Is immigration good for America?

The federal government won't stop them at the border.

You spend $5.5 billion a year to support them.

There's a right way and there's a wrong way.

At the time, there were around 5 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

And most Americans saw immigrants as a burden on the country, taking jobs, housing, and health care, and thought immigration as a whole should be decreased.

Our country is invaded by immigrants who are like cancer cells.

That same year, Republicans ran on a tough-on-immigration platform and took control of Congress.

Democrats were pushed to adopt tough positions on immigration, too.

We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a major piece of legislation, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, or IRA-IRA.

Its goal was to decrease the number of undocumented immigrants.

It did the opposite.

Before the 1990s, undocumented immigration into the U.S. looked very different.

For one, it was usually temporary.

People used to go back and forth across the border.

They would go north for the harvest, and they would return some money, and they would go back to Mexico.

And if they wanted to come live permanently in the U.S., there were a few legal channels, but not many.

If they married an American citizen, they could get lawful status.

Or if maybe their brother was a citizen already, he could sponsor them.

Or an employer could.

And these could be done after they were already living in the U.S. undocumented.

Before 1996, the threat of deportation was relatively low.

People were commonly deported for committing a crime.

And it was mostly limited to major crimes, like murder or trafficking.

But IRA-IRA, together with other 1996 laws, drastically expanded deportable crimes to even minor infractions, like shoplifting.

It was also retroactive.

So say it's 1976, and someone is caught stealing some albums from the mall.

They wouldn't be deported.

Over the next 20 years, they'd never commit another crime.

But after 1996, they could be deported because of that old misdemeanor.

And not just if they were currently undocumented.

This applied to immigrants with lawful status, too.

And previously, an immigration judge could decide if the deportation should even take place.

Now things were a little more automatic.

Ignoring the fact that those deportations would be extremely harmful to U.S. citizen children or spouses.

Deportations skyrocketed.

And IRA-IRA created the framework for future laws that further expanded reasons people could be deported, especially after 9-11.

But IRA-IRA also made another huge fundamental change in the U.S. immigration system.

One of the aspects of 1996 law that is particularly strict, and I think in many respects inhumane, is the so-called 3- and 10-year bars.

Those 3- and 10-year bars made these legal pathways nearly impossible to obtain.

They work like this.

Anyone who's been undocumented in the U.S. for six months and wants to gain legal status first has to leave the country and be barred from returning for three years.

If they've been undocumented for more than a year, they're barred for 10 years.

So if they want to get lawful status through a job, they first have to leave the U.S. for 10 years.

Or through their brother, leave for 10 years.

Or through their spouse, leave for 10 years.

It's family separation by another name.

The bars were intended to try to essentially create punishments that were so severe to deter people essentially from coming here.

But as we've seen with many other deterrence-based policies, the practical effect is very different.

Instead, it incentivized people to stay in the U.S. undocumented.

Before IRA-IRA, Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. unlawfully were about 50 percent likely to return to Mexico within a year.

But after 1996, more people started staying in the U.S.

There were around 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. before IRA-IRA.

Today, it's at least double that.

And we are somehow surprised by this outcome.

This is of our own doing.

Laws like IRA-IRA shaped the way the U.S. focuses on immigration enforcement as a deterrent.

But really, it proves that stronger enforcement doesn't actually stop undocumented immigration.

The laws or the politics of the 90s didn't really change the reasons why people come to the United States.

Today, views on immigrants are very different than they were in the 1990s.

Most Americans now see them as a strength, not a burden.

But the laws created here haven't changed.

Requirements and standards that were created decades ago that aren't responsive to our needs as a nation, they certainly aren't responsive to the needs of the immigrant population.

The idea that if we only had more guns, if we only built a higher wall, that we'd solve all the problems,

I think we learned from 1996 that's not the way it works. It's not that simple.