Immigration Timeline: A look at
U.S. policy toward immigration and border security with Mexico over the past
60 years. By
Andrew Becker
The Braceros, Operation Wetback and
Quotas 1942-1965
Fighting on two fronts
in Europe and Asia during the war, the United States looked to Mexico to help
keep America fed and its railroad running. A guest-worker treaty, known as the
Bracero Program, started in August 1942 with a few hundred Mexican farm
workers. By 1964, when the program ended because of floods of illegal migrants,
improved farming techniques and reports that workers had been mistreated, more
than 4.5 million Mexicans had participated. Illegal immigration increased after
the war ended, as the guest-worker program slowed and Mexicans still came for
jobs.
The response by the
U.S. government in 1954 was to launch Operation Wetback, in which nearly 4
million Mexican immigrants were deported back to Mexico. While the Mexican
government pushed economic growth and the country’s population grew by 10
million through the 1960s (from 38 million to 48 million by the end of the
decade), political and social unrest rose, as evidenced by demonstrations at the1968
Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
The first
maquiladoras, or assembly plants, were built in Mexican border towns to provide
cheap labor and goods for U.S. companies as the Bracero program ended.
In 1965, Congress
passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended numerical restrictions
by country of origin on immigrants allowed to enter the United States.
(Instead, the act capped the number of immigrants permitted to emigrate by
Eastern and Western hemisphere.) Pushed by President John F. Kennedy and signed
by Lyndon Johnson, the new immigration policy aimed to portray the U.S. in a
better light against the rise of communism and to promote American ideals.
Meanwhile, Mexico experienced a strong post-war boom, but most of the nation’s
wealth remained concentrated among the wealthiest residents.
Illegal Immigration Deemed Out of
Control 1970s
By the start of the
1970s, the number of illegal aliens had tripled since 1965, and four out of
five illegal immigrants arriving to the U.S. are from Mexico. By 1972, the
now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that the illegal
immigrant population had topped 1 million, leading many to call illegal
immigration out of control. For the rest of the decade, the estimates of the
country's illegal immigrant population varied widely. In 1975, the U.S. House
of Representatives introduced a bill providing for amnesty along with employer
sanctions for hiring illegal immigrants. Concerned about the rise in illegal
immigration, President Gerald Ford set up a Domestic Council Committee on
Illegal Aliens, which reported that illegal immigrants were driving down the
wages of low-skilled workers. The committee findings urged employer sanctions,
harsher penalties for smugglers and an amnesty program. Congress was
dissatisfied with the proposals, and in 1978 passed a law to create the Select
Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy to further explore national
solutions. Under the Carter administration, the Select Commission determined
that the nation’s immigration policy was in disarray. The Select Commission
recommended a focus on law enforcement, such as employer sanctions for hiring
illegal immigrants, and better border security. It simultaneously rejected a
foreign guest-worker program, while supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Little action was taken immediately.
Meanwhile, Mexico's
nationalized oil industry boomed with the discovery, in 1976, of a huge
offshore oil reserve called the Cantarell Field. But by the end of the decade,
the government’s fiscal mismanagement had left the country deep in debt, and
even basic food production faltered. The economy ricocheted between boom and
bust into the early 1980s.
Recession, Amnesty and the Right to
Education 1980s
At the beginning of
the 1980s, Mexico’s economy was teetering, shaken by the nation's worst
recession since the 1930s. In 1982, the peso was devalued repeatedly during the
country’s economic crisis. High unemployment pushed more migrants to find work
in the United States. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
children who were illegal residents had the right to public school education.
Maquiladoras continued to expand along the border towns, assembling goods for
the U.S. market.
In 1986, Congress
passed more legislation with the Immigration Reform and Control Act, aimed at
stemming the flow of illegal immigration by cracking down on U.S. employers who
hire illegal immigrants. The act also granted an amnesty to illegal workers
already in the United States, giving more than 2.7 million people legal status.
By the mid-1980s, the
total alien population was estimated to be nearly 5 million, and in 1986, the
border patrol reported a record 1.7 million apprehensions of illegal Mexican
immigrants. As a result of the amnesty, illegal immigration plummeted over the
next two years before rebounding at the beginning of the 1990s. The annual
budget for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) increased nearly
fourfold from the previous decade to more than $800 million in 1988. Mexican
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was elected in 1988 on a reform
platform, pushed to privatize the nation’s nationalized industry and deregulate
the economy, paving the way for the North American Free Trade Agreement, or
NAFTA.
Immigration Reform 1990s
During the 1990s,
immigration was again at the forefront of the political reform agenda, starting
with the Immigration Act of 1990 under President George H. W. Bush. Drawing
from recommendations by the Select Commission a decade before, the new law not
only increased the number of legal immigrants allowed into the U.S. each year,
from 500,000 to 700,000, but it also created a visa lottery system to promote
"diversity" from underrepresented countries, such as some African
nations. The law also initiated the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform,
which recommended that the government focus on improving border enforcement
through more training for border officials. The reform also cracked down on
employers hiring illegal workers and eliminated non-emergency medical services
for illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, the number of illegal immigrants, which had
dropped following the amnesty of 1986, climbed back to an estimated 3.4 million
in 1992.
