Why were the employer restrictions so ineffective? During the debate in Congress, the bill's sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community, explains Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego. "The end result was that they essentially gutted the employer sanctions," he says.
Under the final law,
all employers had to do to avoid sanctions was to make sure their workers had paperwork that "reasonably appears on its face to be genuine." If the documents were decent fakes, that wasn't the boss's problem.
Why were the border restrictions ineffective? Poor funding, for one. Congress didn't provide enough money to ramp up Border Patrol hiring until the mid-1990s:
So the 1986 law didn't work? Not quite. The number of unauthorized immigrants in the country rose from roughly 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million today. Part of that was due to flimsy enforcement measures. But a major conceptual flaw in the bill, says Doris Meissner, was that the authors of the bill simply misjudged the high demand for immigrant labor in the United States.