Just a few years ago, Ronald Reagan was the unchallenged hero of the American Right. The elders in the American conservative movement teach young activists a history in which The Gipper is the triumphant conclusion. Barry Goldwater lit the torch, William F. Buckley expelled the kooks, and Ronald Reagan’s message of optimism won the hearts of the people. Uncompromising anti-Communism and a stalwart defense of “limited government” combined with massive military spending drove the Soviet Union to bankruptcy. Ronald Reagan, his defenders claim, won the Cold War.
His legacy has almost collapsed in just a few years. The recent biopic Reagan was panned by critics, and conservatives largely ignored it even though it came out in an election year. On social media, younger right-wingers often scorn Reagan, and have not joined the cult of personality conservatives are pushing. The most consistent Reagan boosters are liberals and cheap-labor conservatives who want more immigration.
Ronald Reagan signed the death warrant of the GOP when he signed the Immigration R.A.C. Act of 1986
With a stroke of a pen, President Reagan granted citizenship to millions of illegals, permanently flipping California blue.
His last speech as president in 1989 was a warning… pic.twitter.com/47zBHXkqCC
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 28, 2023
Reagan was a great President, and he was especially right about immigration. All you foreign bots and bigots can go to hell. pic.twitter.com/q81WyxnxU1
— Robotbeat
➐ (@Robotbeat) July 4, 2025
Reagan is the true father of Multiracial America, and y’all are just going to have to live with that weird fact.https://t.co/jXwIcuO9qf
— Noah Smith
(@Noahpinion) July 20, 2021
The most important thing Ronald Reagan did was sign the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This was supposed to control immigration by punishing employers who hired illegals. An amnesty for illegals who had been in the country since before 1982 would sweeten this supposedly harsh measure. President Reagan said the bill would secure America’s borders: “Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship.”
The result is well known: There were essentially no consequences for employers, and immigration exploded. Illegals learned that if they broke the law and got away with it for long enough, they could be rewarded instead of punished.
The result was the demographic transformation of the United States. Reagan’s own state of California went from the conservative movement’s home base to a Democratic bastion. Commies didn’t turn the United States into a Third-World country; Ronald Reagan did. Some have said that Reagan regretted amnesty or that he was tricked by Democrats who thwarted enforcement.
However, the Arizona Republic found no evidence that Reagan regretted amnesty, nor did the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Former Attorney General Ed Meese is said to have mentioned Reagan’s regrets, but there’s no good source for this.
Ronald Reagan was full of naive sentiments. In 1979, before a meeting with the President of Mexico, he wrote that he wanted to make the border “something other than the location of a fence.” In a debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, he said, “I believe in the idea of an amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally.”
“We have consistently supported a legalization program,” he said when he signed the 1986 amnesty. In his “Brotherhood of Man” speech in 1990, he said:
I cannot help but feel that there was some divine plan that placed this continent here between the two great oceans to be found by people from any corner of the earth — people who had an extra ounce of desire for freedom and some extra courage to rise up . . . to eventually make this country.
. . . And maybe as we continue with this proudly, this brotherhood of man made up from people representative of every corner of the earth, maybe one day boundaries all over the earth will disappear as people cross boundaries and find out that, yes, there is a brotherhood of man in every corner.
John Lennon couldn’t have said it better.
On the surface, the 1986 amnesty had strict rules. Anyone with a felony or three misdemeanors was not eligible. Migrants had to be physically present from before 1982, aside from brief absences. They had to show knowledge of English and American history and government. There was a time limit on applications. The New York Times quoted Catholic Charities and Chinese for Affirmative Action complaining that immigrants were too afraid to comply, implying that the law was too strict.
Then-Representative Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supported the amnesty but was cautious. “The bill is a gamble,” he said. “There is no guarantee that employer sanctions will work or that amnesty will work. We are in uncharted waters.” Now, he wants a path to citizenship for however many illegals are here.
Republican Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the chief sponsor of the bill in the Senate, claimed most employers would comply voluntarily, adding, “I don’t know what the impact will be, but this is the humane approach to immigration reform.” His lobbying of then-Speaker Tip O’Neill was crucial to getting the bill passed. Years later, Simpson told NPR that legislators got away with it by talking about “legalization” instead of “amnesty,” and that the results were generally good. “It’s not perfect, but 2.9 million people came forward,” he said. “If you can bring one person out of an exploited relationship, that’s good enough for me.”
