<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER  No. 2161 -- 12/20/2011 >>>>>


Twenty-five years ago on November 6, 1986 President Ronald Reagan signed
the most disastrous immigration bill in the history of the United States:
the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Giving amnesty for millions
of illegal aliens is what IRCA is most infamous for, but there were
insidious provisions in the bill that were equally as damaging but far less
publicized. One of the most important was the splitting of the H-2 visa
program into H-2A and H-2B. Those two visas were designed to be general
purpose cheap labor importation programs for broad varieties of job
categories.

IRCA laid the foundation for the H-1B program. Four years later President
Bush signed the "Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1990".

Recently an excellent collection of articles about the IRCA fiasco was
published in the Social Contract magazine titled: "America Transformed: The
Destructive Legacy of Reagan's 1986 Amnesty". Authors include experts such
as Wayne Lutton, Rick Oltman, Otis Graham, and Michael Cutler. The entire
magazine is available online:

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_22_1/index.shtml

When the editors of Social Contract magazine asked me if I would author an
article about IRCA and work visas, I at first thought that there wasn't
much to write about. My opinion changed very quickly as I researched the
"H" visa aspects of the legislation. As it turns out, IRCA marked a
significant change in the policies towards employment based visas. The
following excerpts from my published article should whet the appetites of
anyone interested in the history of employment based visa programs:


By 1986, the H-2 program was criticized as having similar problems
as the Bracero program -- it depressed wages and American citizens
were losing jobs as they were replaced by nonimmigrant aliens that
came into the U.S. legally with H-2 visas. The Immigration Reform
and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) was enacted to solve all the
problems caused by the Bracero program and the H-2 visa.

As a compromise to the farmers, new guest worker programs were
created by splitting the H-2 visa into two new categories: H-2A
for agricultural laborers and H-2B for non-agricultural.
Agri-businesses were assured that these programs would provide a
means for them to continue to exploit plentiful labor supplies
from third world nations.

Significantly, the H-2A/B visa programs marked the beginning of
the internationalization of the guest worker labor supply and
the broadening of the types of jobs that aliens could be employed
for.

"IRCA and the Evolution of the ‘Nonimmigrant’", by Rob Sanchez, Social
Contract Magazine, Fall 2011
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/twentytwo-one/tsc_22_1_sanchez.pdf



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