Barbara Jordan’s recommendations are the backbone of our great immigration solutions

Barbara Jordan died twenty-eight years ago on this day, January 17th. Her last act of public service to the national community that she loved was to lead the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. At the time of her death, she was on the cusp of ushering in a new golden age of immigration. 

Her vision would honor the best of our traditions and discard the fatal mistakes of the past. Jordan firmly supported the post-1965 consensus that race and national origin should not be barriers to immigration. She also unapologetically called for immigration reductions to serve the national interest. She and her commission were concerned with protecting the economic mobility of all Americans; a mobility that had been handicapped by the broken promise of the Immigration Act of 1965 to keep immigration levels at a moderate, sustainable level.

Jordan was the visionary successor to American luminaries such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and A. Philip Randolph who had likewise argued as passionately for immigration reductions as they did against national-origin quotas. 

Jordan and her bipartisan commission recommended immigration levels to be reduced to 550,000 per year. They would do this primarily by ending the chain migration of extended family members, and by eliminating the visa lottery. Additionally, the commission called for the mandatory verification that employers were not hiring illegal workers (what we now call E-Verify). With Jordan as the unimpeachable leader, the immigration-reduction movement had won the support of leaders in Congress and the President of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Tragically, Jordan’s premature death in 1996 left a leadership vacuum, which supporters of mass immigration quickly filled. With Jordan missing from the field, Congress and the White House lost the political will to take on the special interests seeking wealth and power from an immigration policy that systematically privatized gains and socialized costs.

NumbersUSA was formed that same year. The Jordan Commission’s recommendations now form the backbone of our Six Great Solutions to reform immigration.