Excerpt: Changes in the Law; Changes in Immigration
By George Fishman on April 1, 2026
If I knew starting out as a counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee in 1995 just how difficult it was to enact major immigration reform legislation, I might have had second thoughts. Such legislation only gets across the finish line once every decade or so, if you are lucky. There was the Immigration Act of 1965, the Refugee Act of 1980, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), the Immigration Act of 1990, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), the REAL ID Act of 2005, and, well . . . that’s all folks. In fact, shortly before I left for the Department of Homeland Security in 2018, my wife asked “George, what have you been doing all these years?!”
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One reason for immigration law’s inertia has been the slow-motion collapse of Democrat support for immigration law enforcement. In 1996, a majority of House Democrats voted for Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Lamar Smith’s legislation that formed the basis for IIRIRA (which provided so many of today’s immigration enforcement tools—from mandatory detention to expedited removal to no-exception removal of criminal aliens to mandated border walls to the legal basis for Return to Mexico and Asylum Cooperative Agreements). A decade later, in 2005, only 18 percent of House Democrats voted for Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.’s House-passed legislation to supersize the enforcement tool shed. A decade after that, no House Democrats voted for Chairman Bob Goodlatte’s 2018 enforcement legislation, even though it also offered legal status to DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—recipients.
The Biden border crisis was caused by rampant asylum fraud, the administration’s aversion to detaining or removing aliens with no right to be here, and its message to the world that our borders were open because our laws were racist.
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We need to seriously consider the exclusion of aliens who support genocide, the imposition of apostasy or blasphemy laws, the establishment of governmentally-enforced religious law more broadly, female infanticide, sex selection abortion, honor killing, or female genital mutilation. For our children’s sake, America should remain a tolerant society, not become a medieval one.
https://cis.org/Fishman/Excerpt-Changes-Law-Changes-Immigration
