Fifty Years of US Immigration Policy History

Jonathan Blitzer's "Everyone Who Is Gone is Here"

I don’t remember how Jonathan Blitzer’s book, Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, showed up on my radar. I put it on my Kindle and read the first third of it (it’s long) when other books crowded it out. With the paperback version just releasing last month, I caught Blitzer on Chris Hayes’ Why Is this Happening podcast two weeks ago and set out to finish the book.

One thing the book does exceedingly well is tell the story of what propels individuals to leave their home country and come to the United States. Seeing through the eyes of four individuals. One was a doctor tortured by Salvadoran military leaders. One was an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles who came to the US as a child and is deported to El Salvador, a family of reformers in Guatemala (one of whom was murdered by authorities), and a woman from Honduras who made the trek to the US and got caught up in the child separation policy. The stories of the hardships they faced give a three dimensional view of their individual situations in ways that volumes of statistics and B-roll videos on cable news never can.

The other story Blitzer tells is the development of US Immigration policy from the Carter administration through the first Trump administration. The short version is that our federal policy choices have always lagged behind the need the policies were trying to meet.

I tried to track the story throughout Blitzer’s book. When I printed off my Highlights from Kindle on the policy initiatives, the printout ran eighteen pages. So rather than quote all of his excellent detail, I’ll try to summarize and hopefully not do damage to his excellent writing.

The policy story picks late in the Carter administration, in March 1980. Given his concern for human rights, for the first time, the US government would have clear sense of what constituted a refugee: “someone outside his homeland, unable or unwilling to return because of either outright persecution or a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’.” The notion of asylum was part of the law, setting the number of asylees at 5,000 per year. It was likely clear from the very beginning that this human rights based definition of asylum was in direct contrast with the numerical limit in the law.

In 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It legalized three million undocumented immigrants — to the outrage of critics upset by “amnesty” —but still left much undone. It contained enhanced enforcement measures.

Four years later, Congress worked to fix some loose ends in the 1986 legislation, raising the caps on overall immigration and including Temporary Protected Status to deal with the disruptions envisioned in the 1980 law, which allowed TPS individuals to work. To get Republicans to sign on, the sponsors agreed to make TPS temporary, requiring renewal every two years. “Republican and Democratic administrations found it easier to renew their TPS status every two years than create an actual route for citizenship…” Looking back, it’s easy to see how power over the issue would shift to whomever wanted to say no.

Asylum then as now was very difficult to achieve. “Between 1983 and 1986, close to a hundred thousand Guatemalans reached the US, but only fourteen asylum petitions were granted.”

In the George HW Bush administration, it became very difficult to approve asylum applications due to increased numbers and staff shortages. We have always been more interested in enforcement strategies that systems that would adequately deal with asylees. “In 1991, there were 56,000 recently filed asylum applications, understaffed INS offices completed 16,000 of them.”

During the Clinton administration, strong border security was a priority, hoping to deter new arrivals. But the 1994 Gingrich revolution changed things. As part of the 1996 Welfare Reform law, which required recipients to work or do job training, the funding for the expanded job training came about by eliminating distinctions between legal and “illegal” immigrants. Prior to that point, green card holders qualified ofr food stamps, Medicaid, and aid to families with dependent children, while those undocumented did not. While later legislation restored half of the eligibility, this idea of immigrants being undeserving recipients has survived.

Another law, in 1996, “established mass deportation as the new centerpiece of American immigration policy.” It identified a set of crimes they called “aggravated felonies” which allowed those convicted of things as minor as writing a fake check, of deportation. This is in the same spirit as the just signed Lakin Riley Act, which now only requires arrest. The 1996 law, written in part by anti-immigration activists, was passed as part of Clinton’s tough on crime stance. One foreign leader observed that when criminals were sent back to his country, they lacked the resources to prosecute or places to put them, so wound up releasing them into the general public.

Then comes 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is created and immigration is immediately seen through a national security lens. (This sets the stage for the current “invasion” language.) Another attempt at Immigration Reform occurred in 2006, led by Ted Kennedy and John McCain, but failed to reach cloture in the Senate.

Curiously, it was not until the Obama administration that the real impact of the 1996 act was felt. Given the constraints placed by the law on the need for enforcement, the number of ICE and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) officers doubled between 2003 and 2008. Again, it’s easier to get funding for enforcement than to reform the system.

In 2013, the infamous Gang of Eight tried again. This time, the bill would put enforcement first but deal with the citizenship question. It passed the Senate but wasn’t taken up by the House. Blitzer suggests that Speaker Boehner was planning to take it up in the next Congress. But then Eric Cantor, a lead negotiator, was defeated by an anti-immigration primary challenger and the effort died.

The next year, there was a surge of undocumented minors at the southern border. In the past, border crossers had been men looking for word. This crisis, regularly in the news, created challenges in providing housing and support for the new arrivals.

In the first Trump administration, Attorney General Sessions and his former aide Steven Miller took a maximalist approach to immigration policy. Thomas Holman became head of INS in 2017, the post he holds again. Rhetoric turned to gang members, with lurid stories painting a disproportionate picture of the undocumented.

The Child Separation policy emerged as a primary deterrent strategy. The woman from Honduras was separated from her children who were sent to relatives, deported, and only reunited with her sons during the Biden administration.

Trump effectively closed the border in 2020 with a huge assist from the COVID pandemic. Using Title 42, allowing him to declare a health emergency, he kept most people from coming into the US. Deportations, however, continued in spite of the widespread impact of COVID. “The United States deported eighteen thousand people in March, and nearly three thousand in the first eleven days of April. In multiple cases, US officials knew that they were spreading COVID but didn’t seem to care.”

The Biden administration had left Title 42 in place (and were blocked by courts when they tried to end it). There were hopes to improve the asylum process. But once Title 42 was lifted, the backlog of people who had been on the other side of the border since 2020 combined with worsening economic conditions at home, created a surge that the administration didn’t respond to quickly enough.

As I said much earlier in this long piece, there is an inherent tension between the human rights orientation that attempts to create a meaningful asylum process on the one hand, and the enforcement strategies against “bad people” on the other. Dealing with the former would require improved processes and more asylum judges (the backlog is astounding). The latter requires more shows of force and “strengthening the border”.

Over nearly five decades, we have been unable to resolve that tension. Instead we slide from one option to another, depending upon the party in control of Congress and the White House.

It would be so much better if we return to comprehensive reform efforts. Because based on Blitzer’s excellent book, the push factors forcing people to leave their home country is only getting worse.