How a 1996 US immigration policy changed everything

♪♪ Hello and welcome to another episode of The Woods. I'm John Flynn Hill, and today we have two very special guests on the show. Hello, it is I, a special guest. Yes, folks, we are joined by two Weeds alumni, Dylan Matthews, and Darryl End. Hello. Is that not the hello part? No, it was perfect. We are audio professionals over here. If you are a new listener who's joined us recently, Dylan and Dara go way back in the Weeds timeline and have both sat in the host chair at various points. Dylan is a senior correspondent here at Vox and also the lead writer of Vox's Future Perfect. And Dara is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who, after her time as a Vox reporter and Weeds co-host, has continued to grace us with her presence over the years. We wanted to get the crew back together one last time because Dara is officially leaving the Weeds universe for a new job. And as a farewell gift, we finally decided to do an episode that she's been pitching basically for forever. And the reason she's been pitching it for so long is because, according to her, it's the most consequential piece of immigration policy you've likely never heard of. So Dara, Dylan, welcome back to the Weeds. Thank you. So Dara, how long have you been wanting to do this episode? So I got to write and explain her when I was full-time at Vox. On the 1996 illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act, known as Ira or Ira, depending on how you feel about capitalizing the A. It is the dumbest acronym. It is very dumb. I did this in 2016 because some of us at Vox, including both Dylan and I, saw Hillary Clinton running for president as an excuse to write content about Bill Clinton's presidency and like to kind of do some Vox explains the 90s content. The dream of the 90s was live in 2016. Yeah. Yeah. I knew already that there was kind of a macro narrative of like how we had gotten to where immigration was in 2016 that this bill played into, but learning about it through like reporting out that explainer and kind of subsequently, it was really amazing how many of the things that have come up in the last like several years have been things that got written into law by this bill and that like weren't even a big deal at the time. Basically, anything you can identify is like a major fact about the immigration system that is broken quote unquote traces back to the debate over the bill and or like provisions in the bill itself, a lot of which weren't even really noticed or really had their consequences realized at the time. So like first of all, the fact that we have a population of like 11 million or so people in the US who don't have legal status, the majority of whom have been here have been settled for a really long time, have community roots in the US and have no path toward legal status. That's an artifact of one of the provisions in this bill that wildly restricted what had been a kind of backdoor legalization and imposed this requirement that if you had been unauthorized in the US, you would have to leave for several years if you wanted to come back. There's also the kind of intertwining of local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement that we think of as a post 9 11 thing, but that actually started with a provision getting written into law in this bill. And we have this kind of issue of border security and asylum being kind of two sides of the same coin, right? Where a lot of people who have come into the US without papers in the last 10 years have requested asylum and that's kind of put a strain on the on the existing system. But that concern goes back to the debate over the 96 bill and the system that we have now was put in place then. So the funny thing is that only one of those, the border asylum thing was actually seen as a major issue at the time. And so it's there are so many things that have kind of been time bombs that have exploded over the 27 years since Ira Ira that looking back on it now, you see what was seen as a major bill and what is now an even bigger bill, but in totally different ways. Yeah, let's go back to 1996. What exactly did Ira Ira do? So the problem with any immigration bill is like any broad immigration bill is that there are just so many areas of policy. So the other wild thing about 96 that you have to remember is three really big pieces of legislation get passed in 96. You have this, you have welfare reform and you have edpah, the anti terrorism and effective death penalty act, I believe. And some of those actually have overlapping things like between welfare reform and Ira Ira, you have a real rightward shift in immigrant celigibility for benefits, which basically means that you can't get them until you already have had a green card for several years. Between this and edpah, you have a like real tightening of eligibility for citizenship and on the flip side vulnerability to deportation if you have certain criminal convictions. But then you also have stuff that is specific to Ira Ira itself, things that make it harder to ever get legal status if you've ever been unauthorized in the US. You have the creation of this credible fear process, which is a theoretically expedited but still not a summary exclusion way to get asylum in the US. And you have this little time bump things, the statement that local law enforcement has inherent authority to enforce immigration law. This provision in there that no one really remembers what it was supposed to do at the time, but then gets used in 2018 to create the remaining Mexico or MPP program. A lot of little things like that. But when the bill is passed, it's generally understood as a asylum restriction, criminal bars, the welfare thing got a lot of play. And so some of the other kind of immigration specific stuff faded out of the line light a little bit. So I know that it is difficult to summarize just these decades of immigration history. But I'm sort of interested in