The Effects of NAFTA 1990s
The North American
Free Trade Agreement, ratified under President Bill Clinton, went into effect
in 1994, to eliminate tariffs over 15 years and to turn the United States,
Mexico and Canada into the world’s second largest trading bloc after the
European Union. Critics believed that the trade agreement would undercut
Mexican farmers with cheap U.S. food imports and exacerbate inequality between
the two countries. A flagging Mexican economy received an initial boost from
foreign investment related to NAFTA. But an economic crisis -- caused in part
by political instability, a drop in foreign investor confidence, and a
government spending spree toward the end of Salinas’ presidency, among other
factors -- befell the country and the peso collapsed in late 1994. Despite
privatization and NAFTA, wealth still remained mostly concentrated within the
elite classes, and the wage gap between Mexico and the United States remained
wide.
Although some
economists agree that NAFTA has stimulated a rise in real income for Mexicans,
the country as a whole continues to lack the infrastructure in agribusiness and
other industries, and the investment in education and innovation to become more
competitive with its northern neighbor.
Tightening the Border 1990s
In El Paso, Texas, one
of the two main corridors for illegal entry (the other being San Diego), the
Border Patrol began a new program to clamp down on illegal immigration. Sector
Chief Silvestre Reyes, now a Democratic Congressman, launched Operation
Blockade, which roughly doubled the number of border agents patrolling the area
between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso around the clock. Originally scheduled to
last two weeks, the operation was expanded and renamed Operation Hold the Line;
as a result, apprehensions of illegal immigrants dropped significantly in the
area.
A report by Sandia
National Laboratory determined that the INS strategy of tracking down and
apprehending illegal immigrants was ineffective, which led the Border Patrol to
revamp its national strategy in 1994. (In 1993, the annual budget of the INS
had climbed to $1.5 billion.) Borrowing from Reyes’ Operation Hold the Line,
the new focus was to prevent illegal immigration through deterrence. This
called for more fencing, border patrol agents, technology, lighting and
surveillance equipment to be implemented in four phases.
The phase included El
Paso's Hold the Line and San Diego's Operation Gatekeeper, which targeted the
busiest illegal crossing point in the southwest. The goal was to push migrants
into more remote and difficult locations to dissuade them from crossing. The
Clinton administration unveiled an immigration law enforcement plan in February
1994 that prioritized increasing border security, deporting criminal aliens,
reorganizing the asylum process, ensuring greater enforcement in the workplace
and encouraging legal immigrants to seek citizenship.
In 1996, Congress
passed legislation mandating jail time for some criminal aliens and authorizing
the hiring of more Border Patrol agents over the next several years. Deportees
could now also be held in jail for up to two years before appearing before an
immigration board. And power was given to local law enforcement in the border-states
to deputize police forces to uphold immigration laws.
The strategy of
pushing more immigrants into the desert and away from the major San Diego and
El Paso smuggling routes was deemed a success in 1998, as the flow of illegal
immigrants moved into more remote areas. An unintended consequence of this was
to increase the number of deaths of migrants trying to traverse the scorching
desert.
9/11 and Homeland Security 2000 to Present
As the 21st century
approached, the number of illegal immigrants apprehended reached 1.6 million in
2000, and INS estimated that there were 7 million illegal immigrants living in
the United States in 2000 -- more than half of whom were Mexican. Other
estimates pegged the number of illegal immigrants at more than 9 million. INS
was operating with a budget of $5 billion, three times that of a decade ago,
and by the end of 2000, the maquiladoras were in decline, challenged by cheaper
labor in Asia and elsewhere. Mexico’s economy suffered a recession along with
United States.
The 9/11 terrorist
attack in 2001 intensified security at the border, with an emphasis on
preventing terrorists from entering the country. In response to the attacks,
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was set up in 2003, swallowing the
INS, Customs and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA); DHS
reorganized the former agencies into Customs and Border Protection, Immigration
and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services, along with
nearly 20 other agencies. The same year, the money flooding back to Mexico from
migrants in the U.S. surpassed $10 billion for the first time. President Bush
proposed a guest-worker program that was met with strong opposition in Congress
and complaints that it would lead to another amnesty.
The Border Patrol
continued to grow as more emphasis was put on securing the U.S. border in the
wake of 9/11. Congress increased spending and passed new laws, including the
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in 2004, which authorized
adding 10,000 new agents. These agents are expected to nearly double the Border
Patrol force from 11,000 to 21,000 by 2010.
In the last few years,
Congress has attempted to pass comprehensive immigration reform bills in both
the House and Senate. The efforts ultimately stalled because Congress could not
reach a consensus. House Republicans, such as Representative James
Sensenbrenner (R-WI), demanded greater border security, including the
construction of more fencing, while a broader bipartisan Senate reform bill,
known as McCain-Kennedy, called for enhanced security along with a guest-worker
program and a path toward citizenship. Since taking office in 2006, Mexican
President Felipe Calderon has sent thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico
border to combat drug traffickers. In the fall of 2006, President Bush signed
the Secure Fence Act, calling for roughly 700 miles of border fencing.
While Mexico's
Congress voted to decriminalize illegal immigration in its country in spring
2008, the U.S. ramped up Operation Streamline in an effort to prosecute more
illegal border crossings. In April 2008, the U.S. Justice Department announced
it would spend $7 million to send more than 60 more prosecutors to border
districts to prosecute border crimes, such as human smuggling.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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