Looking Back at Amnesty Under Reagan
Our video team recently posted a short documentary featuring the story of Marisol Conde-Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant currently studying at Rutgers Law School:
“I think that I’m the first undocumented person to attend law school in the state of New Jersey,” Conde-Hernandez says in the film. “It’s still in the back of my mind because I’m undocumented. What if I can’t practice as an attorney?”
In the comments section for the video, Atlantic readers discussed immigration policy, which has become the signature issue for the presumptive GOP nominee for U.S. president. One reader wants to know more about a landmark piece of legislation passed under President Ronald Reagan:
Has there been any deep longitudinal or follow-up study of Reagan’s 1986 amnesty recipients? There were about three million of them, if I recall correctly. I’d be interested in how they fared economically and, more so, how their kids fared.
First, a bit of background: The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) passed Congress 30 years ago this November. (Here’s the New York Times report of Reagan signing the bill.) Eric Schlosser, in his award-winning 1995 investigative piece for The Atlantic, “In the Strawberry Fields,” described how the IRCA was so long in the making:
In 1951 the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor condemned the abysmal living conditions of illegal immigrants employed as migrant farm workers in the United States. At the time, workers were found living in orchards and irrigation ditches. They lived in constant fear of apprehension, like fugitives, and were routinely exploited by their employers, who could maintain unsafe working conditions, cut wages, or abruptly dismiss them with little fear of reprisal. In many cases the life of these migrants was, according to the commission, “virtually peonage.”
Read more from The Atlantic:
This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
