Four Decades of Republican Immigration Fights, From Reagan to the Gang of Eight

Every family has a feud nobody remembers the start of. Two cousins stop speaking at Thanksgiving, and by the time the grandchildren are old enough to ask why, the only honest answer is "it was something about a casserole." The Republican Party's argument with itself over immigration is a feud like that, except that this one has a paper trail. It runs through a dozen bills, four presidents and a few thousand angry phone calls, and if you lay the events out in order, the voters' mood stops looking mysterious. Folks who feel they were told one thing and handed another have a point, and the dates show why.

This is a timeline, so let me keep the commentary short and the dates exact. Where I am not certain of a detail I will say where to check it. Congress.gov has the legislative history of every bill below.

The dated entries

November 6, 1986: the bargain

President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It offered legal status to people who had lived here unlawfully since before January 1, 1982, created a program for agricultural workers, and made it unlawful for the first time to knowingly hire a person without work authorization. Alan Simpson, a Republican senator from Wyoming, was the Senate's leading voice for it, along with Representative Romano Mazzoli, a Democrat.

Why it mattered. It set the template that Republican voters would hold every later bill against: legalization now, enforcement promised. The legalization happened on time. The employer checks were weak, because a paper form could not tell a real document from a fake one. Everything after this year gets read through that experience. The long version is in Reagan Signed the 1986 Amnesty and Got Only Half of the Bargain.

November 29, 1990: the open-door expansion

President George H. W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which Congress passed with bipartisan support. It raised the overall level of legal immigration, set up the employment-based categories with an annual allotment of 140,000, created the diversity visa lottery with 55,000 visas a year, and created Temporary Protected Status for people from countries in crisis. The law's formula started from a flexible worldwide level of 675,000 a year after a transition period: 480,000 family-sponsored, 140,000 employment-based and 55,000 diversity, since 480,000 + 140,000 + 55,000 = 675,000. It is a starting formula, not a hard ceiling, because immediate relatives of citizens sit outside the numerical limits; read section 201 of the Immigration and Nationality Act for the exact mechanics.

Why it mattered. It showed that a Republican president and a Democratic Congress could expand legal immigration on purpose, and it made the party's pro-business and restrictionist wings visible for the first time. Business-minded Republicans liked the employment categories. Others looked at the family numbers and the lottery and wondered who had asked for them. The mechanics today are laid out in The Four Doors Into America and Who Holds the Keys to Each.

November 1994: California's Proposition 187

California voters approved a ballot measure that would have cut off public schooling, non-emergency health care and other public services for people in the state unlawfully, and would have directed officials to report suspected unlawful presence. Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, ran for re-election that year in support of it and won. Federal courts blocked most of its provisions, and it never took effect as written.

Why it mattered. Two reasons. It showed the power of the issue with voters, who voted for it in large numbers. And it started a debate inside the party that has never ended: whether a tough posture wins elections or loses an entire generation of voters. Political scientists argue about the answer, and anybody who tells you the evidence is entirely one-sided has not read the studies. For a party that wanted to build a lasting majority, the question mattered a great deal.

September 30, 1996: the toolbox

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, created expedited removal, the three- and ten-year bars on reentry, the 287(g) program, the entry-exit mandate and the E-Verify pilot.

Why it mattered. It built most of the enforcement machinery still argued over, and it demonstrated that a bill focused on enforcement could pass with a president of the other party signing it. It also created several mandates, entry-exit tracking above all, that were never fully carried out. The details are in The 1996 Immigration Law Behind Most of Today's Border Fights.

December 2005: the Sensenbrenner bill

In mid-December 2005 the House passed H.R. 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, named for its sponsor, Representative James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin. It called for hundreds of miles of additional fencing, tougher employer verification, and stricter penalties, and it included provisions that would have made unlawful presence a felony and that critics said could criminalize people who helped immigrants. The Senate never took it up in that form.

Why it mattered. It was the high-water mark of the enforcement-only approach, and it set off large street demonstrations in the spring of 2006. The felony provision became the symbol, and opponents used it to define the whole bill. The Senate then passed a different bill that spring with a path to legal status, and the House did not take it up. The two chambers of the same party had passed incompatible visions and neither moved.

May 2006: the Senate answers

Five months after the House acted, the Senate passed its own immigration bill in late May 2006, a bipartisan measure that paired added border enforcement with a route to legal status for many people already here, and that was associated with Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy. The House did not take it up. What followed was a stalemate between two chambers run by the same party, each holding a bill the other would not touch.

Why it mattered. It showed in the plainest way that Republicans had no single position to bargain from. The House bill reflected the voters who wanted enforcement first. The Senate bill reflected leaders who wanted a deal that business and the White House could accept. When the same party passes two incompatible bills, the voters can be forgiven for asking which one is the real platform.

October 26, 2006: the fence

President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It directed the Department of Homeland Security to build roughly 700 miles of reinforced fencing along the southwest border. A later appropriations law gave the department more flexibility about what kind of barrier to build and where. Read the text and the later amendment on Congress.gov, because that flexibility is the root of the question: how much of what was authorized was built, and what kind.

Why it mattered. It was the party's practical answer to the failure of the Sensenbrenner bill, a narrower measure that could pass. It also taught a lesson that the barrier debate still reflects: authorization is not construction. What a barrier does and does not do is the subject of What a Border Barrier Actually Does, and What Honest Critics Get Right.