the standard story about immigration we typically hear. I know people often think of like Ellis Island, like the 1900s, but can you walk us kind of how that immigration policy shifted and changed throughout the 20th century? Oh sure. It's at heart cellar time. Oh yeah, it's heart cellar time, baby. So we actually, this was the subject of a past week's time machine episode. Yeah. Super interested. You can go back and listen to what we did on heart cellar or the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. There's also a great book on this. I just wanted to plug by Gia Lin Yang at the New York Times called a mighty resistible tide of the history of that bill. But anyway, so the macro picture is that Ellis Island is really like the last gasp of a 19th century system in which there aren't very strong formal federal statutory restrictions. But instead, there's a lot of discretion that ends up getting used in predictably racist and eugenicist ways that results in some people coming all the way to the US and then getting told they can't get left in. That gets replaced in the early 1920s with the national quota system, which is explicitly designed to conform to the ethnic balance of the 1890 census so that America didn't get too many southern and eastern Europeans. And that system is what the 1965 act, which is the last major overhaul of the legal immigration system we've had. So two big effects of that are A, it really opens up America to Asian and African immigrants. B, for the first time it imposes restrictions on legal immigration from the western hemisphere. And so the second half of the 20th century in a lot of ways is trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that we have this really long and like complicated in a terrain sense land border through which now actually matters a whole lot more whether people are crossing. So in 1986, this problem they try to address with Iraka the Reagan amnesty, which gives the opportunity to apply for legal status for people who are already here, makes it illegal to work in the United States without work authorization, in theory, creates restrictions on employers, that kind of thing. And kind of building up from 1896 to 1996, the beginning of the kind of border militarization, right, the hiring of large numbers of border agents, the building of physical barriers, that kind of thing is kind of coming up through the 90s. But you still kind of have this sense that things are out of balance because you have an unauthorized population, which is like a policy failure on some level, right? And this increasing attention to Middle Eastern terrorism with a couple of like high profile cases of people who had applied for asylum and then come into the US and had then been arrested for violent crimes, a sense that asylum is creating a get out of jail free card for anyone who wants to come to the US to do people harm. So by the time we get to 1996, what's the undocumented population like? You had the Reagan amnesty in 1986. So you had a large swath of people who had this opportunity to legalize. Is it just people who came in the subsequent 10 years, were there people like left out of the Reagan amnesty? So that is a good question. I wish we had like, I really wish that there had been, I know that people tried to do really good data collection on the legal education. Was there just people? It's just like, so it's hard to get that data. What yeah, like, I think our understanding is that there was decent pickup, not like ideal pickup, but decent pickup among eligible people. There is of course the problem of like people who had already come in the time between the law was signed, you know, like, and they do continue coming because the likelihood of apprehension compared to today is still very low. The potential penalties compared to today are still pretty low. And so what you have is the beginning of a shift that really becomes very clear in the early 2000s, but that is happening during this time in that Ira, Ira almost certainly kind of accelerated and locked into place, but that was probably happening before that, which is a shift from the unauthorized population being mostly single men of working age or men of working age coming without their families who would then kind of return, you know, and engage in what we call circular migration because it's just a way to get some money and then go back to people settling in the US, more women coming, more, you know, families coming and a more settled population, all of those trends together pointing to in the years after this bill passes. And certainly there's a correlation here and we can talk about the causation in a bit, what had been a fairly, you know, transient population becoming a long settled unauthorized population. So I know now, especially, but even in 1996, we were very far away from this Ellis Island, give us your poor sort of immigration policy. And I want to get into 1996 and the political and cultural landscape. So Dylan, what was going on back then? Bill Clinton was in the White House. We were all doing the Macarena. Like what was happening? Yeah. I mean, I think it's important, especially as we go through the myriad failures of this bill to remember how radically to the right of today's political atmosphere, things were then. So we're two years out from the 94 midterms. The 94 midterms were like catastrophic for Clinton in a way that no subsequent midterms had been. The Democrats had had the House for 40 years uninterrupted and close to 60 if you exclude like a two year period in the 50s. That got wiped out. It was like an apocalypse shift in the way that the Congress works. And so Clinton had to deal with a hostile Congress that he never thought that he was going to have to deal with because no previous president had to deal with it. Also he came after 12 years of Republican presidents, each of whom won in a landslide, like Reagan and Bush did not win by small margins. They'd like kick the shit