will require a broader coalition, including at least some people who oppose mass migration but who increasingly believe that the Trump administration has gone too far. This isn’t just a matter of recruiting people to a cause. Too often progressive advocates are perceived as demanding fealty to a single ideological position. Instead, building this coalition requires listening to our erstwhile recruits, adjusting our positions to accommodate their concerns, and moving forward together. This isn’t easy work, but the payoff would be a much broader, bi-partisan, pro-immigrant coalition.

Perhaps the most important lesson from successful advocacy of four decades ago is this: we have to show up and speak out. Many politicians and advocates today want safe, poll-tested messaging before they say anything. They only want to speak before sympathetic audiences. They’re afraid of push-back from their base if they express any empathy for Trump voters’ concerns. As a result, they decline to appear on Fox News or right-leaning podcasts, ceding the field to their opponents. But you can’t win if you don’t play, and its well past time for pro-immigrant advocates to get in the game and engage in real debate. Nothing less than the future of our nation’s immigration policy is at stake.

As described in my book, Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die, pro-immigrant reformers in the 1980s weren’t just so-called “policy wonks” focused on shaping legislation. They were also deeply concerned with “implementation”—the art and science of turning abstract policy into real improvements in people’s lives. In that era, advocates wanted to protect as many undocumented people from deportations as they could. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Through enactment and implementation of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), they helped more than three million undocumented people gain permanent resident (green card) status. A follow-on bill, the Immigration Act of 1990, protected another two million or so from deportation through temporary programs, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

These results came not simply from the legislation itself, but also from concentrating on implementation. Immediately after legislation passed, the advocates shaped and monitored agency regulations. They designed program manuals and followed up with trainings to support community groups who were assisting the undocumented to apply for legalization. But ultimately, it was church and civic organizations on the ground in communities across the country that made the difference. Chronically understaffed, often relying heavily on volunteers, these groups rose to the challenge. They conducted outreach efforts, informing their communities about the opportunity to legalize. They stood up programs that helped people collect the documentation and fill out the forms the government required. Millions were protected from deportation as a result.

Four decades later, the task facing pro-immigrant advocates is to protect subsequent generations of undocumented residents, who contribute mightily to our society and economy, from indiscriminate mass deportations. Many perform essential work planting and picking crops we rely on for food, performing manual labor at construction sites, caring for our elderly and infirm, bussing tables and washing dishes at restaurants, and cleaning our hotel rooms and offices. Many have longstanding ties to the community, including US citizen children. And it’s not just undocumented families at risk. The Trump administration is systematically revoking the status of huge swaths of those here lawfully. Affected people include hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Venezuelans paroled into the country, millions with Temporary Protected Status, and many student visa holders, that are now at risk of deportation. Policy advocates and litigators are fighting to protect these communities in Congress and the courts. But they can’t win this battle alone. Luckily, they don’t have to.

In effect, pro-immigrant advocates today face the opposite challenge of our forebears: instead of helping people legalize, we must now confront the policy of mass deportations and figure out how to make it fail. And instead of standing up a program, we need to “reverse engineer” the deportation machine: break it down into its component parts and add barriers at every step. There’s a common through-line that links today’s strategies to those from a generation ago. Our predecessors relied heavily on “people power”—volunteers, often from the community—to make legalization work. We can do the same today to lawfully impede mass deportations. For example, ordinary people can take effective steps to chip away at the infrastructure supporting the current mass deportation regime:

Volunteering time to first responders and legal services organizations, many of whom need of people who are fluent in multiple languages. This work can range from answering phones or collecting and analyzing data to accompanying people to their immigration hearings.
Documenting (with cameras or phones) enforcement activities, and if abuses are discovered, disseminating them to advocates, legal service organizations and policymakers directly, or via social media and the press.
Supporting those apprehended/detained and others at risk by lifting up their cases to lawmakers, other public officials and media. Human interest stories should be emphasized (over data & statistics). The reason: even people who don’t like immigration often are sympathetic to immigrants they know. Our job is to steer the discourse away from an abstract battle over immigration policy into a question of how our society should treat fellow human beings.
Writing letters and making phone calls to Members of Congress & Senators. This kind of “old school” pressure is far more effective than many believe.

There is no national clearinghouse for you to sign up. The groups and coalitions doing this work are trying to stand up an infrastructure in real time and tend to be, as we say in the trade, “hyper local.” To find ways to help, we must educate ourselves:

Review Know Your Rights materials that local groups are using to educate the undocumented population.
Look to see which organizations are quoted in local stories about how people have been released from detention; contact them and see if they accept volunteers.
Go to a demonstration or rally where organizations often have tables or exhibits or disseminate flyers about how to help.
And if you can’t find a local group or coalition to latch onto, start one. Many of the most successful advocacy activities have been started by regular people seeing injustice and doing something about it.

Then, decide what you can do and do it! Most Americans can’t do everything outlined above, but all of us
can do something.

Tag: politics

Chapter V: Envisioning a Pro-Immigrant Future

Chapter IV: Seeing Policy Through to the End – and the Reverse!