NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks Testifies to Congress
on Shortfalls of 1986 Immigration Bill

IRCA Failed Because it was an Amnesty
 

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, NumbersUSA Director of Government Relations Rosemary Jenks testified at a hearing to examine the shortfalls of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).  The hearing was held by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law.  

“IRCA was touted as the solution to the problem of millions of illegal aliens living and working in our country,” said Jenks.  “Not only did it fail miserably on that score, it actually resulted in millions more foreign workers illegally in the United States.” 

An unpublished paper from the then-INS shows a significant spike in illegal immigration immediately following the passage of IRCA.  The Pew Hispanic Center found that the annual illegal alien flow exceeded the legal immigration flow to the United States for the first time in 1995, immediately following the enactment of an amnesty provision, Section 245(i), in 1994.  The implementation of that section also marked the beginning of huge backlogs of pending applications for immigration status at INS and later USCIS. 

“One of the more interesting twists in the debate inside the beltway is the fact that some elected officials hold out IRCA as the big, bad amnesty which they repeatedly insist that they oppose,” said Jenks.  “In the next minute, though, they have signed onto or introduced a bill that is just as much an amnesty as IRCA.”

Jenks testified that IRCA is comprised of the same basic elements as the “comprehensive immigration reform” proposals coming out of the Senate, the White House, and House of Representatives.  These four elements are: enhanced enforcement, legal immigration increases, guestworkers, and amnesties.  Jenks went on to explain that amnesty is defined as pardoning immigration lawbreakers and rewarding them with the objective of their crimes, be it jobs or green cards.  Even if they are required to pay fines or back taxes, learn English and civics, or even have to “touch back” across the border, if the end result is legal permission to work or stay for any period of time in the United States, it is amnesty. 

“In the end, it is all about perceptions.  And it doesn’t matter whether the law is called an ‘amnesty’ or something else,” said Jenks.  “If people outside the United States believe that Congress has changed the law in such a way that illegal aliens are permitted to stay – even if the stay is temporary – and work (or do whatever else they may have come here to do), the message to all of those people is that we are not serious about the laws prohibiting illegal immigration, so they may as well try their luck.”

Finally, Jenks refuted the claim that our economy is dependent on the illegal aliens present in the United States by pointing to a new study by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, which shows that low-skill households cost U.S. taxpayers an average of $394 billion each year; an amnesty or a new guestworker program would significantly add to that amount.  In that study, Rector calculated that in order to make these households fiscally neutral, we would have to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, all means-tested welfare programs, and then cut public education by 50 percent.

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