During the vice-presidential debate Tuesday, Virginia senator Tim Kaine likened Hillary Clinton’s stance on immigration to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration plan, a controversial set of reforms that, rather than cracking down on undocumented workers and heightening border security, was followed by a steady influx of illegal immigration.
David Nakamura at the Washington Post has more on the 1986 bill:
In fact, Reagan oversaw the last major legislative overhaul of the nation’s immigration system — a milestone that has been cited both as a model for new efforts at bipartisan reform and as a failure that has led to the current crisis that has left millions of undocumented immigrants in legal limbo. The Immigration Reform and Control Act that Reagan signed into law in 1986 put 2.7 million people living in the United States illegally on the path toward citizenship, marking the largest legalization program in U.S. history. But the bill denied legal status to more than 2 million others who had recently arrived in the country, and failed to create a guest worker program large enough to handle the surge of workers streaming across the border over the next two decades.The number of people living in the country illegally rose again quickly in the ensuing years. … Other measures in the Reagan era bill aimed at rooting out undocumented immigrants who were working illegally in the country were stripped.
Trump running mate Mike Pence also invoked Reagan when discussing immigration, Nakamura notes, but Pence emphasized border security rather than “amnesty.”
“Reagan said a nation without borders is not a nation,” the Indiana governor said.
