Immigration

Fiona Harrigan | From the November 2024 issue

In April 1980, two candidates were leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination—Ronald Reagan, who went on to win the election, and George H.W. Bush, who became his vice president. They participated in a presidential forum that month in Houston, and the very first question from the border-state audience touched on the topic of illegal immigration.

"Do you think the children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend the Texas public schools free," asked the questioner, "or do you think that their parents should pay for their education?"

The problem of illegal immigration "has to be solved," Bush replied. But because "we have kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd like to see legal," he continued, "we are creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law."

"Why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems [with Mexico], make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here?" Reagan pitched. "And when they want to go back, they can go back. And they can cross. And open the border both ways by understanding their problems."

Compare that exchange to the current state of America's border politics. The Republican Party's official platform calls for the deportation of "millions" of illegal migrants and the implementation of "strict vetting" to "keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America." It refers to an ongoing "migrant invasion" that must be stopped, including through means as drastic as stationing troops along the southern border.

Democrats, never consistent doves on the border, have also warmed to more restrictionist policies in the lead-up to the 2024 election. They rallied behind a bill that would have significantly restricted access to the asylum process and given the president the power to "shut down" the border when crossings hit a certain number. Before dropping out of the race, President Joe Biden touted executive actions he took to button up the border—a stark contrast to his more humane-sounding promises as the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

Many of the loudest voices in the conversation defend their volume by saying the border has never been this chaotic, insecure, or porous. It's true that border apprehensions (arrests of migrants crossing into the country illegally) are shattering records. It's also true that asylum courts are severely backlogged, cities and states are struggling to accommodate newcomers, and the media paint the borderlands as a region in crisis. It's easy to simply blame the most recent president for whatever is going wrong at the border.

But none of that fully explains why the U.S. is so bad at handling this issue at this specific moment, and why it seems like border politics have never been more toxic.

Border management and border rhetoric have hit crisis levels because the nation's policy tools were designed to handle completely different migration patterns than we see today. Congress hasn't meaningfully updated the nation's immigration system in more than 40 years. During that time, border crossers have shifted from being mostly single adult Mexican male laborers to a patchwork of children, adults, and families coming from more than 150 countries for a variety of reasons. The situation has changed dramatically, but politicians keep using 1980s tools to address 2020s problems without considering why they're not working.

Border crackdowns feel like an easy solution to something that touches so many complex policy issues, from drug overdoses to national security to economic worries. It's no wonder that the 2024 presidential election has increasingly turned into a referendum on who has the most hawkish bona fides. But as voters and politicians become more and more inflexible in their views on what can and should happen at the border, the situation there—and the debate around it—will only get worse.

In the years following Bush and Reagan's 1980 exchange, unauthorized migration along the U.S.-Mexico border grew more common and visible. By the middle of the decade, apprehensions there exceeded 1 million every year.

The first of two modern eras of unauthorized migration was underway. According to a January paper by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), this period extended from the 1980s to the early 2010s, and "the border security approach that emerged during this period reflected the characteristics of migrants crossing the border at the time."

Back then, "the Southwest border was a question of Mexican migrants coming from a contiguous country, typically single young males looking to work in the United States and looking to avoid being arrested or being apprehended by the Border Patrol," says Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the MPI who served as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under President Bill Clinton. "Up until probably 2014, 97 to 98 percent of crossings at the southwest border were from Mexico."

By 1984, Reagan agreed that "our borders are out of control." The perception of violence and disorder in the border region in the '70s and '80s led Congress and the executive branch to reconsider how the U.S. should handle border enforcement and the country's unauthorized migrant population, culminating in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).

Like many of today's border bills, the IRCA focused primarily on illegal immigration. Unlike many of today's border bills, it was a bipartisan compromise. It punished U.S. employers for hiring undocumented immigrants and it increased Border Patrol staffing, but it also legalized nearly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. It passed the House 238–173 and the Senate 63–24. Support and opposition didn't fall cleanly along partisan lines: Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) backed the bill, but then-Reps.........

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