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CHAPTER 7. Reform and Retrenchment: The Refugee Act of 1980 and the Reagan Administration's Refugee Policies
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C H A P T E R 7 Reform and Retrenchment: The Refugee Act of 1980 and the Reagan Administration’s Refugee Policies AS THE INDOCHINESE refugee crisis stretched on through the late 1970s, the push for systemic reform of American refugee laws gained momentum. For advocates of refugee admissions, the ad hoc, successive paroles highlighted the need for an overhaul of the basic commitment to refugees. For skeptics of refugee admissions, those paroles pointed to the executive branch’s abuse of the parole codicil and symbolized an immigration system out of control. This debate over refugee affairs, moreover, came as immigration politics deadlocked. The larger liberalizer community by 1980 increasingly felt it was on the defensive, yet the restrictionist alliance was still disorganized and nowhere near as powerful as it once was—or would become in the near future. These factors paved the way for passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, which provided for the annual admission of over fifty thousand refugees from all over the globe. Just as important, that law replaced the Cold War–influenced, anticommunist-centered definition of “refugee” with one much less grounded in early Cold War political ideology . These reforms were long-standing goals of refugee advocates who argued vociferously that refugee policy should flow, at least in part, from human rights principles. The law also had much to recommend it to restrictionists and opponents of refugee admissions, including legally mandated consultations over refugee admissions between the executive and legislative branches and the possibility of the end of mass admissions. The Refugee Act proved a flawed instrument, however, in two important regards. First, the Reagan administration shaped admissions under the Refugee Act to conform to its anticommunist, anti-Soviet foreign policy agenda rather than to the human rights-based principles inherent in the 1980 legislation. As a result, the vast majority of refugees (and asylees) entering the United States came from communist countries or were fleeing communist persecution. Thus, the Refugee Act, as implemented by the Reagan administration, represented a significant retreat from the human rights moment in refugee affairs that produced the law. Second, admissions during the 1980s declined precipitously, underscoring that while the Reagan administration wanted to admit refugees from communism , it just as ardently wanted to shrink admissions in total. 168 • Chapter 7 RESTRICTIONISTS AND LIBERALIZERS IN THE LATE 1970S: A DIVIDED LOT By the late 1970s, as immigrant admissions swelled in the aftermath of the 1965 reforms, restrictionism revived, a resurgence that matured by the mid-1980s. Immigration opponents could be found all over the United States, but the heart of restrictionism had shifted from the American South to the West and Southwest. Restrictionism retained its bipartisan flavor as some liberal Democrats, many with ties to the black community, wondered whether newcomers hurt job opportunities for minorities and soaked up needed government funds. But leadership in the restrictionist bloc often fell to Republican conservatives, including some (but not all) of the “New Right.” Conservatives worried about the strain that Asian and Latino immigrants placed on already stretched social programs and whether these newcomers could ever become “American.” The movement also drew new energy from recently formed organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which emerged in the late 1970s and immediately began shaping public debate through its welldisciplined and organized lobbying efforts. FAIR repeatedly questioned the abilities of newcomers to assimilate culturally to the United States, a critique whose racial and ethnic undertones echoed early twentiethcentury restrictionists. Finally, the growing numbers of immigrants arriving illegally—which some estimates put at over 250,000 annually— powered restrictionist growth (especially in the Southwest) and fed restrictionist fears. Public-opinion surveys throughout the United States confirmed that restrictionists might find a sympathetic ear, a sentiment that liberalizers, who believed themselves on the defensive by the end of the 1970s, essentially endorsed.1 Immigration liberalizers had similar partisan, ideological, and regional diversity. In Congress, liberal Democrats like Senator Ted Kennedy and Representatives Peter Rodino (NJ) and Liz Holtzman (NY) led the liberalizer bloc. The AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the ACLU, some of the leading liberal interest groups of the late 1970s, still belonged to the liberalizer camp as well. For Democratic politicians, then, support for the immigrationliberalizer position went hand in hand with courting some of the building blocks of their party’s electoral coalition. They were joined by pro-business organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and free-market conservatives who wanted a loose labor...