June 2007: the Senate bill that failed

President Bush, Senator John McCain, and Senator Edward Kennedy, along with others in both parties, backed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. It combined legalization for people already here with enforcement measures and changes to the legal system. In late June 2007 the Senate failed to muster the votes to end debate, and the bill died.

Why it mattered. It was the first time the president of the party and many of its voters stood on opposite sides in a public fight. Opponents called the bill amnesty, and the label stuck. Supporters called it a realistic compromise. Whoever was right on the merits, the episode taught Republican officeholders that the grassroots would punish a vote for legalization bundled with enforcement promises. The label "amnesty" became a test of loyalty.

June 2013: the Gang of Eight bill

Eight senators, four from each party, wrote the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. The Republican members were John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Jeff Flake. The Democrats were Charles Schumer, Richard Durbin, Robert Menendez and Michael Bennet. The Senate passed the bill on June 27, 2013. It combined a long path to legal status for people already here with a much larger border enforcement program, expanded employment verification, and changes to the legal immigration categories. House leaders declined to take it up, and it died at the end of the Congress.

Why it mattered. It was the second major attempt in six years to pair legalization with enforcement, and it died the same way, which hardened the belief among many Republican voters that such a package is a trap. It also strengthened a different belief among others that the party's leaders could not deliver on what they had promised donors and business groups. Both beliefs are on the record, and they point in opposite directions. For a look at the party's internal map, see the party-unity page at /politics/party-unity/.

The pattern, and what it means for the voters

Lay the dates side by side and three patterns appear.

One. The bills that passed were narrow. The 1996 law and the 2006 fence law each did a defined thing. The bills that tried to do everything at once, in 2007 and 2013, died, and the 1986 law, which did try to give every side something, left the lasting complaint.

Two. Every attempt to trade legalization for enforcement has produced distrust. The 1986 law delivered the first half and not the second. The 2007 and 2013 bills asked voters to accept the first half again on the promise of the second. A voter who watched the first one has a rational basis for skepticism.

Three. The party has always had at least three wings on this subject. Business-minded Republicans want a workable legal labor supply. Security-minded Republicans want the border and the interior enforced. Populists want a lower overall number and are suspicious of both of the other groups. Most of the timeline is a story of those three coalitions combining in different ways. You can see how the party has handled other internal divisions on the /politics/republicans/ page.

The scorecard in one table

Here is the record at a glance. Treat the table as a guide to the argument, and check each bill's text for the details.

Read down the third column. Of the four measures that became law, only one included legalization, and that one is the 1986 law whose enforcement half is the subject of the whole sorry argument. Of the two that tried to pair the two halves again, neither became law. If you were a voter with a long memory, which way would you lean?

What each wing wants, stated fairly

Because the pattern depends on the three wings, state each one the way its members would.

The business wing says: our farms, restaurants, construction firms and hospitals need workers, the legal channels are too narrow and too slow, and a fair system would let willing employers hire willing workers lawfully. It does not like mandatory verification without a workable legal channel to go with it.

The security wing says: a country that does not control who enters is not fully a country. Build the barriers, the sensors, the staffing and the tracking, deport those with orders against them, and sort out the rest afterward. Its members tend to be most comfortable with the 1996 toolbox and most impatient with the parts never built.

The populist wing says: neither of the other two speaks for the working family whose wages and neighborhoods feel the competition, and the whole level of immigration, legal and illegal, should come down until the country has absorbed the last wave. Its members are suspicious of any bill thick enough to require a staff to read.

Each of those descriptions contains a real concern. None of them is the whole truth.

The strongest objection

A critic will say: "You are presenting this as a story of Republican voters being let down by bills that did not deliver. But most of those failures were Republicans refusing to vote for the compromises their own leaders negotiated. The base rejected everything. How is that the leaders' fault?"

That is a fair objection, and the answer is that blame does not have to be assigned to one side. Leaders who negotiate compromises have to deliver votes, and voters who reject compromises have to offer an alternative that can pass. Some of both happened. The base has had a reasonable complaint, and the leadership has had a reasonable complaint. My point is not that one wing was right in every case. It is that the voters' distrust came from a sequence of events, not from a mood.

If you want a working vocabulary for the conversation, How to Talk About Immigration at the Table Without Losing the Room is the next stop, and The Case for Being Pro-Immigrant and Pro-Border at the Same Time argues the position that most Republican voters actually hold, as opposed to the one the caricatures describe. For the earlier chapters of the story, before the numbers were capped by ancestry and then by family, read How the 1965 Immigration Act Quietly Rewrote Who Comes to America.

The bottom line

• Eight turning points define the party's immigration fight: 1986, 1990, 1994, 1996, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2013. Know the dates and you can follow any argument.
• Narrow, enforcement-focused bills passed. Big bundles that paired legalization with promised enforcement died, in part because voters remembered 1986.
• The party has three wings on this issue: business, security and populist. Any plan that ignores one of them will stall again.
• If you are asked to support a bill, ask the contractor's questions: what gets built first, who checks it, and what happens if it does not get done?
• Check the primary record on Congress.gov before you cite a bill's contents. Slogans about these bills are almost always wrong in some detail.