out of Carter Mondale and decockus. And Clinton only won because it was a three way race and he had a sort of bare plurality. He got something like 42, 43% of the vote because Ross Broke got 20 and did so by running like hard to the right relative to the rest of the Democratic field. The idea that a Democrat would sign this can seem baffling now, but he's existing in an ecosystem where there was a very real feeling among Democrats that if you don't move right word on stuff like immigration, you're never going to win an election again. And I think that fear is amplified after 94 because it suggests that like the 92 gains were very fragile. They could go away very, very fast. I kind of want to dig into that time period and immigration specifically. What were lawmakers concerns regarding immigration at the time? Like what were the big, you know, I mean, now people are freaking out about migrants and fentanyl and all these things. But what is the 1996 version of that? So there are a few things. There's definitely a concern about like we're still in a post-Willie Horton kind of media world, right? And that's the super duper race is at there. Exactly. Bush and decockus on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. Horton was Willie Horton who murdered a boy in a robbery stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime. But it's kind of more generally the principle that you can have an entire policy knocked out because one bad case creates the opportunity to kick you over the policy. And so there is some concern about that that becomes relevant, especially when we're talking about asylum stuff because of the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, a couple of other cases. There's also this rise in the Republican Party. Obviously, both parties are a little bit cross pressured on immigration. But what you have at this point in the Republican Party is a wave of kind of entrepreneurship among Republicans like Pete Wilson in California who are making their reputation as immigration hawks and specifically on the idea that immigrants and specifically unauthorized immigrants shouldn't be eligible for social services. And that's not just defined as like cash benefits. It's defined as public schools. The idea that unauthorized immigrant kids had a right to be in public school was pretty up like the Supreme Court had only established that. I think in 1982, you know, obviously there's nothing stopping Congress from passing a bill explicitly saying that that's not okay. So Pete Wilson makes his reputation on a proposition in California that severely restricts public benefits for unauthorized immigrants. And so that is kind of opening up as a new kind of terrain of battle where Republicans can use their traditional concerns about welfare to also hit Democrats on this on. And it's useful that it's California here because this is at a time when the unauthorized population isn't in a lot of the country, right? California is a much more diverse place than much of the rest of the country. And so that's where kind of the fear of change can be activated very readily. It is very interesting to me. I don't know. I think of the 90s was just, I don't know, it was a different time. And I think of just so many of the policies there, like the attitudes around welfare, attitudes around so many things, just this idea of like, we can't have people taking advantage of these things. Like people will have the brown and black people need to earn it because they're lazy, right? So it's shaped so much of the policy at the time, it seems like. Well, California was also just very different. Like this is something I've been reading about recently for some other projects, but we think of the California as this arch-liberal state now, and it really wasn't. I mean, you had Reagan famously, but Wilson succeeded another conservative Republican governor. And a huge part of the dynamic of the state was that it was a defense state. You had huge naval installations and contractor businesses in Southern California. And when a lot of that business shut down in the early 90s, because the Cold War was ending, you had a kind of localized recession in Southern California that like both fed into kind of reactionary norms. And it was also like, eventually led to those businesses shutting down and the whole state shifting left for it because you didn't have this kind of like conservative bulwark in Orange County in San Diego. As I'd say, you're Orange County Republicans. Right. Right. And there's some of them who are still there, but like it's not sort of the defense heavyweight that it was then. And I think that's like really profoundly shaped the state in kind of surprising ways. But I think it helps the count for why you have people like Pete Wilson, why you have enough Republicans paying for and voting for measures like Prop 187, which is the ballot initiative that Dara mentioned. I want to talk about the legislative history of Ira Ira a little bit. It was a very complicated process. Why? Well, it's wild. Congress used to do this thing called legislate where at the beginning of a Congress bills would get drafted and then they get negotiated openly. And then you would know your work as a process. I hear committees are sometimes involved. Yes. I don't know. Committees were involved, including conference committees. There would be different versions of a bill that would go through the House and Senate like independently. And then they would be reconciled at the end of the process rather than getting ping ponged back and forth. Sounds like fan fiction to me. So that said, because this is kind of in important ways, as Dylan mentioned, kind of alluded to earlier, the first like modern opposition Congress, Republicans come into office with like a slate of things they want to do, but also are aware that like they have no need to play by rules of comedy, especially in the House and also in the House because they hadn't had control