Flashback: When Harry Reid was Right about Immigration

Thirty years ago, FAIR found what would now be an unlikely ally in The Los Angeles Times opinion page. On August 10, 1994, the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) wrote a fantastic op-ed promoting his bill, the Immigration Stabilization Act (S. 1351), to slash legal immigration by two thirds, from approximately 1 million to 325,000 annually. Some of the many other important reforms in the bill included an end to birthright citizenship, doubling number of Border Patrol agents, uniform ID cards for legal aliens, capping refugee admissions at 50,000 annually, along with a $10,000 fine and up to one year in prison for non-citizens voting in federal elections. His solutions were remarkably prescient.

“Taxpayers simply cannot continue to sustain new populations the size of San Diego or the State of Nevada every year. California is sending up the red flag [Proposition 187] that Washington should heed,” Reid stated. “Unprecedented demands are being placed on job markets, schools, hospitals, police, social safety nets, infrastructure and natural resources.”

Nearly all enforcement against illegal immigration has collapsed due to Biden administration policies, so the problems resulting from legal immigration are not top of mind for most people. However, it seems that the American people don’t have much of a say despite suffering the consequences of exactly what Senator Reid predicted decades ago. An average of 1 million legal immigrants have arrived annually from 1994 to 2023. During that time, few policymakers have shown the willingness Senator Reid did to question whether the status quo of legal immigration is actually benefitting Americans.

What type of immigration, and at what levels, will offer the maximum benefit to our citizens? Will the new arrivals be a disproportionate burden on social services and schools, or even a threat to public safety? These are the primary questions we should ask ourselves when crafting policies. Coming to the U.S. is not an entitlement — it’s a privilege that should be offered much more selectively.

S. 1351 contained a complex system of caps on employment based immigration to protect American workers, but still attract exceptionally talented and economically beneficial individuals. Lastly, it protected taxpayers with a provision redefining “public charge” to allow immigration officials to exclude those deemed likely to become eligible for public assistance programs.

Mass legal and illegal immigration are crushing opportunities and wage growth for millions of Americans. Yet, the advocates for cheap labor are always quick to dismiss our concerns. We’ve all heard the condescending, specious trope that immigrants perform jobs native-born citizens will not. But as Steve Camarota testified to Congress last year, “Even in the two dozen occupations where illegal immigrants are 15 percent or more of all the workers, 5.7 million U.S.-born Americans are employed.”

Last summer, 1.2 million native-born Americans reportedly lost jobs from July to August, while 700,000 new jobs went to foreign-born workers during that period. These trends span decades, often with a disparate racial impact. For example, a 2006 study found that immigration between 1980 and 2000 reduced the wages of black high school dropouts by 8.3 percent, and reduced their employment rate by 7.4 percentage points.

None of this is fair to the American people, as Reid eloquently noted in his conclusion.

“The real injustice to future Americans would be to do nothing. America is proud of its immigrant tradition. This tradition should be reconciled with our responsibility to create a better country in which to live,” he wrote.

While it got the numbers right and would have taken so many monumental steps in the right direction, Reid’s bill only scratched the surface of addressing the key flaw to our system enacted a few decades prior. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 rightly ended blatant discrimination based on national origin. Unfortunately, it also made fundamental changes that created chain migration, giving preferential treatment to extended family members of new citizens and green card recipients. Indeed in 1995, the year after Reid’s op-ed, 82 percent of legal immigrants were granted admission simply because they had a relative in the U.S. Since then, family-based admissions continue to account for the vast majority of LPR (lawful permanent resident) admissions.

Another attempt at reforming the immigration process along the lines of Reid’s bill was the RAISE Act, proposed in 2017 by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and former Sen. David Perdue (R-Georgia). That bill would have offered some excellent remedies. It would have encouraged immigrants to bring their nuclear families, but ended the chain migration that brings extended relatives. It would have eliminated the diversity visa lottery and, like Reid’s bill, capped the number of permanent refugee visas at 50,000 per year. Even more importantly, it would have established an Australian/Canadian inspired skills-based point system to select for factors such as education level, English-language proficiency, and a record of extraordinary achievement; all while reducing overall immigration to more traditional levels.

More broadly, all three of the aforementioned senators had the foresight to understand, and the political courage to point out, that the annual importation of 1 million legal immigrants is unwise at best. Combined with an even larger influx of illegal immigration, that level of immigration is unsustainable and detrimental to the citizenry. Legal immigration must be reduced and refocused on American interests, instead of continuing to overload an already backlogged system.

All immigration should be legal. And the goal of our legal immigration policy should be to maximize the benefits to the nation, while minimizing the harm to American workers, as Harry Reid argued 30 years ago.