What are some of the other factors that allowed illegal immigration to continue?
There is a growing consensus that illegal immigration continued because the 1986 law didn’t recognize the demand for low-skilled immigrant labor. The law didn’t create more channels for low-skilled workers to come legally at a time when the economy was expanding, and there were fewer American workers. As a result, immigrants came illegally to meet labor needs. Without them, those jobs would have gone unfilled, and the economy wouldn’t have been able to grow as quickly. Immigration control advocates, however, fiercely dispute the idea that low-skilled immigrants are an integral part of the U.S. economy. They say cheap immigrant labor is expensive once education, health care and other costs are factored in. What happened to the undocumented immigrants who got amnesty? About 3 million people applied for amnesty and nearly 2.7 million were approved. About 1.7 million applied through the program for rooted undocumented immigrants who entered before 1982, and about 1.3 million applied throug
