Jewish Policy Center inFOCUS Quarterly, Spring 2026
If I knew starting out as a counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee in 1995 just how difficult it was to enact major immigration reform legislation, I might have had second thoughts. Such legislation only gets across the finish line once every decade or so, if you are lucky. There was the Immigration Act of 1965, the Refugee Act of 1980, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), the Immigration Act of 1990, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), the REAL ID Act of 2005, and, well . . . that’s all folks. In fact, shortly before I left for the Department of Homeland Security in 2018, my wife asked “George, what have you been doing all these years?!”
Slow Motion Collapse
One reason for immigration law’s inertia has been the slow-motion collapse of Democrat support for immigration law enforcement. In 1996, a majority of House Democrats voted for Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Lamar Smith’s legislation that formed the basis for IIRIRA (which provided so many of today’s immigration enforcement tools—from mandatory detention to expedited removal to no-exception removal of criminal aliens to mandated border walls to the legal basis for Return to Mexico and Asylum Cooperative Agreements). A decade later, in 2005, only 18 percent of House Democrats voted for Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.’s House-passed legislation to supersize the enforcement tool shed. A decade after that, no House Democrats voted for Chairman Bob Goodlatte’s 2018 enforcement legislation, even though it also offered legal status to DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—recipients.
The Biden border crisis was caused by rampant asylum fraud, the administration’s aversion to detaining or removing aliens with no right to be here, and its message to the world that our borders were open because our laws were racist.
Don’t take my word regarding asylum fraud. Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, and Merrick Garland, his Attorney General, had to admit that “without a change in policy, most non-Mexicans processed for expedited removal … would likely establish a credible fear [of persecution] and remain in the [US] for the foreseeable future despite the fact that most of them will not ultimately be granted asylum … likely continu[ing] to incentivize an increasing number of migrants.”
And, in 2014, The New York Times—in an article titled “Asylum Fraud in Chinatown: An Industry of Lies”—paraphrased a Chinese-American professor’s conclusion that “it was an open secret in the Chinese community that most asylum applications were at least partly false, from fabricated narratives of persecution to counterfeit supporting documents and invented witness testimony.”
The Employment Magnet
Let me relate two home truths about illegal immigration. First, as the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, chaired by Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, concluded in 1981, “the vast majority of undocumented/illegal aliens are attracted to this country by employment opportunities…some form of employer sanctions is necessary if illegal migration is to be curtailed,” and “the absence of such a law serves as an enticement for foreign workers,” Barbara Jordan, Chair of the Commission on Immigration Reform, and also a Medal of Freedom recipient, stated in 1995 that “reducing the employment magnet is the linchpin of a comprehensive strategy to reduce illegal immigration.” Even the Supreme Court, in a 1982 opinion written by liberal icon William Brennan, Jr., concluded that “the dominant incentive for illegal entry … is the availability of employment” and that “the failure to establish an effective bar…. raises the specter of a permanent caste … encouraged by some to remain here as a source of cheap labor.”
IRCA made it unlawful for employers to hire or continue to employ aliens knowing them to be unauthorized to work, and established the “I-9” process requiring employers to examine new hires’ identity and employment authorization documents. Unfortunately, as Rep. Lamar Smith concluded, “the easy availability of counterfeit documents … has made a mockery of the law.”
As a result, first the Jordan Commission and then Rep. Smith proposed what is now known as E-Verify, an electronic employment eligibility verification system ensuring that Social Security numbers provided by new hires match government records. E-Verify, enacted as part of IIRIRA, has been enormously successful. (Disclosure: I drafted the legislative text.) While its use is for the most part voluntary at the federal level, some States have made it mandatory. “[K]ey takeaways” of a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas report were that “E-Verify, when it’s mandatory … can have very large deterrent effects on the employment of undocumented immigrants and possibly also on … illegal immigration.” Every major proposal for comprehensive immigration reform over the last few decades has included some form of mandatory E-Verify.
We Can’t Deport Out
The second home truth is that we cannot deport ourselves out of the hole. Why? Consider that:
The high-water mark for removals of aliens from our country’s interior (not the border) was only 237,941 in 2009 (yes, during the Obama administration),
There is a backlog of about 3.4 million cases in immigration court,
Sanctuary jurisdictions openly violate federal law to impede the removal of aliens, and
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations had only 6,000 law enforcement personnel nationwide (in fiscal year 2024).
Also consider that there are at large over 1.4 million non-detained aliens already ordered removed and over 6.2 million non-detained aliens in removal proceedings, and that “DHS has limited ability to track post-release addresses accurately and effectively,” according to DHS’s Inspector General.
The House Committee on Homeland Security has concluded that “continuously detained aliens have historically almost always been repatriated, while non-detained aliens have rarely been.” Similarly, the Supreme Court has explained that ‘‘one of the major causes of the … failure to remove deportable … aliens was the … failure to detain those aliens during their deportation proceedings.’’ DHS’s own numbers readily back up these conclusions. Of aliens encountered at the Southwest border in 2013, DHS had returned or removed 98 percent of those who were continuously detained by the end of 2021, but only 7 percent of those who were sometimes detained, and 15 percent who were never detained.