of it for so long, you have some decently experienced Republican legislators who have cared about this issue for a long time, like Lamar Smith of Texas and Elton Gallagley of California, who have never had the chance to really like write legislation. And so they really take the bill by the horns. There had been like concerns both in Congress and the executive branch about asylum in particular because the asylum policy of the United States at the time was such that if you could apply for asylum and get a work permit and it was taking so long to adjudicate asylum claims that you would just have people like applying working for a couple of years and then getting the asylum denial. And because that incentivizes more people applying, the backlog was just getting worse. And the Clinton administration had taken some like regulatory moves to change that, but you know, it wasn't necessarily enough to kind of reduce the political pressure. But Smith and Gallagley, especially Smith kind of take that and write a bill that is, you know, we're going to have a whole title cutting legal immigration across the board, including business immigration. We're going to really like tighten these criminal bars. We're going to ban immigrant children from republic schools. Like they really take a maximalist approach and then the Senate and then the house kind of negotiating process becomes a triage concern for advocates and Democrats who are a little bit back footed on like, how do we fight all of this at once? At a fairly early point, Smith realizes he can't fight a two front war and so agrees to cut the business immigration stuff. And like out of the bill and ultimately some of the other legal immigration cuts kind of get like shunted as well because it would have been like had this bill passed as an initially written, it would have been wildly restrictive on legal immigration from 1996 levels. But on some of the other stuff, there isn't a very well organized immigrant rights movement. There are basically a bunch of asylum lawyers. There's, you know, a little bit cross pressuring among Democrats who feel the need to say that they're not supportive of illegal immigration per se, right? And there are a lot of moving parts. And so a lot of the attention ends up focusing on what's called the Gallagli amendment, the provision on unauthorized immigrant children in public schools that takes a lot of oxygen ultimately becomes the subject of a veto threat from the Clinton administration and then get stripped. And like without that veto threat, there's then a whole, okay, is this bill bad enough that we think we can keep Bill Clinton from signing it? But the other fun thing that happens in terms of like Republicans are not needing the rules of comedy is Democrats show up for the conference committee, the final committee before it hits the House floor in summer of 96 to find that the bill has been substantially rewritten to the right from where it had been prior to that. And it's just like sitting on their desks and they're like, okay, so now you have to vote for this. And so there's this actually hilarious kind of congressional record day where Javier Vaseira, who's now Secretary of Health and Human Services, he and never other Democrat are like, well, this is a crappy move. So there was kind of a certain extent to which Republicans, at least some Republicans were both well informed and playing hardball and very few Democrats were both of those things. All right, up next we'll dig even deeper into Ira Ira. This episode of The Weeds is brought to you by Wondrium. Wondrium is a massive educational platform loaded with documentaries, immersive series, lessons, basic how-to guides and a lot more. There are over 8,000 hours of expert-led, easy-to-follow videos that cover just about everything you could obsess over. And look, I know that you know me as a hardcore policy wonk, but when I checked out their catalog, I went right for their Spanish courses. I took Spanish in college and in high school, and language is really one of those things where if you don't use it, you lose it, and I'm afraid to say I've lost it. But with Wondrium, I get to pick it back up. Of course, they have a bunch of courses practically created for people who love the Weeds. Like an overview of our 12 most important presidents, a look at the current state of Western democracy, a class covering the science of energy consumption and resources, and so much more. Learn about what you love and love learning about it with Wondrium. Weeds listeners can sign up for Wondrium now and try it free for a full month. Go to Wondrium.com-slash-weeds to get a full month of unlimited access. That's W-O-N-D-R-I-U-M.com-slash-weeds. Wondrium.com-slash-weeds. For years now, it's been very unlikely for a big megabox office hit to win Best Picture at the Oscars. As like CGI-heavy movies sort of started to dominate the top 10, that's when you sort of started to see that like the public's taste and the Oscars taste just like really, really started to part ways. I wish they were more aligned too, but I kind of want the public to maybe like, you know, they'll see the fabulous guys. Like it's not going to hurt you. I don't know. What's up with the Oscars and Lockbusters? This week on Intuit, Vulture's Pop Culture Podcast. New episodes, Tuesdays and Fridays. Welcome back to The Weeds. I'm John Glenn Hill. I'm here with Dara Lynn and Dylan Matthews doing a little Weeds Time Machine about Ira, Ira and immigration. So Dara, we did a brief summary earlier, but now I really want to get into the nitty gritty of this policy. Can you walk us through some specific areas of the bill and how they differed from the existing laws at the time? Let's kind of take this in what this looks like if you're in various positions. Okay. If you're currently in the US and unauthorized when this bill is enacted, you go from having a not easy, but like decently predictable way to ultimately get legal status. It's