Barbara Jordan's Commission Wanted Less Immigration and a Workplace Check

If you want to know what a bipartisan immigration consensus looks like, do not look for it in a speech. Look for it in a report that Congress commissioned, a Democratic civil-rights hero chaired, and Washington then put on a high shelf where it could be admired from a safe distance.

The report exists. The woman who led it is one of the most admired figures in modern American politics. And what she and her colleagues recommended would make a good many of today's loudest voices on both sides of the immigration fight uncomfortable. That is the best reason I know to read about her.

A career built on the Constitution

Barbara Jordan was born in Houston, Texas, on February 21, 1936. She grew up in the city's Fifth Ward, attended Phillis Wheatley High School, and went on to Texas Southern University, where she was a standout on the debate team, and then to Boston University School of Law, from which she graduated in 1959. She came back to Texas and practiced law in Houston.

She ran for the Texas House twice and lost. In 1966 she won a seat in the Texas Senate, the first Black woman to serve there, and the first Black person elected to that body since the 1800s. In the Senate she was known for mastering the rules, for working with colleagues of all kinds and for a voice that people described then, and still describe, as one of the great speaking voices of American public life. She served in the state senate until 1972.

In 1972 she was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Houston, and she served three terms, from 1973 to 1979. In Washington she sat on the Judiciary Committee. In the summer of 1974, as the committee considered whether to recommend articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon, she delivered a statement that is still taught in classrooms. She spoke on July 25, 1974, and she began by reading the opening words of the Constitution and observing that when it was completed in 1787 she had not been included in "We, the people." She went on to say that through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision she had finally been included, and then she gave the line that carried the day: "My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total."

The speech mattered not because of the politics of the day but because of the argument she made. The Constitution was the standard. Everyone, including the president, was under it. A conservative reads that as a statement of the principle of limited, law-bound government, and I think it is right to claim her on that ground.

In 1976 she delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, the first Black woman to do so at a major party's convention. She left Congress in 1979 and taught at the University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, where she remained a public presence, and she later served as ethics adviser to Governor Ann Richards. She died on January 17, 1996.

Her politics were those of a liberal Democrat on most questions. I do not present her as a conservative, and she would not have thanked me. What I present is a person who held to a principle, that public policy must serve the national interest, and who applied it to immigration even when it was not the fashionable position on her own side.

How the commission came to exist

By the late 1980s, Congress had passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which legalized several million people who had been in the country illegally and imposed sanctions on employers who hired unauthorized workers. The Immigration Act of 1990 then raised legal immigration and rewrote the employment categories. The 1990 act also created a body to take a hard look at what had been done: the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which was to study the operation of the law and recommend changes.

President Clinton named Barbara Jordan chair in December 1993. The members were appointed by the president and by the leaders of both parties in both chambers. It was a mixed group, which is why its conclusions carry weight.

The commission produced three major works that matter here. In September 1994 it issued an interim report on illegal immigration. In 1995 it issued a report on legal immigration, titled Legal Immigration: Setting Priorities. And in 1997, after Jordan's death, it issued a final report on integration, called Becoming an American. She chaired the first two and her influence marks the third.

What the commission recommended

Let me set out the recommendations in plain terms, because they are easily caricatured by both sides. I rely on what I understand to be the substance of the reports, and I would ask you to read the originals.

On illegal immigration, the commission put its weight on the workplace. Its premise was that the magnet for illegal entry is jobs, so the best deterrent is a reliable way for an employer to learn whether a worker is authorized. The commission found the existing system, which relied on the I-9 form and a list of documents that could be forged, to be failing. It recommended developing a computerized verification system that would check a new hire's information against federal records, to be tested in pilot programs before a wider rollout. It did not recommend a national identification card. This recommendation is the ancestor of E-Verify, and the argument about whether to make it mandatory is taken up in The Conservative Split Over Mandatory E-Verify, Argued From Both Sides.

On the border and enforcement, the commission called for credibility. The title of its first report, from September 1994, was U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility. The word was chosen on purpose. A law that is not enforced loses the respect of those it governs and invites those who would break it. The commission supported stronger border enforcement and the removal of people who had no right to remain.

On legal immigration, the commission recommended lower numbers and a sharper focus. It concluded, as I understand it, that the level of legal immigration should be reduced to around 550,000 a year, a cut of roughly a third, though sources differ on the exact starting figure. The reduction would come from reshaping the categories. Family admission would concentrate on the nuclear family, meaning spouses and minor children of citizens and permanent residents. The preferences for adult children and for siblings would be ended. The argument for the family part is made in The Case for Nuclear-Family Immigration Over Extended Family Chains.

On integration, the commission wanted a civic nation. Its final report stressed that becoming an American means learning English and the principles of the country, and it spoke of the obligation of the immigrant and the obligation of the nation to help. A conservative who has read the history of the "melting pot" will recognize the theme, and English as a Common Language Is a Gift to Newcomers, Not a Barrier picks it up.

The unifying principle was that immigration policy should serve the national interest. This was not a restrictionist slogan. It was the guiding sentence of a commission with a liberal Democratic chair and bipartisan membership.

