Sorry, Trump supporters: The White House clearly isn’t going to make Mexico pay for that wall

From your article

the problem lies in how the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986 was implemented. He described the passage of the bill as something of a “con-job” that allowed millions of immigrants in the country illegally to have legal status with a promise of workplace enforcement and other measures to curb future illegal immigration.

But that didn’t happen, he said. And there was little incentive to follow through on promises of strict workplace enforcement, he said, once millions of people were legalized.

...

thirty years after the amnesty bill became law the stringent workplace enforcement many expected, and mandated use of the government’s E-Verify system for employers to check the legal work status of prospective hires, is still being debated by lawmakers and the business community. Multiple iterations of federal legislation to require employment verification have been defeated in Congress.

Sounds like enforcement was lax, not the reason for increased immigration - and it sounds like some kind of proper federal database id is one of the keys

Meissner says part of the problem was the two immigration laws that followed in 1990 and 1996 that she said did very little to create a legal path to the United States for low-skilled workers. The government does have a pair of visa programs for seasonal agriculture workers and others who are considered seasonal, nonagricultural workers, but Meissner and other critics of the program argue that it is not sufficient.

“There is no line to get into,” Meissner said. “This is why at the end of the day we need updated laws, we need immigration reform.”

Sounds pretty much like what I've been saying

/r/politics Thread Parent Link - ashingtonpost.com