One of the AEA sessions in Boston in January 2015 was on illegal immigration and crime.  A couple of the papers looked at the effect of the 1986 amnesty in the U.S. I learned that the amnesty was rife with fraud. It was  supposed to just give amnesty to two groups: people who had been illegally in the country continuously for at least 5 years (1.8 million applicants), and people who had worked at least 90 days in agriculture in the past three years (the SAW program, 1.3 million applicamts). Interviews were required. The local offices recommended denial of 883,000 applicants (though there will still 300,000 pending at that time). Only 352,000 were actually denied though— the higher-ups were much more generous. The 700,000 SAW applicants in California were actually twice as high as anyone’s estimate of the total agricultural work force in the state— legal and illegal alike! David North says,

     There was, for instance, a conscientious first-line interviewer who knew something about the rural life and who faced many SAW applicants who did not. She developed a loose-leaf notebook with no text. It consisted of pictures of, and dried leaves from, the kinds of crops that were grown in her area. If someone said that they had picked strawberries, she asked them to show her the strawberry plants in the book; if they could not properly identify them she recommended a denial.

      I remember asking the Deputy Assistant Commissioner in charge of the SAW program why the CO had not instructed field offices to replicate what she had done, and he said, in effect, there was no political will for spending time and energy on such things when the courts were constantly ruling against INS….

     Similarly, there was a gold mine of computerized information in the files of the California Department of Employment Security on wages paid to farm workers by growers; it related to the state’s temporary disability insurance program. There was no effort made by INS to verify claims by California SAWs that they had worked for a specific employer by checking the state’s tax records for that employer….

     One nicely documented example of such a transfer was reported by Interpreter Releases, the immigration bar’s scholarly trade paper. An assistant INS commissioner announced that $50 million in what he termed excess SAW fees were going to be used to buy INS a whole new generation of computers.23 When I reported, during the Ford-supported research, that this money could have been, and should have been, used to identify fraudulent SAW applicants, that assistant commissioner (who will remain nameless) literally screamed at me; I had apparently touched a raw nerve….

In short, one of the reasons why there was so much fraud in the SAW program was because INS siphoned off $180 million or so away from fraud detection.

    This one thing Congress needs to keep in mind when passing legislation, especially concerning immigration. The Executive and the Judiciary can turn a statute into something very different from what Congress intended.

David North  (2010) “A Bailout for Illegal Immigrants? Lessons from the Implementation of the 1986 IRCA Amnesty,”  http://cis.org/irca-amnesty.