Legalization of status is the issue. It is amnesty no matter how you try to disguise or cloak it. "We used the word 'legalization,' " former Wyoming Sen. Alan K. Simpson tells NPR's Guy Raz. "And everybody fell asleep lightly for a while, and we were able to do legalization. The 1986 bill was an amnesty.
The real issue is that Fat Teddy and the new Democrat controlled Senate gutted the border enforcement and employer sanction provisions of the 1986 IRCA, not Reagan! If the GOP had held onto the Senate, those provisions would have been properly funded and implemented, and today we wouldn't have the serious problems with 15 million illegals stealing from the US taxpayers.
Sorry, but Reagan signed the bill. He supported amnesty. Most of his own party did not. Even John McCain voted against it when he was in the House. The Chamber of Commerce did/does not want to see those laws enforced. And I don't see how Rep control over the Senate, which was 53-47 in the 98th Congress, would have made any difference since the Dems overwhelmingly controlled the House in the 99th Congress 253-182 and in the 100th 258-177. In case you may not know, the House has a major say in the appropriation process.
The IRCA of 1986 was not a blanket amnesty and Reagan did not support a blanket amnesty. The legalization/amnesty provision was for 300K illegals, not 2.7 million and was the compromise Reagan made to get tougher border enforcement and stricter employer sanctions for the long term. At least that is what he believed.
Come on. You can do better than that. By your definition, the Hagel-Martinez and McCain-Kennedy bills were not blanket amnesties either. That is pure nonsense worthy of Clintonian parsing. FYI: The government estimated 1 million would apply. The true number turned out to be 2.7 million. And it is worth noting that the number of apprehensions soared prior to the implementation of the act. The all-time apprehension record was 1,693,000 in 1986 immediately preceding passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). And fraud abounded with fraudulent papers being handed out just blocks from immigration offices. And INS just pushed through the applications with little or no review. It was a travesty and I know that from firsthand information from the people involved in it.
If anyone deserves blame for the failure of the IRCA of 1986, its Senator Kennedy and the Democrat Senate majority. Not President Reagan. Also, Ed Meese has publicly stated, Reagan would not have make the same mistake again. Reagan would never have supported the McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration reform act, or any of its subsequent offshoots.
Reagan was President. The buck stops there. He made the decision to do it with the best of intentions as the signing statement indicates. Ed Meese says without any qualification that the amnesty was a mistake. It just encouraged future attempted amnesties and more people to enter this country illegally in anticipation of the next amnesty. We are being fed the same garbage today using the same arguments. FYI: The Rep controlled Senate passed an amnesty in 2006 (Hagel-Martinez) and it was only due to the Rep controlled House and Sensenbrenner that it wasn't passed. An amnesty will destroy this country with the stroke of a pen.
You wrongly blame Reagan for the failure of the 1986 IRCA. While at the same time you allow the Democrats led by Ted Kennedy to get off scot-free.
>>>>>By your definition, the Hagel-Martinez and McCain-Kennedy bills were not blanket amnesties either.
No, those are your words, not mine. I'm simply correcting your inaccurate remarks with the truth and not allowing you to get away with revising the Reagan record with a bunch of BS.