Building an Immigration Enforcement Regime through Bipartisan Coalition Building: Lessons from IRCA in 1986

This study analyzes the role of bipartisan coalitions in creating exclusionary, enforcement focused immigration policy. First, the thesis covers the history of federal immigration law and connects this to critical migration scholarship, which emphasizes the racialization of migration controls and enforcement regimes, by highlighting the growing federal categories of immigrant illegality and criminality. Next, the thesis develops an original framework that builds on prior scholarship in political science to systematically connect coalition building and the Democratic party’s complicity as a cause of this growing regime. Specifically, the thesis applies a coalition building analysis of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, with special focus given to how the president, congressional leaders, and interest groups, in the 1980s. A key finding is that both political parties pushed the enforcement narrative and played key roles to enact employment verification into federal immigration law. The thesis connects this finding to critiques about the two-party political system as well as scholarship that exposes the injustice of U.S. immigration enforcement regime that continued to grow in the interior, at the border, and globally.