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workers is small and that, overall, immigrants stimulate the economy by diversifying the
skill set within it.43
Advocates of the enforcement-first approach see any plan that offers guest-worker status
or eventual citizenship to illegal immigrants as tantamount to amnesty. They point
specifically to IRCA’s legalization of between two and three million undocumented workers
in 1986, arguing that any repetition of that move would only perpetuate the problem.

The guest-worker program and the possibility of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants
again proved to be the most controversial provisions when a revised immigration reform
bill reached the floor of Congress, now controlled by the Democrats, in 2007. The 2007
bill would have allowed the legalization of illegal immigrants who paid a series of
significant fines and fulfilled other requirements. It also marked a departure from the 2006
debate with the introduction of a new points-based system that could fundamentally shift
the criteria of immigration from family relations to job skills, education, and English-
language proficiency. President Bush and some senators saw the proposed system as an
effective means of tying immigration policy to long-term economic growth, but others
argued that points-based systems, such as those employed by Canada and the United
Kingdom, contradict the United States’ long-standing tradition of social mobility and
undermine its very identity as a land of opportunity.

In the aftermath of the latest legislation’s defeat in June 2007, the administration pledged
to enhance its enforcement of existing sanctions on illegal workers and their employers,
though the funding that would have facilitated greater diligence in this regard was lost
with the collapse of the bill. In one aspect of this enforcement effort, the Social Security
Administration collaborated with the Homeland Security Department to warn employers
that discrepancies in social security records would oblige them to fire the workers in
question or face prosecution. By the end of the summer, a federal judge had ordered a halt
to this program, based on a lawsuit citing a December report by the Social Security
Administration inspector general that said 17.8 million of the agency’s 435 million records
contained errors that could result in doubts about a worker’s legal status.44 Meanwhile,
efforts are multiplying in localities across the country to enact rules restricting access to
public services for residents without documentation, and the courts are being asked to rule
on whether it is the proper function of these governments to enforce immigration laws.45
The debate over how to control American borders has been tied tightly to national security
interests since 9/11 and to economic concerns for a good deal longer. All of the current
discourse over illegal immigration, however, appears to underestimate the extent to which
today’s immigrants—both legal and illegal—comprise contemporary American society and
contribute to the country’s strength.

Assimilating American Immigrants

In a July 2006 interview, Representative Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican,
presidential hopeful, and one of the strongest advocates for an enforcement-first approach,

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