Immigration’s Border-Enforcement Myth

Of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the last major immigration reform bill, former Member Mae Ngai writes, “It embodied the idea that we could ‘wipe the slate’ clean by legalizing the undocumented already here and preventing future unauthorized entries. This idea, which continues to shape the national debate about immigration, is based on the false premise that the nation’s borders can be made impregnable. In truth, undocumented migration is not an aberration of ‘normal’ immigration.”