Friday, January 09, 2004

Plan May Lure More to Enter U.S. Illegally, Experts Say:
"The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 offered amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants already in the United States, or most of them. Having cleared the decks with this provision, the law sought to discourage future illegal entry by imposing penalties on employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants.

But foreigners saw in the 1986 act an invitation, not a deterrent, said Stephen Trejo, a labor economist and immigration expert at the University of Texas. 'The biggest long-term impact of the 1986 law was the idea that maybe there will be periodic amnesties, and even if I come to the United States illegally, there is a good chance I'll be able to legalize my status while I am there,' Mr. Trejo said."

The 1986 law offered green cards to illegal immigrants who had entered the country before 1982. Over the next four years, 2.7 million green cards went to illegal immigrants already in the country and in some cases to spouses and children still abroad, according to data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But the chief deterrents, employer penalties and stepped-up border patrol, failed to stem illegal immigration, and today illegal immigrants number 7 million or more, according to most estimates. By 1990, the proportion of foreign-born adults in the work force, legal and illegal, had risen to 9.3 percent from 7 percent in 1980 and by 2000, this group represented 12.3 percent of the nation's workers, the Labor Department reports.

The employer penalties were hard to enforce. Employers could be fined up to $10,000 for multiple offenses, and even imprisoned. But to avoid punishment, an employer needed only to check a job candidate's documents, not the authenticity of the documents. Soon, on the streets of Chicago, for example, a forged Social Security card could be purchased for less than $100.

"The employer sanctions, introduced for the first time in that bill, were a joke," said George Borjas, an economist and immigration expert at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

What helped to doom the Reagan approach in 1986 was the failure to create a legal avenue for unskilled immigrants to enter the United States and take low-wage jobs. Various visa programs brought in skilled workers, but not the unskilled, despite strong demand to fill openings at hotels and restaurants, in nursing homes and home health care, and in landscaping, child care, housekeeping and light manufacturing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/09/national/09ECON.html

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