called cancellation of removal. It was basically if you'd been here for 10 years and you could demonstrate that it would be a hardship for you to go back to the country you hadn't lived in for 10 years, then a judge could give you a path to permanent legal status. And that gets changed in a couple of ways. First, there's a numerical cap put on it. Second, the hardship standard gets raised. And third, it gets changed to it can't be a hardship to you. It has to be a hardship to a US citizen. Oh, okay. So usually that ends up being like a spouse or a child, but because the hardship standard is also raised, merely, well, we would have to move from the place where my child has lived their entire life does not count. The other kind of major reason we don't talk about why the unauthorized population prior to this was like more transient is because if you were settled in the United States, ultimately you weren't going to be unauthorized. And so that's one of those things where it wasn't something that a ton of people looked at at the time, but in retrospect, if you look at how many people here now would have qualified for like pre-Ira-Ira cancellation, it really does have a massive effect. The other thing, as I kind of alluded to earlier, is if you are eligible for legal status somehow, for example, if you marry a US citizen, you have to leave the US, wait a certain amount of time, and then apply to get back in depending on how long you'd been unauthorized in a country. In some cases, it's a permanent bar. Like you will never be able to get legal. There's also a slightly elevated risk that you will get caught and deported because of this inherent authority provision. Because of that, there is a slightly bigger kind of attention being put to interior enforcement in the US. If you're coming to the US and you don't have papers as an asylum seeker, this is actually a huge change. And at this time, we don't have extremely sophisticated international databases where airlines can check legal status. So it's not unheard of for someone to come to the US and not have legal status here via JFK. And so it had previously been the case that anybody had a right to an interview with an INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service Officer, to demonstrate if they were eligible for asylum in the US. And if that claim was denied, they got to go before a judge. After this bill gets passed, you have this thing called expedited removal, which means if you are caught coming in or you're caught within a certain amount of time of entering, you can be deported without a judicial here. And for asylum seekers, that means you get a, if you claim a fear of returning to your home country, you get an interview within a asylum officer that isn't a full interview. It's a screening interview. And if they find you have a credible fear of deportation, then you proceed to going in front of a judge. It creates a population of people who are going to be able to get deported very quickly. And the expedited removal provision is something else that like doesn't really get used a ton at the time, but we'll get used more later on. If you're a legal immigrant in the US, then it plus the welfare reform stuff means that your eligibility for public benefits, for federal public benefits, has basically been cut to nil unless you're a refugee or someone who's been granted asylum or a humanitarian visa like a visa for domestic violence survivors, that kind of thing. That doesn't affect your children's enrollment in public school, but you can kind of understand from like, if you remember the debates over the public charge regulation during the Trump era, like it can be a little bit hard to communicate to people. Well, these benefits are off limits, but these benefits are okay. So there's definitely some of that. The other thing is that it's now much harder to get citizenship or to retain legal status if you have contact with the criminal justice system. There are lots of legal terms of art that are somewhat, somewhat which are kind of pre-existing in immigration law, but like now get more important because they're expanded. The concept of the aggravated felony, which is not a term that exists in actual criminal law, but exists in immigration law and has since been the subject of like enormous amounts of litigation, like, okay, does it have to be a felony to count as an aggravated felony? No. Like, there are kind of all of these like expanding, but not very well defined bars to citizenship that mean that if the government decides to deny your application for citizenship and try to deport you instead or like strip your green card or that kind of thing, you're going to end up in a pretty lengthy judicial process where you may or may not be able to persuade a judge that it doesn't matter that you had a long ago drug conviction and obviously given like where this is coming from in the context of like policing in the 1990s. What that ends up meaning is that to this day, you have a lot of black and brown long-time immigrants who are in the system because of like ages ago convictions that might happen today but probably wouldn't because they were based in policies that like have been abandoned as too aggressive and too draconian today, but because they still have that stuff on their record, it's still a problem. A lot of the times when I think of 1990s, especially criminal justice policy, I think draconian is a very good word to use. I mean, policies were so punitive back then. I'm thinking of the 1994 crime bill. I'm thinking of Ira, Ira, what is it about the 1990s that punishment was just such a major part of policy? One thing to keep in mind is that there genuinely was a real surge in crime in the 70s and 80s and you can't have that happen and not have a kind of reaction of some kind. It doesn't have to be a punitive reaction. I think the fact that the reaction was punitive is based on some other things. I mean, this is also in the immediate