Illegal Entries From Mexico Held Unabated

The landmark overhaul of the U.S. immigration law enacted in 1986 has thus far failed to substantially reduce the huge numbers of Mexican nationals entering the United States illegally, an academic study here has found.

The conclusions, reached by researchers for the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego, contradict statements by U.S. immigration authorities and congressional representatives who assert that the law is working as designed.

The academicians, who conducted a two-year study of the effects of the 1986 law, reported that Mexican migrants are continuing to flow northward, with or without documentation, and that 41% of those who had jobs and were interviewed had resorted to using false or borrowed immigration documents in order to secure work, thus circumventing the law.

Work Available, Study Says

Despite new legal sanctions against employers who hire illegal aliens, the study found that most migrants continue to find work in the United States and that few were returning to Mexico, which is believed to account for more than 90% of the illegal immigrants entering the United States.

Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and head of the study, said: “No viable alternative to migrating to the United States has developed in these communities, so they’re continuing to send people.”

Moreover, Cornelius, an expert on Mexico and immigration, said migrants were increasingly arriving from areas of Mexico relatively new to the migrant stream, such as Mexico City and the states of Mexico, Guerrero and Oaxaca. The development is an ominous one for U.S. policy-makers seeking to deter illegal immigration, Cornelius said, as it indicates that new migrant networks are being created.

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the most comprehensive revision of the nation’s immigration laws in more than three decades, was designed largely to reduce the flow of undocumented immigrants, mostly Mexicans, into the United States via the U.S.-Mexican border.

Link to Economy

Cornelius and others have argued that the law likely would be ineffective as long as Mexico’s economy continued to deteriorate.

INS and congressional officials disputed the results of the study, asserting that the law was indeed deterring illegal immigration. Among other things, authorities noted that arrests of illegal aliens along the U.S.-Mexican border--long considered the best single indicator of undocumented immigration--had declined precipitously since passage of the new immigration law.

U.S. authorities have attributed the decline in arrests at the border in part to the deterrent effect of the “employer sanction” sections of the new law. Those provisions require that all employers check prospective workers’ documentation to determine that they are authorized to work in the United States.

The decline in arrests at the border, Cornelius said, is more likely linked to the fact that more than 3 million one-time illegal residents have been granted legal status via the amnesty program, and are now able to cross the border legally.