Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Over time, the United States Immigration system has undergone a myriad of comprehensive reforms which have proven to greatly impact the composition of its population. Though it is unclear whether these specific policies were products of theoretical assumptions, such as those associated with a country’s economic stature, the social norms of the time period, or further contributory factors such as the existing political landscape, the issue of immigration has continued to remain problematic in the 21st century and requires a structured approach. Preceding the current Obama administration and previous Bush administrations of the early 2000s, relatively recent major reforms were made to the U.S. immigration system through the passage of bills beginning in 1986 under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, in 1990 under the Immigration Act, and in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (Bodvarsson and Van den Berg, 368). Each of these legislative bills proposes different sets of provisions which include, to some degree, address comprehensive immigration reform. However, the policy strategy to include these broader reforms on recent immigration legislation have largely failed to emerge from beyond the preliminary procedures of Congress as a result of strong opposition by today’s lawmakers.
More specifically, the notable policy trend in contemporary immigration legislation involves the heavy emphasis on border enforcement as the principal solution to the issue as a whole. The comprehensive processes that were once established through the legislative bills of the 1980’s and 90’s, such as the family reunification programs, legal amnesty clauses, and population ceilings, are now largely absent from the one-dimensional enforcement system utilized today. It is within the scope of this philosophical shift that has elicited the question of why the most recently implemented immigration policies have been limited to the expansion of border