
In 1986 I worked for California’s Employment Development Department, where I processed amnesty seekers under President Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration reform law called Immigration and Control Act (IRCA). The Watsonville office reviewed documents proving that applicants had worked in the local farming economy for certain specified times, allowing them to qualify for eventual permanent residency status.
The bill was passed by a bipartisan majority in both houses of the U.S. Congress. Some 3 million people went from being illegal border crossers to lawful permanent residents authorized to work legally anywhere in this country. Being a part of the effort to implement its generous provisions changing so many lives was a highpoint of my career.
Thirty-nine years later, I watch as elected officials pledge to “mass deport” those who entered this country on some of the same paths those immigrants followed. Hateful rhetoric labels them criminals for doing what countless others have done for generations in search of better lives for themselves and their families. What has happened in those decades to change the perception of the American dream so dramatically?
I think it begins with the aftermath to IRCA. The “C” stands for “Control,” and the stated intent of the law was to require employers to hire only those who could prove they were legally entitled to work. With so many newly qualified legal workers, it should have been easy to fill the jobs so long worked by low-income, recent arrivals to the country. After all, the economic development of this country has, since its inception, been fueled by an immigrant work force.
But as the economy boomed throughout the ’90s, more workers were always in demand; and minimal enforcement of verification rules was standard. Counterfeit documents were easily available and the work force swelled with more illegal labor than prior to the legislation intended to curb the flow.
Prior to 1914, immigration to the U.S. was unregulated. For decades, waves of people fleeing poverty and oppression poured into the United States for the chance to live the American dream. Milton Freidman, one of the architects of modern economics, said in 2018, that like in those days, today’s immigrants are essential to the continued economic prosperity of the U.S., but only if they remain illegal. As such, they contribute not just labor but billions of dollars in social security and other taxes whose benefits most never receive.
Freidman compares the illegal immigration that has fueled decades of economic growth to the limitless availability of low-income workers who legally entered the country prior to 1914. Both provided labor most established Americans were unwilling to perform, and after being legally admitted, those immigrants gradually moved into better-paying jobs and greater prosperity.
The numbers of people seeking access to the American dream has swelled in the 21st century, due to growing oppression and poverty in countries they flee. Pressure on the system to process them became unsustainable and that system has largely collapsed, with asylum becoming its most accessible tool. Lawmakers have been unwilling to tackle the complex work of reforming the broken systems. Entering the country illegally has largely replaced that failing system, though I personally know people who have navigated the time-consuming and costly process to gain access.
As early as 2009, in order to deter illegal border crossings, political decisions separated immigrant families at the southern border. By 2018, separated children were being held in cages. Massive protests halted such measures, including some on the streets of King City and Greenfield.
The incoming president, inaugurated two days ago, has pledged to begin the largest deportation in American history. All data indicates the proportion of criminals to law-abiding, hard-working family members is low, so it will be the latter who will be rounded up to create the “mass.”
Will we as people of conscience, who benefit from the labor and family values of the vast majority of undocumented workers, stand by and watch this travesty of our values unfold?
California, and counties such as Monterey, acknowledge the value of immigrants to our economy and communities and have pledged to resist.
How many of us will join that effort?
SuRay is a writer of local history, poetry, letters to the editor and a play about Bella Lockwood, the first woman to legally run for U.S. president. She has lived in Lockwood for 38 years.