America's Immigration System Is Broken. Congress Can't Seem To Fix It.
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.1 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2024
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Congress is at it again, but that effort, like so many others, looks doomed to fail. Just a few hours after the text from the Senate bipartisan bill dropped, Speaker of The House Mike Johnson said IF the bill reaches the house – it will be DEAD on arrival. And on Monday night GOP support for the legislation in the Senate seemed to all but fade away.
As the Senate gets ready to vote on yet another attempt to address immigration in the U.S, we look at why the effort to fix America's broken immigration system fails across decades, administrations and parties.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When he was running for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan took a position on immigration that would be anathema in today's GOP. |
| 0:09.0 | Rather than making them or talking about putting up a fence. |
| 0:13.0 | Why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, |
| 0:17.0 | make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, |
| 0:20.0 | and then while they're working and earning here they pay taxes here. |
| 0:25.0 | Fast forward to 1986. |
| 0:28.0 | I'll get on with the signing and make this into law. |
| 0:31.0 | Hope nothing happens to me between here and the court. |
| 0:35.0 | Reagan was in his second term and after years of working across the aisle, |
| 0:40.0 | the 40th president signed a sweeping immigration reform bill into law. |
| 0:45.0 | This bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that I will sign in a few minutes, is the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since |
| 0:55.0 | 1952. The Immigration Reform and Control Act did a couple of things. It toughens |
| 1:02.2 | security at the Mexican border. Employers |
| 1:04.8 | faced fines and sanctions if they knowingly hired undocumented workers. And it |
| 1:09.8 | also allowed many of the illegal immigrants a path towards citizenship. The hope of the |
| 1:14.9 | Immigration Reform and Control Act was to put a stop to illegal immigration once |
| 1:19.7 | and for all. That did not happen. |
| 1:30.0 | Because despite the fact that 1.1 million people became legal citizens after the 1986 law, there were still millions of migrants who didn't qualify for amnesty or simply didn't |
| 1:36.4 | know how to go about getting it. |
| 1:38.9 | There also wasn't enough funding to ramp up border control, and the number of migrants arriving at the border |
| 1:44.8 | grew exponentially year after year decades after Ronald Reagan signed his |
| 1:50.8 | administration's immigration law. |
... |
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