ProPublicans,

My very first job in Washington in the early 1980s was as a reporter covering the Justice Department for the Dallas Morning News. It was a lively beat. Thanks to a DOJ investigation into Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson, I got to report on allegations that Wilson had used cocaine while in a hot tub with a Playboy cover model in the Fantasy Suite at the Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas.

I quickly decided, though, that my reporting on the department should focus on its role in immigration at what was then called Immigration and Naturalization Service. I was encouraged in this endeavor by the then-No. 3 official at DOJ, a hard-charging lawyer named Rudy Guiliani, who told me that he believed the best way to get a handle on the management problems at the agency was to drop a nuclear bomb on its headquarters and start over.

The question of what to do about the rising tide of illegal immigration had taken center stage in a national conversation, one with potentially profound implications for Texas and the Southwest.

It’s worth recalling some of this history because there are some startling similarities and some notable differences between recent headlines and the situation decades ago.

Then, as now, millions of people were living in the United States without documents. In those days, the bulk of the migrants were single men from Mexico who had illegally crossed the border looking for work. Employers could hire them cheaply, with no legal consequences. (Today, there are many more families, and the people on the move are more likely to be from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.)

Being a complete newbie on the beat, I asked what seemed an obvious question: How could it be a crime for migrants to cross the border without papers yet OK to hire them once they were here?

That’s when I learned about what is known as the Texas Proviso, a legal loophole that encapsulates America’s ambivalence about immigration. In 1952, federal lawmakers were pondering what to do about our country’s porous borders. Congress moved to pass legislation that would make it a crime for companies to hire undocumented workers, taking away the “magnet” that draws most migrants to the United States.

The Texas delegation resisted, fearing harm to the state’s economy and criminalization of its employers.

And so it became the law of the land that while it was a federal crime to enter the country illegally or for anyone to “harbor” an undocumented migrant, hiring someone did not count as harboring. The message, in essence, was, “There’s work to be had if you can get here.’’

Back in the 1980s, there was a surprisingly broad consensus on the need to change that dynamic. Republicans and Democrats agreed that American workers were paying a price in wages and working conditions when employers hired people who were desperate for jobs and didn’t dare complain. A famously conservative senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, joined with a Democrat from Kentucky, Romano Mazzoli, to revoke the Texas Proviso. They drafted a bill that would give amnesty to those already here while making it illegal for companies to “knowingly” hire undocumented workers.

The legislation, which ultimately passed in 1986 and was signed with great fanfare by President Ronald Reagan, gave millions of undocumented families who had lived in the United States for years a clear path to citizenship.

As the bill was coming together, I asked Simpson, who was remarkably generous and patient with this very inexperienced reporter, whether he worried about fake documents. No, he replied, the federal government has experience in creating hard-to-duplicate papers. Just look at the $100 bill. (Simpson actually wanted to create a national ID card for Americans, but a coalition of civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle killed that idea.)

As we all know, things didn’t quite work out as hoped. Fake green cards became a cottage industry along the border. That little word “knowingly” made it possible for millions more people to come from overseas and find jobs using forged documents. Hardly any company was ever charged with illegally hiring migrants.

The failure of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill was about more than fake IDs. It turned out there were factors pushing the flow of migrants to the United States that were beyond the control of the U.S. Congress. As ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten pointed out in a series of stories last year, fundamental changes in the climate of Central America accelerated the forces pushing people north. Conditions in El Salvador and Guatemala can have as much effect or more as changes in U.S. law.

Just 100 days into his presidency, Joe Biden is confronting precisely what our reporter Dara Lind predicted would happen in a story we published in October of last year. The combination of the pandemic and the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum applicants to wait for their day in court in squalid camps or hotels on the Mexican side of the border, temporarily slowed the flow of migrants. The re-opening of the American economy and the growing desperation of people in Central American countries have combined to put immigration back on the front burner.

To get some perspective on all this, I reached out for Frank Sharry, one of my sources when I covered the Simpson-Mazzoli bill who, because the world is ridiculously small, was my across-the-hall neighbor in college. Nearly four decades after the passage of Simpson-Mazzoli, Frank remains deeply immersed in the immigration issue as executive director of America’s Voice, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Frank noted that the flow of migrants from Mexico slowed significantly after Simpson-Mazzoli, not because of the U.S. action, but because Mexico became more prosperous and offered the opportunities of a vastly expanded middle class.

Today, the picture is very different. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, “are on the verge of being failed states,” Sharry says, controlled by gangs, corrupt law enforcement and beset by climate-accelerated economic disaster. The people approaching the U.S.-Mexico border are in a “gray area” not envisaged by the World War II-era asylum system. They are fleeing both economic collapse and a very real fear of persecution.

The answer, he said, is to set up refugee processing centers in Mexico and create a more orderly process. It’s an answer that may well not fly with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but it would be an improvement over the current situation. “You don’t try to stop migration,” he said. “You try to manage it.”

Just this week, Biden was asked at his first press conference about the rise in migrants, and said his administration was pressing Mexico to accept families seeking asylum while they await rulings from U.S. judges. That prompted Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who spearheaded the legal attack on the Trump administration’s policies, to tweet that if Biden tries to “expel ALL families” to Mexico, then “litigation may be the only choice.’’

I never imagined that I’d still be thinking about these exact issues three decades later, but I’m grateful ProPublica has reporters like Lomi Kriel and Dara Lind covering this story. I suspect they’ll be busy in the coming months.

Steve