Even Secretary Mayorkas and AG Garland eventually admitted that “large-scale releases pending … removal proceedings … incentiviz[e] potential migrants to travel to the [US] with the belief that, even if initially detained, they will ultimately be released to live and work [here] for long periods of time.”
That is why Congress placed detention mandates in IIRIRA. One of the main reasons for the House’s impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas was that, as the impeachment resolution stated, he “willfully refused to comply with the detention mandate[s],” but instead “implemented a catch and release scheme, whereby … aliens are unlawfully released, even without effective mechanisms to ensure appearances before the immigration courts.” (Disclosure: I participated in the drafting.)
Deportation pushes must be combined with effective mechanisms to encourage illegal aliens to “self-deport.” The Trump administration’s success in this regard is the only way to account for the unprecedented decline in the illegal population by more than 1.5 million since President Trump’s inauguration. By far the most effective mechanism would be mandatory E-Verify, or some other method of ending the jobs magnet.
As to legal immigration, we should reduce levels, place an emphasis on skills and education, and reinvigorate ideological exclusion. Let me explain why.
The Immigration Act of 1924
The Immigration Act of 1924, widely endorsed by progressives, conservatives, racists, and Black leaders alike, ushered in a four-decade-long pause in mass immigration. Of course, it would inadvertently close off the escape hatch for Jews from the Nazis’ death machine, but that could not have been known in 1924.
What were the consequences of the Act in the US? Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA, has determined it to be “the greatest federal action in US history — other than the Civil War Constitutional Amendments — in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers.” Audacious – but very likely true. The Act made it more difficult for employers to rely on foreign workers, forcing them instead to recruit Black citizens. In 1928, The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper, pointed as proof “to the great strides made by Negroes … since European immigration has been so markedly curtailed… especially noticeable in the North and East, where … the Negro has more industrial opportunities than at any time since the Civil War.”
These new economic opportunities across the nation catalyzed the Great Migration of millions of Blacks out of the South, one of the most transformative events in US history. Stanford’s Gavin Wright has concluded that “[t]his change in the fundamentals of southern society ultimately made possible the success of the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Reversing Gears
From 1940 to 1970, the average real earnings of white men rose by 210 percent – while those of Black men rose by 406 percent. After the 1965 Act restarted the engine of mass immigration, progress stalled or even reversed: from 1970 to 2014, white men’s average real earnings fell by 19 percent, Black men’s by 32 percent.
In 2023, the US granted permanent residence to 1,172,910 immigrants, only 6 percent of whom were chosen on the basis of skills and education (14 percent counting accompanying family members). This system is hardly designed to further the national interest. Reorienting our selection system to one that favors skills and education and “the best and the brightest,” such as through a points system, seems like a no-brainer.
How dare I advocate for ideological exclusion? Isn’t that some relic of the Red Scare? Well, intending immigrants who are members of the Communist or any other totalitarian party are inadmissible to this day, as are aliens who have incited genocide. And the REAL ID Act made the endorsement or espousal of terrorist activity a ground of inadmissibility, and also a ground of deportability for already admitted aliens. (Disclosure: I drafted the legislative text.)
The population in the US of people born in Muslim-majority countries has increased dramatically—from about 500,000 in 1980 to about 3.7 million in 2024, an increase of over 600 percent. The number of aliens receiving green cards (lawful permanent residence) from these countries has increased from about 50,000 in 1986 to about 180,000 in 2023. What impact has this had on the American Jewish community and Americans’ support for Israel?
I don’t think there would be a pro-Hamas mayor, or at least one who believes in the moral equivalence of Israel and Hamas, in New York City of all places, had it not been for this influx. I don’t think there would be a cratering of Democrat support for Israel without this influx. I don’t think there would be the “Europeanisation” of anti-Jewish violence without this influx. I don’t think there would have been the vile mass protests on college campuses glorifying Hamas’s October 7th massacre without this influx.
As to culture more broadly, let me give one example. Worldwide, severe forms of culturally/religiously based violence against women are seen all too frequently, including honor killings, female infanticide, sex-selection abortions, erasing the birth of girls, dowry-related killings, and female genital mutilation. These brutal and abhorrent practices have been introduced to the US by immigrants from areas of the world where they are prevalent. Efforts to stem their spread have been hobbled by fealty to multiculturalism and the fear of accusations of racism. A report prepared for the Department of Justice concluded that “honor violence is most prevalent among people from Islamic regions of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.”
Conclusion
We need to seriously consider the exclusion of aliens who support genocide, the imposition of apostasy or blasphemy laws, the establishment of governmentally-enforced religious law more broadly, female infanticide, sex selection abortion, honor killing, or female genital mutilation. For our children’s sake, America should remain a tolerant society, not become a medieval one.