aftermath of the crack epidemic, which I think contributed to that but also was sort of played up a lot as a scare tactic and turned cocaine from like a rich white person drug to a scary poor black person drug in ways that had implications for how hard it was cracked down on. I think a lot of it was just the incentives that political actors faced. Dara mentioned Willie Horton earlier who was both an ad but was also a real person. That was really damaging. I think a takeaway, as Dara was saying from that was people don't want to be responsible for the one guy who benefits from your policy and then goes on to hurt people. That anything that could be twisted to make you responsible for not having been tough enough on someone who goes on to do something heinous even if that is sort of the one in 10,000 person from that policy, that book is really dangerous for Democrats. So yeah, that's kind of the context we're in. With regard to immigration in particular, I think this gets into some interesting political and policy dynamics because for one thing, this bill does a lot to create what some scholars and activists call it, like the intertwining of these two systems so that it's both immigration itself being criminalized and the criminal system getting used for immigration enforcement. What said, it's not fully a criminal system yet. Like being unauthorized in the United States is not a crime, entering the United States without authorization is a crime and that distinction ends up being super relevant at a point when a lot of people end up being visa overstays, which is what we have in terms of the long set of unauthorized population now. And so there's this really weird political dynamic where in theory talking about stiffening criminal penalties for immigration or stepping up deportations of people who don't have criminal records or treating unauthorized immigrants more harshly, not giving them more permits. Politically, that can very easily reduce for a lot of people down too well their criminals and it's more complicated than that, but saying it's more complicated than that is hard to do in a political context. And the other side of this is that because immigration is not fully criminal, there's no right to counsel, deportation is not a criminal penalty, there's ongoing litigation in the Supreme Court about whether you can be detained without a bond hearing for like years and years and years and years and years because it's not, you know, like it's just it's governed by different rules. There are a lot of things about the immigration system that are in fact as severe or more severe than criminal penalties, but because it's not it's technically a civil violation and not a criminal violation, you don't have those protections. And at the time it's hard to see that because not a ton of people are getting arrested and deported. And after 1996 as enforcement steps up both at the border and in the interior, it becomes increasingly clear that the cliche about immigration courts is that it's death penalty cases in traffic court. And that's really at the heart of this mismatch between the consequences of the system and the kind of relative safeguards that get put into the criminal side of the criminal justice system versus civil litigation. So we've dug into this sort of criminal justice aspect of Ira Ira, but I want to I want to dig into more of the social services to Dylan another part of the rhetoric we heard at the time. And honestly that we hear now is this idea of people who are unauthorized to live in the country receiving benefits and social services, just sort of like this idea of like they're taking our stuff. What's happening? Can you talk about that a little bit? One piece of the political context of 96 is that another major legislative push happening is for welfare reform. And this is something that Republicans and Congress wanted, but that Clinton personally also really wanted. He promised during the primary in 1991 to end welfare as we know it. And there was sort of a bipartisan consensus that eight to families with dependent children wasn't working. So Clinton brings in this team, this guy David Elwood, who has this sort of very ambitious plan to remake it as a job support program and fund a lot of government-fried jobs and child care and whatever. And it quickly becomes clear that there isn't going to be the money for any of that. And then they lose the house and the Senate and it becomes clear that Republicans won't vote for anything like that. So the welfare reform act is sort of being sussed out around this time. As with Ira Ira, there are some things that are being proposed that don't make it in. The biggest being block granting food stamps that a lot of people wanted to not just sort of return cash welfare to the states, but to return food stamps, which would totally remake the federal safety net and get rid of sort of one of the few programs that helps people who don't have any earnings. And so they were sort of having to base about whether that was going to happen and how far they were going to go. But one axis of conflict in writing that bill was sort of has a deal with immigrants. And this was subject to all the same pressures that Dar has been describing in the immigration specific legislative context and it culminates in a bunch of provisions stripping access to SNAP, into Medicaid, which are for these purposes, like the two most important means tested safety net programs from a large chunk of legal immigrants. And sort of underlining legal there, I think is important that it has always been the case that if you are an authorized immigrant, you can't get these programs. There's never been a maturity in Congress for you walk over the border and we hand you a Medicaid card. But these were people who were lawfully here, some of whom had green cards, many of whom were married to or had family members who were US citizens, were suddenly ineligible. And I think much as Dar is describing a lot