Trump keeps saying that the democrats don't want to do anything about immigration laws. Guess what? Clinton did and that's why it's the mess it is today.

The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today's immigration problem

Everyone remembers that in 1986, President Ronald Reagan passed an "amnesty" law. But what most people don't know is that in 1996 — fresh off the heels of signing welfare reform, and two years after signing the "crime bill" — President Bill Clinton signed a bill that overhauled immigration enforcement in the US and laid the groundwork for the massive deportation machine that exists today.

Both welfare reform and the crime bills Clinton signed have been relitigated during a contentious Democratic primary, but the 1996 immigration bill — the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act — hasn't.

That's mostly because Democrats have come a long way on the issue since 1996, and advocates have been happy to let them do it without asking too many questions about the past. Only now are some progressive Democrats trying to raise the issue (32 members of the House of Representatives have signed onto a congressional resolution condemning the 1996 law, introduced Thursday by Rep. Raul Grijalva).

If Democrats ever find themselves in a position to pass the comprehensive immigration reform, they might find the past law's immigration legacy has been too consequential to ignore.

What '90s immigration reform did: made more people deportable and fewer people legalizable

There was no single provision of the 1996 law that was as dramatic as the 1986 "amnesty" law, signed by President Reagan, which is why he gets credit for the last major immigration reform. But the '96 law essentially invented immigration enforcement as we know it today — where deportation is a constant and plausible threat to millions of immigrants.

It was a bundle of provisions with a single goal: to increase penalties on immigrants who had violated US law in some way (whether they were unauthorized immigrants who'd violated immigration law or legal immigrants who'd committed other crimes).

More people became eligible for deportation

Legal immigrants — including green-card holders — can be deported if they're convicted of certain crimes (which cover a broad umbrella of offenses, some of which aren't violent). But in 1996, Congress radically expanded which crimes made an immigrant eligible for deportation. And they made these changes retroactive.

"Overnight," says law professor Nancy Moravetz of NYU, "people who had formed their lives here — came here legally or had adjusted to legal status, were working here, building their families, had ordinary lives in which they were on the PTA and everything else — suddenly, because of some conviction, weren't even allowed to go in front of a judge anymore. They were just fast-tracked to deportation."

It got easier to deport people

Immigrants convicted of crimes weren't the only ones stripped of the ability to argue their case before a judge before getting deported. So did anyone apprehended within 100 miles of the border. And IIRIRA required the government to hold more immigrants in detention before deporting them — making it substantially harder for them to get lawyers.

These changes drastically reduced the amount of leeway that immigration judges and the executive branch had to exercise discretion in whether or not to deport an immigrant.

"Discretion was taken away from district directors and immigration judges almost entirely," says Doris Meissner, who was head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time. "And so deportations started to go up, people were deported who otherwise would not have been deported."

The change to the law was so drastic that after a high-profile deportation of an immigrant over a minor crime led to public outcry, Republican members of Congress — including the lead author of IIRIRA — wrote the Clinton administration asking them to back down.

It got a lot harder for unauthorized immigrants to "get legal."

For much of the 20th century, it was possible for at least some unauthorized immigrants to obtain legal status once they'd been in the US for a certain amount of time. Before 1996, for example, immigrants who'd been in the US for at least seven years could get legal status as long as they showed it would cause them "extreme hardship" to get deported.

These standards weren't easy to meet. But IIRIRA made them essentially impossible.

It limited "cancellation of removal" to immigrants who'd been in the US for at least 10 years. Instead of having to show that the immigrant herself would suffer "extreme hardship" if she was deported, she'd have to show that a US citizen (like her spouse or child) would suffer "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship." The simple fact that the family would be separated if she were deported wouldn't count. And the US could only grant this to 3,000 immigrants each year.

That essentially eliminated an existing back door to legal status. But IIRIRA did even more. It locked a front door to legal status, too.

Marrying a US citizen or permanent resident makes you eligible to apply for a green card. So does having an immediate relative who's a US citizen (like a child), as long as the citizen's over 18. These are true whether or not you already live in the US. And before IIRIRA, it was true regardless of whether or not you were legal to begin with.

Starting after IIRIRA passed in 1996, though, an unauthorized immigrant couldn't directly apply for legal status — even if he had married a US citizen, or qualified for a green card through a relative. Immigrants were banished for at least three years if they'd lived in the US without papers for six months; the banishment lasted 10 years if the immigrant had lived in the US without papers for a year or more.

This law laid the framework for modern spikes in deportation

"I don't think people fully appreciated what those laws had done," says Nancy Morawetz, referring to both IIRIRA and the other 1996 laws that affected immigration. In some ways, they're "still being sorted out today."

But one effect was clear: After IIRIRA, deportation from the United States went from a rare phenomenon to a relatively common one. "Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement," sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren have written. "Afterward, these activities rose to levels not seen since the deportation campaigns of the Great Depression."

This particular law was passed during an era where Congress and the Clinton administration were both working to increase the amount of spending and agents on the US–Mexico border.

And after 9/11, the way the federal government handled immigration changed in two major ways. The bureaucracy was reorganized — and moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security. And the funding for immigration enforcement got put on steroids.

The combination of those gave rise to what Meissner and the Migration Policy Institute have called a "formidable machinery" for immigrant deportations — a machinery that took the US from deporting 70,000 immigrants in 1996 to 400,000 a year though the first term of the Obama administration. But that machine was built on the legal scaffolding of the options IIRIRA opened up.

