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The World Always Was Flat
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
The bill was essentially a bargain. It provided an amnesty to those who had already entered the country illegally while stopping others from coming in. But in practice, of course, it wasn't that simple. Read more about the bill that billed itself as the bill to end all immigration bills.
The bill, officially the Immigration Reform and Control Act, was signed into law by Ronald Reagan on November 6, 1986. It provided a path to citizenship to people who had been living illegally in the United States since 1982. It also called for penalties against employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers.
Criticisms of the bill came in from the right and the left. Law-and-order conservatives, for whom immigration reform meant fortifying America's borders (and nothing more), hated a law that explicitly rewarded unlawful behavior. They pointed to absurd cases such as one involving two Nicaraguan brothers, only one of whom -- the one whose visa had expired in 1979 and who had lived illegally in Miami ever since, not the one whose visa remained valid after 1982 -- was eligible for citizenship.
Many liberals, meanwhile, worried that the threat of sanctions would make employers skittish about hiring any immigrants, even legal ones. But some liberals had another complaint: that the January 1, 1982, deadline excluded thousands of El Salvadoran immigrants.
By the time President Reagan signed the immigration bill, his administration had been shipping arms to El Salvador for years. The arms, intended to help the Salvadoran government defeat a leftist insurgency, had the effect of prolonging that country's war and increasing the number of Salvadorans seeking refuge in the United States. Restrictions in the 1986 immigration act prevented them from entering the United States legally.
A guerrilla firing an American gun he has acquired (El Salvador, 1989)
© Getty Images, Inc.
To the authors of an op-ed piece that appeared in the Christmas Day 1986 edition of the Los Angeles Times, the Salvadoran case showed the devastating interconnectedness, or what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has since called flatness, of the world.
U.S. foreign policy was prolonging a war in El Salvador, which was in turn aggravating the immigration problem in the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. legislative measures enacted to resolve that problem were increasing the suffering of the Salvadorans hit hardest by a war U.S. foreign policy was prolonging.
Activity
Find another editorial or op-ed piece written to oppose the 1986 immigration act. Then write a 500-word essay, identifying:
- the reasons given for opposing the act
- language used by the writer so as not to appear heartless or racist on the one side or naive or "un-American" on the other
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