of IRA, this flu kind of a vunder the radar. I think a lot of people were focused on what happens to food stamps generally, what happens to Medicaid. Can we get more money for something like childcare if we're going to force people to work to get cash welfare? Those were sort of more what people were arguing about and what was being sort of bannied about in the Clinton administration as he considered whether to sign or veto it. But then also there were these immigration provisions and those proved to be very important as well. Up next, we look at immigration policy after IRA IRA. I want to get into something else that changed immigration policy. And that's 9-11. How did that change the country's feelings about immigration and how did it change our policies? So I think there's this assumption that I think it's partly true, but I also think it's kind of helped to obscure the legacy of IRA or some because there's this assumption that 9-11 was a real turning point toward a restrictive immigration policy. And on a very, very sophisticated level, that's probably true. The Dream Act was first introduced in summer of 2001. There was kind of a building understanding that there was a cohort of people who were growing up unauthorized in the US. There was some realization that the criminal bars for legal immigrants were once those started getting implemented, even some of the Republicans who had supported them were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this seems a little harsh even for us. And that all gets arrested and kind of shuns it aside by 9-11. The most important thing from a policy perspective is that the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service gets broken up and reconstituted as three separate agencies, two of which are responsible only for enforcement. So instead of having just one budget line, you had three budget lines and making it all the easier to just zero the benefits one. And that's, you know, USCIS remains a fee funded agency, whereas the two enforcement agencies, Congress has been happy to like give more and more money to. The fact that it's two enforcement agencies rather than one is also very relevant because that means that for the first time you have a whole agency that is responsible for enforcing the immigration and customs in the interior of the United States. And that opens the door to turn this inherent authority provision in Ira Ira into a series of programs that explicitly authorize local law enforcement to coordinate with this growing interior enforcement body to like turn immigrants over, creating something of a like jail to deportation pipeline through the late Bush and Obama administrations in particular. So purer critically, absolutely huge deal, you know, deportations are rising through the 90s, but we don't have anything close to the scale that we get, you know, by the end of the Bush administration. And a lot of that is because of the bureaucratic reorganization and the kind of empowering of enforcement within DHS. But legislatively speaking, 9-11 does nothing. There's a huge political concern, like refugee resettlement is paused. There's definitely a turn towards xenophobia, specifically against Middle Eastern and like people perceived as Middle Eastern or Muslim. But what we see in the changes to immigration policy post 9-11 are something of a political shift, but really the bureaucratic shift allowing a lot of things in Ira Ira that had kind of been dormant to like then become, you know, potentially viable, which ultimately kind of reaches its apex in this remaining Mexico thing, which like when they were talking about it in 2018, I and every other immigration reporter who was working on this was just going around to the people who had been around in the 90s. Like the head of the INS when Ira Ira was passed is, you know, still like Doris Meisner, who's like still in a prominent role as a think tanker. And she was like, I don't remember what this was about. Like this was not, we were like, it was maybe it was about like courts, ports of entry, like no one is really sure, but it got turned into because of the way it was written and because no one really knew what it had been about, it got turned into a valve for we're going to take tens of thousands of people and force them to stay in Mexico while they eventually get asylum hearing scheduled in the US. We're almost 30 years out from the passage of this bill. And I'm curious how our current political environment is different from 1996. We've touched on this, but you know, we're less punitive in a lot of ways, but people are still very hawkish, especially when it comes to the border. I think of speaker McCarthy recently did a trip with the house freshman down to the border. So how have things changed and how is it similar? We've circled back to a couple of really important similarities. One of which is that the border has eaten the immigration debate and like that doesn't mean that other problems are solved, right? Like no one for whom there was a legalization push 10 years ago, five years ago, et cetera has gotten legalized with the exception of a few thousand librarians who were legalized under the Trump administration. And now we have this much more settled, much larger than it was in 1996 population. And as I kind of alluded to it, one I like spell out, demographers have identified this as being a caddling effect where like where the passage of more punitive penalties, more likelihood of enforcement convinced people to stay where they are rather than cross back and forth and risk getting apprehended. And so creates a settled population out of a transient one. And now we have the effects of that. And you know, that's the one thing that like you can't create a pathway to citizenship without Congress. And so even subsequent democratic administrations, while they've tried to protect people from deportation, give them work permits, et cetera, can't bridge that gap. The other consequence