the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt four)

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

In the spring of 1981, Reagan’s advisers were so divided on immigration policy that they could agree only that the president should avoid the subject altogether. It was a “no win issue,” one of his counselors wrote in a memo. “Given the difficulties that can be expected,” another noted, White House action “may be more detrimental to domestic standing than living with the current situation.”

The current situation was this: There were somewhere between three million and six million people living without legal documentation in the US, and another four hundred thousand to a million migrants crossing the border that year. The budget of the INS was less than half that of the Philadelphia police department. “Nothing short of a Berlin Wall could keep illegals out,” one of Reagan’s advisers confessed. The country was in a recession, which further inflamed the public against immigrants who were seen as competitors for their jobs. The president also had to think about his core political supporters. Growers, industrial farming operations, hotels, restaurants, and manufacturers along the border and in the Sunbelt depended on cheap labor, and already there was a shortage of unskilled workers in the Southwest. In May, a well-connected California farmer sent an angry letter to Willian French Smith, Reagan’s attorney general, complaining about INS activity in Fresno. Arrests by Border Patrol, he claimed, were costing him an average of seventeen hundred workers each month. He was losing crops.