by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
The last time Washington did something about immigration, Ronald Reagan was president, “Top Gun” was in theaters, and I was a senior in high school. The deal was amnesty now, enforcement later. We got the amnesty. We’re still waiting on the later.
Forty years on, both parties have decided immigration is worth more as a grievance than as a solved problem. Republicans run on the invasion. Democrats run on the cruelty. Nobody runs on a bill, because that would kill the fundraising emails.
So let’s do the unthinkable and start with the law.
Crossing the border without permission violates 8 U.S.C. § 1325. It’s a misdemeanor — six months, tops, for a first offense. Overstaying a visa, which is how roughly four in ten undocumented immigrants got here, isn’t a crime at all. It’s a civil violation, like an expired plate. The felony is § 1326: coming back after you’ve already been removed.
And the overstay population isn’t only who the campaign ads say it is. DHS counted roughly 483,000 suspected in-country overstays in fiscal 2024, about 81,000 of them from visa-waiver countries — Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Australia. Canada, which DHS counts separately, topped the list outright as recently as 2015. Nobody is staking out a job site looking for the Canadian who never went home after a Colts game.
Sit with that. We are running the largest, most expensive enforcement operation in American history — detention beds, task forces, converted warehouses — over conduct Congress classified somewhere between disorderly conduct and a parking ticket.
Then there’s the math. Roughly 14 million people are here without status, including 9.7 million workers, better than five percent of the labor force. ICE removed around 329,000 people last fiscal year, a record. At that pace, deporting everybody takes about 42 years, assuming nobody new arrives and the economy politely holds still.
It won’t. Ask anyone who’s tried to hire a roofing crew in August, staff third shift at a processing plant, or find a CNA for a nursing home at 3 a.m.. These are jobs Americans have decided, they aren’t doing. Pretending otherwise isn’t a policy. It’s a mood.
Here’s the grown-up version.
Everyone here illegally gets one shot at a registration window. You come forward, you submit to biometrics, pass a background check, square up on back taxes, and pay a civil penalty. In exchange, you get permanent legal residency. A green card. You can work, pay taxes, buy a house, sue somebody, get sued, and stop living three feet from a trapdoor.
Commit a felony — before or after — and you’re gone. Not gone after eleven years of continuances. Gone. You get a criminal trial with every protection the Constitution affords. What you don’t get is a second proceeding to relitigate it in immigration court.
And you never vote. Ever. This isn’t a path to citizenship. It’s a permanent status with a permanent ceiling. Green card and a W-2, not a ballot.
Aren’t we manufacturing a permanent second class? Be honest about the baseline. Right now those same people can’t vote, can’t call OSHA, can’t call the police, and can’t do much about a boss who decides payday is optional. Under this plan they’re documented, taxed, and standing in the same courts as everybody else. Their American-born kids are already citizens and will vote soon enough. And nobody’s conscripted — take the deal or take your chances.
As for the amnesty charge, my conservative friends can get over themselves. Reagan stood on a debate stage with Walter Mondale in 1984 and said he believed in “amnesty for those who have put down roots,” then signed a bill two years later that legalized nearly three million people. In that same debate he went after the employers paying starvation wages to workers who couldn’t complain without deporting themselves. The patron saint of modern conservatism would get primaried today for saying it out loud.
And no, he never recanted. The line that Ed Meese heard the Gipper call the 1986 law the biggest mistake of his presidency traces to a June 2013 Washington Times op-ed whose author couldn’t say where he got it. A month later it turned up in the Wall Street Journal under then-Rep. Tom Cotton’s byline. It’s an internet myth in a good suit. Don’t bother sending it to me.
Besides, this isn’t amnesty. Amnesty is forgiveness plus restoration. This is forgiveness plus a permanent penalty: you get to live here, you just don’t get to run the place.
Which is why it won’t pass. Both parties would rather have the issue than the answer.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He was a high school senior the last time Congress passed an immigration bill that mattered, and he is still waiting on the sequel.