of the border eating the debate is it is possible that in the next couple of years we are going to see the system that got set up in 1986 that was the compromise instead of essentially killing asylum entirely, this credible fear screening process, we may be seeing that eliminated or restricted so much that it is essentially eliminated. Whether that's legislative, whether that's because of Biden administration proposals that they have not actually released yet, but have said they're going to release, that may have been released once this comes out, that would ban people from asylum if they had crossed through another country in order to get to the US. Jake Hugh here, Dara was right. Last week on February 21st, the Biden administration announced a new rule that would make migrants ineligible for asylum if they passed through another country without seeking asylum there first. Okay, back to Dara. But the concern there is that it's an enforcement question versus kind of a basic humanitarian question of like, at what point are you raising the bar so high that in practice, no one with the legitimate humanitarian claim is going to be able to leap over it? And I think in that regard, it is absolutely possible that border security is going to swallow asylum whole. Yeah, it's interesting to me that it's asylum, that's sort of the thing. Like, of all the types of immigration to take place, it's people running from these awful situations and yet this seems to be the sticking point for a lot of this policy. The problem here is that because the border isn't a force field and therefore it's possible to set foot in the US without having legal status, like you can apprehend as many people as you want, but you can't immediately deport all of them because some of them will claim asylum. And so asylum is the one absolute thing written into US law where like, yes, on the one hand, you have committed the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry by setting foot in the US without papers, but it's also fully 100% legal for you to be here as long as you are an asylum seeker. And it's like really, it's this weird quantum state that's really hard for people to process. And so that, A, does incentivize people requesting asylum whether or not they know what it means. And that's not to say that they don't have good cases. It's just to say that asylum law is extremely complicated. And B, creates this ongoing suspicion that if you really did want to come into the United States from a line purposes, you would do so by claiming asylum. So that kind of does make a certain amount of sense to me. Certainly the trends over the last decade have been like, we really are seeing just many, many more people seeking these fear screening interviews than we did under the Bush-Roe bomb administrations. And like, you know, people respond to incentives, smugglers train people to like do whatever they think is going to most successfully get them into the United States. And so, if you're not saying that you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, if you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, the reason that it's a lot of fun to talk about when Congress passed immigration legislation isn't just that Congress doesn't pass bills anymore, but also that it's wild to think about a time when immigration policy wasn't being driven by the federal courts. Yeah. Yeah. Like Title 42 is from the Public Health Service Act of 1944. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't see that one coming. No, no, no, no, no. That was definitely another, like, whoever control F'd the entire U.S. code, like, to find that provision. I mean, honestly, I admire the research skills. But yeah, the current state of it is that the Biden administration, after not wanting to end it for a while, tried to end it, got sued by a bunch of red states. Federal courts said you can't end Title 42 because you still have this other emergency, even though those are legally distinct things. So, it makes it really difficult to predict what's going to happen. It makes it really difficult to set up any successor policies. And what we end up having is this world where, like, no one really knows which policies are unaffected any given time. There are multiple policies. What you're actually subject to is a little bit as it has been. And, like, you know, this is a shout out to everybody who's super sick of me saying this. It's down to the people at Border Patrol who are doing apprehensions or, like, their supervisors or their supervisors. It's, there are multiple things in effect at once. And that means that any given person who comes across won't know what policy they're subject to until they've come over. All right. Darlene, Dylan Matthews, thank you so much for joining me on the weeds and for, like, making the weeds awesome in the first place. It is a joy and a pleasure and thank you for letting us come back as weird to all the lums who are still hanging around the high school. The funny thing is, though, like, the joke is you go back to your elementary school and you're like, wow, things are so much smaller and they literally have changed the table in the podcast studio. So, it's smaller. And I'm like, this is, this is awfully literal for this metaphor. Yeah, it's a, it's a, a, a mat daemon downsizing situation, but I'm, I'm glad you're thriving, Jake, you're mine. That's all for us today. Thank you to Dylan Matthews and Darlene for joining me. Our producer is Sophie Lalonde, Christian Ayala engineered this episode. A special thank you to Kim Eggleston for fact checking it. Our editorial director is A.M. Hall and I'm your host, John Kolinhill. The weed is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Dara or Dara? Don't know, don't care. Don't notice. I know. Like genuinely, whatever is more comfortable for you, just roll with it. Okay. It's like how light can be a particle or a wave. That's actually really correct. I'm entirely correct.