All articles

In 1986, my father Grant Lee was one of the first million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who received amnesty under President Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Having adopted as his first name the surname of the great Union Army general, my father firmly believed in the American Dream and he was sure that his days of being separated from his family, traveling from state to state to toil in restaurants, were about to end.

But IRCA, passed on a bipartisan basis, proved to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. While it ended up granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants in the country at the time, it also included a provision that criminalized undocumented immigrants for working. Unlike what its name suggests, the employers’ sanctions provision did not punish employers, but instead punished undocumented workers for working, creating an underclass of labor and dividing the working class in the process.

Trump guts public benefits in his "One Beautiful Bill", while launching militarized ICE raids on immigrant communities across the country.  His all-out assault on working people will only get worse. As he detains and deports greencard holders and even US citizens, it is now clearer than ever that Trump and his oligarch friends will make all of us, regardless of status, a "criminal". 

How did we get here? If Trump’s current dystopia is based on the premise of “conquer us all,” it’s only been made possible by decades of the bipartisan governance model: “divide and conquer.”  In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, with bipartisan support. One key provision of IRCA was Employer Sanctions which made undocumented immigrants criminals just for working. This law forced undocumented people into low-wage, no-rights labor, creating a criminalized underclass.