USA: The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today’s immigration problem – Vox

Good long-read on US immigration policies and their impact by Dara Lind (thanks to Arun with a View):

But one effect was clear: After IIRIRA, deportation from the United States went from a rare phenomenon to a relatively common one. “Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement,” sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren have written. “Afterward, these activities rose to levels not seen since the deportation campaigns of the Great Depression.”

Douglas Massey/Julian Simon Lecture Series

This particular law was passed during an era where Congress and the Clinton administration were both working to increase the amount of spending and agents on the US–Mexico border.

And after 9/11, the way the federal government handled immigration changed in two major ways. The bureaucracy was reorganized — and moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security. And the funding for immigration enforcement got put on steroids.

The combination of those gave rise to what Meissner and the Migration Policy Institute have called a “formidable machinery” for immigrant deportations — a machinery that took the US from deporting 70,000 immigrants in 1996 to 400,000 a year though the first term of the Obama administration. But that machine was built on the legal scaffolding of the options IIRIRA opened up.

“Both of those things have had so much more force because of this underlying statutory framework that they were able to tap into,” says Meissner. In retrospect, “it was sort of a perfect storm.”

After ’90s immigration reform, the unauthorized population tripled

But even though deportations exploded after the passage of IIRIRA, it didn’t keep the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US from growing. It went from 5 million the year IIRIRA was passed to 12 million by 2006. (By contrast, during the decade between the Reagan “amnesty” and IIRIRA, the unauthorized population grew by only 2 million.)

These two things didn’t happen despite each other. More immigration enforcement is one big reason why there are so many unauthorized immigrants in the US today.

A lot of this is because of the increase of enforcement on the US–Mexico border — something that was happening even without IIRIRA. Many unauthorized immigrants used to shuttle back and forth between jobs in the US and families in Mexico. Once it got harder to cross the border without being caught, they settled in the US — “essentially hunkering down and staying once they had successfully run the gauntlet at the border,” as Massey and Pren write — and encouraged their families to settle alongside them.

(This wasn’t the only reason unauthorized immigrants started settling in the US around this time. The types of jobs available for unauthorized workers were changing, with seasonal agricultural jobs being replaced by year-round service-industry ones, for one thing. But it was certainly a major factor.)

But if border enforcement encouraged families to stay, IIRIRA prevented them from obtaining legal status. By this point, a majority of the unauthorized-immigrant population of the US has been here 10 years — more than enough time to qualify for cancellation of removal, if IIRIRA hadn’t made it so difficult to get. Millions of them have children who are US citizens.

Douglas Massey/Julian Simon Lecture Series

The 3- and 10-year bars alone have caused millions of immigrants to remain unauthorized who’d otherwise be eligible for green cards or US citizenship by now. According to Douglas Massey’s estimate, if those bars hadn’t been instituted in 1996, there would be 5.3 million fewer unauthorized immigrants in the US today. In other words, the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US would literally be half the size it is now.

Source: The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today’s immigration problem – Vox