Ronald Reagans role in immigration issues

Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, held a rather surprising view on immigration as an issue. A staunch Republican, it was expected, in 1986, that President Reagan’s immigration reform would include head-cracking law enforcement.

Not so. The Immigration Reform and Control Act did include sanctions against employers for hiring illegals, but the sanctions were toothless. The Act did include money for border patrols for the Mexico U.S. border, but not enough to stem the growing tide. The Act also included a guest worker program for 500,000 Mexican citizens.

And it included amnesty for any illegal alien who had slipped into the country and had managed to stay without being deported since January 1, 1980.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was the opportunity missed. At this time, there was still a prevailing attitude that America, being a nation built on immigration, should continue to welcome the ever-growing influx of immigrants. But a new approach was being called for, one that would look to stem the tide not of the already controlled quota of immigrants by country, but of the illegal entrants to the U.S.

But President Reagan had been governor of California, and knew the economic advantages of unskilled and cheap labor. In one of his radio addresses, in November 1977, he wondered about what he called “the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.”(1)

President Reagan had a benign and pragmatic view of illegal immigrants.

At this time, though, immigration, illegal or legal, was not so much a political issue as a social one. The 1965 Immigration Act sought to change the process of immigration, moving away from quotas directed at maintaining ethnic balances and toward family sponsorship and reunification as well as offering asylum to political refugees. In essence, quotas did not control aliens with naturalized family in the U.S. and those who could show evidence of political abuse.

The 1964 Immigration Act was the seed for the creeping vine of immigration.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act, meant to prune back the foliage, only served to feed it.

Members of Congress started to hear from constituents about