Peter Scarry is Professor of Political Science at Boston College.

He's also a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at University of Virginia.

His many writings include the book Counting on the Census,

race group identity, and the evasion of politics, and also Mexican-Americans, the ambivalent

minority. His essays and commentaries have appeared, I'm just going to say everywhere.

They've appeared everywhere over his long and distinguished career.

We're going to look at one of them today.

It's the cover article in this month's National Review issue.

And it's entitled, insane asylum on the immigration disaster.

It's a timely piece that I thought would be worth of fuller discussion.

Welcome, Professor Scarry.

Thanks, Mark.

It's good to be here.

We'll jump right in as we do.

You say at the start that America has suffered from, quote, more than five decades of evasion and

outright policy failures when it comes to immigration. You give us a number there. When did the

mistakes begin and why? How did we start going down a bad road?

Well, I think it, as good a place to start as any would be the Immigration Reform and Control

Act of 1986, which is often viewed as a landmark and a positive development in our immigration policy.

But I would say in a major reform, but it was, I think, a major failure and greatly overrated.

The heart of that compromise that was negotiated by the Reagan administration and by a Democratic

Congress was that in return for an amnesty for about approximately 2 million undocumented

...