Why Congress set it aside

The story of what happened next is a lesson in how Washington works, and I will tell it carefully.

In 1996, Congress took up an immigration bill, and the enforcement parts of the commission's agenda moved forward. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 strengthened border enforcement, added removal authority, and created the pilot programs for electronic work verification that the commission had urged. The enforcement half of the commission's work, in other words, was partly taken up.

The legal-immigration half was a different story. The proposals to reduce the numbers and to end the adult-child and sibling categories were separated from the enforcement bill and did not pass. Opponents of the cuts succeeded in splitting the bill into its legal and illegal halves, and in 1996 the House voted to drop the legal-immigration reductions from it. I am confident of the broad outcome, which is that the cuts were not enacted, and less confident of every detail of the maneuvering, which I will leave to the historians.

There is a lesson here that has nothing to do with left or right. A reform that has concentrated opposition from interests with a lot to lose, and diffuse support from a public that is not watching, tends to lose in committee. The people who benefit from the status quo can name themselves. The people who would benefit from reform are everyone and no one in particular. This is the oldest problem in legislative politics, and the Founders, who wrote about the danger of factions in Federalist No. 10, would have recognized it at once. Madison's point was that factions pursuing narrow interests can overwhelm the public good, and that the remedy is a large republic in which many factions check one another. In this case, the factions checked the public good.

It also did not help that Jordan died in January 1996, in the middle of the debate. She had been the commission's most persuasive voice, and the voice that could answer the charge that its proposals were hostile to immigrants. That charge was easier to make once she was gone.

What her argument teaches

I will draw four lessons, in numbered form.

1. Immigration policy is a choice, and the nation is the chooser. Jordan's commission began from the premise that a country has the right and the duty to decide how many people to admit and in what categories. She did not treat that premise as hostile to immigrants. She treated it as the foundation of a policy that could keep public support. That is the Founders' view as well. Article I, section 8, gives Congress the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization," and a rule is a thing a nation writes for itself.

1. Credibility is the precondition of generosity. A country that does not enforce its own law cannot long sustain a generous policy, because the public stops trusting the system. Jordan's emphasis on restoring credibility is a reminder that enforcement and welcome are not opposites. They depend on each other. The 1986 law's failure on this score is told in The 1986 Law's Real Failure Was the Fake Document Industry It Created.

1. The workplace is where policy is made real. The commission's focus on verification was practical. It did not expect agents to find every unauthorized person in the country. It expected employers to be given a tool and be held to its use. That is a more modest enforcement strategy than a mass roundup and, in my view, a more durable one.

1. A bipartisan finding is not the same as a bipartisan law. The commission shows that people of different parties and backgrounds can look at the same evidence and reach similar conclusions. It also shows that the conclusion does not become law without organized political will. Anyone who wants immigration reform, on any side, should take the second half of that lesson as seriously as the first.

The other side's best response

A fair profile has to allow the other side a word. Defenders of high legal immigration respond to the Jordan recommendations in three ways.

First, they say that the nation's economy has grown and that the numbers recommended in 1995 would be too low for a larger population and a tighter labor market. That is an argument about the number, and it is a fair one. The commission's number was a judgment, not a law of nature, and a country can choose a different one. What the commission got right was the principle that the number should be chosen deliberately.

Second, they say that family reunification is itself a national interest, because families anchor newcomers. The commission's answer was that the nuclear family is the unit that does the anchoring, and that extended-family categories, which generate very long waits, serve the promise less well. I think the commission had the better of that exchange.

Third, they say that the employers' need for workers is real. It is. The commission's answer, which I think is right, was that a verification system and a lawful channel for the workers the economy needs are complements, not rivals. The record of what happened when one program ended without the other is in When the Bracero Program Ended, California Built a Tomato Harvester.

A last word on the woman

Jordan said, in the speech I quoted, that she was not going to sit "as an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution." The line comes from the same Watergate statement, and I will paraphrase it rather than risk a misquote: she refused to stand by while the constitutional order was weakened. The same instinct, applied to immigration, produced a commission that asked whether the law was being enforced and whether it served the country. That is not an anti-immigrant instinct. It is a rule-of-law instinct, and it is worth recovering.

The case in brief

1. Barbara Jordan, born in Houston in 1936, served in the Texas Senate from 1967 to 1972 and the U.S. House from 1973 to 1979, and her July 1974 Judiciary Committee statement made the Constitution the standard for everyone, including a president.
2. She chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, created by the Immigration Act of 1990, which reported in 1994, 1995 and 1997 and held that immigration policy must serve the national interest.
3. Its core recommendations were a computerized worksite verification system, credible enforcement, lower legal numbers with family admission focused on the nuclear family, and an emphasis on integration.
4. Congress took up much of the enforcement agenda in 1996 and set aside the legal-immigration cuts, which faced concentrated opposition and diffuse support.
5. Her lesson is that credibility and generosity depend on each other, and that a bipartisan finding becomes law only with organized political will.

What you can do: Find the commission's 1995 report, Legal Immigration: Setting Priorities, through a library or the federal depository system, read its summary of recommendations, and send one paragraph to your representative saying which of them you would enact.