How "Once and for All" Got a Bad Name in the Immigration Debate

By Jerry Kammer on February 24, 2015

I welcome the opportunity to work with anyone who wants to build on the improvements we've put in place, and fix our broken immigration system once and for all.

— President Barack Obama in The Hill, February 24.

President Obama's desire to reform immigration policy "once and for all" has a familiar ring to it. It has reverberated throughout the national debate since Congress invoked it when it passed the ill-named Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

As the Washington Post reported two years ago: "There was just one problem — the 1986 reform didn't work. The law was supposed to put a stop to illegal immigration into the United States once and for all. Instead, the exact opposite happened. The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the country soared, from an estimated five million in 1986 to 11.1 million today."

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) told the New York Times in 2007 that he regretted his vote for IRCA:

"I thought then that taking care of three million people illegally in the country would solve the problem once and for all," Mr. Grassley said. "I found out, however, if you reward illegality, you get more of it. Today, as everybody has generally agreed, we have 12 million people here illegally."

President Obama wants Congress to revive the 2013 "comprehensive" reform bill that was passed in the Senate, but died at the end of the last Congress. But one of the Senate's most knowledgeable authorities on immigration policy, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), issued a word of warning about that bill's "once and for all" promise.

Portman, who began learning about immigration policy in the late 1970s as a staffer on the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, insisted that the bill's provisions for worker verification were fatally flawed. "They say everybody wants to go to heaven," he said to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). "But not everybody is willing to do the hard things to get there."

Portman warned that unless the Senate bill's verification provisions were strengthened, the bill would fail. My examination of the issue persuades me that he is right. The U.S. Congress, despite four decades of strutting and fretting and vowing to deliver immigration reform that fulfills both ends of the elusive, almost mythical deal — legalization of most illegal immigrants in return for serious, credible, and effective enforcement against future illegal immigration — continues to promise that this time, it really, really means it. Some of us fear that unless Portman's reforms become part of the package it will be just another "tale told by an idiot ... signifying nothing" (to borrow from Macbeth).

President Obama's promise to make it work this time rings false, especially since his top adviser on immigration policy, Cecilia Munoz, used to be the top immigration lobbyist for the National Council of La Raza. In that capacity, Munoz worked tirelessly to thwart the worksite enforcement that was — and is — the sine qua non of "once and for all."