After '90s immigration reform, the unauthorized population tripled

But even though deportations exploded after the passage of IIRIRA, it didn't keep the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US from growing. It went from 5 million the year IIRIRA was passed to 12 million by 2006. (By contrast, during the decade between the Reagan "amnesty" and IIRIRA, the unauthorized population grew by only 2 million.)

These two things didn't happen despite each other. More immigration enforcement is one big reason why there are so many unauthorized immigrants in the US today.

A lot of this is because of the increase of enforcement on the US–Mexico border — something that was happening even without IIRIRA. Many unauthorized immigrants used to shuttle back and forth between jobs in the US and families in Mexico. Once it got harder to cross the border without being caught, they settled in the US — "essentially hunkering down and staying once they had successfully run the gauntlet at the border," as Massey and Pren write — and encouraged their families to settle alongside them.

(This wasn't the only reason unauthorized immigrants started settling in the US around this time. The types of jobs available for unauthorized workers were changing, with seasonal agricultural jobs being replaced by year-round service-industry ones, for one thing. But it was certainly a major factor.)

But if border enforcement encouraged families to stay, IIRIRA prevented them from obtaining legal status. By this point, a majority of the unauthorized-immigrant population of the US has been here 10 years — more than enough time to qualify for cancellation of removal, if IIRIRA hadn't made it so difficult to get. Millions of them have children who are US citizens.

The 3- and 10-year bars alone have caused millions of immigrants to remain unauthorized who'd otherwise be eligible for green cards or US citizenship by now. According to Douglas Massey's estimate, if those bars hadn't been instituted in 1996, there would be 5.3 million fewer unauthorized immigrants in the US today. In other words, the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US would literally be half the size it is now.

A Republican bill that Democrats couldn't vote against

So who's to blame for all of this?

Unlike some of the Clinton-era laws that the Democratic Party has now moved to the left of — like the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform — IIRIRA was not President Clinton's bill. It was Republicans who'd pressed the issue of tightening immigration restrictions during the 1994 campaign (both in Congress and in California, where Gov. Pete Wilson rode to reelection on a ballot proposition severely restricting unauthorized immigrants' use of state services like public schools).

When Republicans won the House of Representatives in 1994, they — and especially Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the new chair of the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee — came in with a mission. "They were about the business of really toughening up immigration law," says Doris Meissner, who was head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time. "And that is what they did" — sticking immigration provisions in welfare reform and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (or AEDPA).

And then there was IIRIRA, which was originally introduced as a comprehensive immigration enforcement bill: seriously tightening the requirements for legal immigration; making it harder to apply for and receive asylum in the US; and increasing immigration enforcement.

"Nobody really felt like they had a lot of leverage" against the Republican plan, says Charles Kamasaki of the National Council of La Raza.

Pro-immigration Republicans and Democrats were able to limit the damage by dividing the bill. They blocked the restrictions on future legal immigration, and were "at least partially successful in mitigating" restrictions on asylum (in Kamasaki's telling).

But at the heart of the split-the-bill strategy was the recognition that the enforcement provisions against "criminal aliens" were too popular to stop — not only among Republicans, but among congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House.

"There was a pretty spirited fight on the 3- and 10-year bars" in Congress, says Kamasaki, as well as on a few other amendments. "But the votes weren't even close."

The administration certainly didn't seem to have a problem with the enforcement provisions of IIRIRA. "We all understand the problem of illegal immigrants. We're all trying to ensure that we have additional enforcement to protect against illegal immigrants," said White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta at the time. "But I, for the life of me, do not understand why we need to penalize legal immigrants in that process."

The Clinton White House wanted an "opportunity" to demonstrate it was tough on immigrants.

If IIRIRA was as terrible a bill as Meissner claims, why did Panetta celebrate signing it? For that matter, why did President Clinton sign the bill at all?

The answer is, essentially, that on some level the Clinton administration really did want to look tough on immigration. And that was more important than vetoing a bill because some in the administration didn't like its policy provisions.

"It's certainly the case that the administration was enforcement-minded where illegal immigration was concerned," Meissner says. That started at the top.

Bill Clinton had personal experience with immigration as a political liability: the only election loss of his career (his gubernatorial reelection campaign of 1980) came after he'd agreed to house Cuban refugees in Arkansas after the Mariel boatlift. He was convinced, even as president, that being soft on immigration was a no-go for Democrats — just like being soft on crime or welfare.

So from one angle, the administration painted itself into a corner with IIRIRA: It had to sign any bill Congress offered, and this was the one it got.

"The administration was taking a position that immigration enforcement needed to be strengthened," says Meissner. "Under those circumstances, you've got to try to get as good a bill as you can get. But if you veto a bill — it would have been viewed as politically dishonest."

But the Clinton administration might not have been as reluctant to sign IIRIRA as Meissner implies.

In a memo written in November 1996, a few months after IIRIRA was passed, a senior adviser to the president named Rahm Emanuel wrote a memo recommending a series of aggressive steps President Clinton could take in the wake of the law — including "claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens."

"After the Crime Bill passed in 1994, we built a strong record on crime," Emanuel wrote. "The illegal immigration legislation provides that same opportunity; now that the legislation is passed, we can build up a strong Administration record on immigration."

So once again Bill Clinton passed legislation that the republicans long wanted passed. Welfare reform? Yep. The Crime Bill? Yep. The Immigration Bill? Yep.

Pence said that it's up to the democrats to fix the "crisis at the border" even though they just agreed with the republicans to give Trump $4.6 Billion with no strings attached. But why aren't the republicans getting the same crap as the democrats on fixing immigration? Weren't they in control of all 3 branches of government for two years? Funny how the crisis started right after the republicans lost the house.