Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

The advocates succeeded in sinking the provisions of the bill that would have restricted legal immigration and undermined asylum law. But the rest of the bill remained intact. Without the politically unpopular elements threatening legal immigration, it was essentially unstoppable. The measures that went to the president for his signature in September were almost too harsh and far-reaching to survey. The journalist Dara Lind, writing two decades later, said, “it was a bundle of provisions with a single goal: to increase penalties on immigrants who had violated US law in some way (whether they were unauthorized immigrants who’d violated immigration law or legal immigrants who’d committed other crimes).” The law, called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), established mass deportation as the new centerpiece of American immigration policy.