Simpson had a reputation as a border hawk, but he was a cynic. “That’s always the palliative that makes people feel good,” he said of border security. “‘Well, we’re still dinkin’ around with immigration, so since we can’t seem to get anything done and our constituents are raising hell — how do we get re-elected?’ Well, you just put some more money into the border.” One wonders if he really wanted immigration control.
The “tough” part of the bill was employer sanctions. Employers who showed a “pattern or practice” of hiring illegals could be imprisoned for up to six months and fined $3,000. In addition, funding for the border patrol was increased, states got money to pay for services for the newly legalized, and aliens were generally excluded from federal handouts.
About 90 percent of the 1.3 amnesty applications for agriculture were approved — even though possible fraud was found in up to a third of then. The general amnesty legalized another 1.7 million people, despite what the New York Times called “concerns” about the applications.
Sanctions against employers were never strictly enforced. Researchers from the Urban Institute and Rand Corporation found that “[a] low level of enforcement activity could lead many employers to discount the possibility that violations will be detected and punished, thus weakening the deterrent effect.”
The law was enforced through audits of employers, either randomly selected or from “leads” by other agencies. After an initial jump, both audits and fines fell close to zero.
The Migration Policy Institute noted:
Until 1986, INS’ [Immigration and Naturalization Service] enforcement efforts had always targeted aliens, that is, non-citizens. With IRCA, [the amnesty] Congress called on the INS to enforce a law targeted at employers.
Yet individual members of Congress have interceded on behalf of their constituents in the business community when worksite enforcement disrupted business. . . .
. . . . INS/ICE has never set performance targets for numbers of employers to be audited or numbers of fines to be issued.
Unless there is strict enforcement, employers’ desire for cheap labor always wins. There is also the danger that employers can carve out exemptions. And this is the danger we face today.
Just a few days after successfully shepherding the Big Beautiful Bill through Congress largely on the strength of its immigration provisions, the administration is floating the idea of amnesty — but calling it something else.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins waffled: “This is not about amnesty,” she claimed on Fox News, “this is about him [President Trump] backing the farmers, which he has always done.”
At a separate press conference, she said:
Ultimately, the answer on this is automation . . . . And then also, when you think about, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America.
It is fantasy to expect people on Medicaid to do farm work, but it is a clumsy way of saying Americans could do these jobs. Still, Secretary Rollins stresses “strategic deportations,” suggesting that certain groups will be exempt. More than 40 percent of farm workers are said to be illegals.
President Trump’s furious supporters are focusing their fire on Secretary Rollins, in the tradition of “If Only the Tsar Knew,” but on July 3, President Trump said that the farmers themselves would be in charge of deciding who would be deported. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer has denied there would be amnesty, but says the country must “answer the needs of our farmers, ranchers, and producers.”
On June 29, Mr. Trump said:
[W]hen we go into a farm and we take away people that have been working there for 15 and 20 years, who were good, who possibly came in incorrectly. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to do something for farmers where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows he’s not going to hire a murderer.
The farmer has no idea. The man who murdered Mollie Tibbetts in 2018 was a farm worker in the country illegally. He worked for a company owned by a prominent Republican donor, exactly the type now screaming about their need for cheap labor.
Less than a week ago, the President said his team was working on “legislation” on this issue, rather than a regulatory change. This sounds like something more than not raiding farms.
The same thing happened in 1986. The already weak 1986 amnesty was further weakened by a Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program spearheaded by none other than Chuck Schumer. The issue jeopardized the bill, but Rep. Schumer put in a provision to appease what he (at the time) called “special interests.” SAW was complicated and riddled with fraud. Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the participants in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, got a SAW amnesty.
Any compromise on immigration law enforcement risks repeating the mistakes of 1986. Amnesty was the deathblow to white California, and perhaps all of America. If President Trump supports any way to let illegals keep working on farms, it’s amnesty — whatever he calls it. Ag companies will never voluntarily give up cheap labor. The 1986 “one-time” fix gave us a permanent problem and erased all of Ronald Reagan’s accomplishments. Amnesty would do the same for Donald Trump.
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