Migration and Immigration in the 1990s and 2000s

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the long-term effects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on the source countries and demographic profile of post-1980 immigration to the United States.
• Identify the principal sending regions of the 1990s and 2000s migration wave (Mexico, Central America, China, India, the Philippines, and Korea) and account for the doubling of the Latino population between 1990 and 2010.
• Account for the political debate over immigration from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the post-September 11 Department of Homeland Security reorganization of 2002, the DREAM Act proposals, and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive action of 2012.
• Account for the internal migration patterns of the period: the continued rise of the Sun Belt (Florida, Texas, Arizona), the contraction of the Rust Belt, the partial reversal of the African American Great Migration, and the urban concentration of Native peoples.
• Use Skill 2.C (Sourcing and Situation) to explain how the historical situation of a Period 9 immigration document or statistical release shaped the way it framed migration, citizenship, or border security.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, often called the Hart-Celler Act, replaced the national-origins quota system that had governed American immigration since 1924. The new framework prioritized family reunification and skilled labor and removed the quotas that had favored northern and western European arrivals. The full demographic effects took two decades to appear, and the migration wave that the College Board CED associates with the 1990s and 2000s is the long-term consequence of the 1965 law. By the 1990s, the largest sending countries were Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, China, India, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Korea, an almost complete inversion of the European sending pattern that had defined American immigration before 1924 (KC-9.2.II.B).

The demographic results were dramatic. The Latino population reached thirty-five million in the Census 2000 enumeration and surpassed the African American population for the first time, doubling between 1990 and 2010 to reach more than fifty million people. The Asian American population grew at a comparable rate, with the Indian American population growing especially fast on the strength of the H-1B skilled-worker visa created by the Immigration Act of 1990. The foreign-born share of the population climbed from less than five percent in 1970 to more than thirteen percent by 2010, figures last seen during the immigration wave of the early twentieth century. The Census Bureau's projections, first published in the 2008 round of population estimates, anticipated that non-Hispanic white Americans would constitute less than half of the population by roughly 2045, the demographic projection that has shaped political and cultural debate ever since (KC-9.2.II.B).

The political debate over immigration moved through three distinct phases during Period 9. The first was the legalization-plus-enforcement compromise of the 1980s. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by President Reagan on November 6, 1986, created two parallel tracks. It granted lawful status to roughly three million undocumented residents who had lived continuously in the United States since 1982, the largest legalization in American history, and it imposed civil and criminal penalties on employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. The 1986 compromise was the model for every later legalization debate, but it was also widely judged to have failed at deterring future undocumented migration, and the political appetite for repeating it has never returned (KC-9.2.II.B).

The second phase was the enforcement-without-legalization turn of the 1990s and early 2000s. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 expanded enforcement and removal authority, hardened the southwest border, and made deportation easier. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 abolished the Immigration and Naturalization Service and reorganized federal immigration enforcement inside the new Department of Homeland Security, placing visas, naturalization, and removal on a national-security footing. The DREAM Act, first proposed in 2001 to grant a conditional path to citizenship to undocumented residents who had arrived as children, has been introduced in nearly every Congress since but has never been enacted. President Obama responded with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive action of 2012, which paused deportation and allowed work authorization for an estimated eight hundred thousand qualifying young people. The legal status of the DACA program remains contested in federal court (KC-9.2.II.B).

The third phase was the restrictionist turn of the 2010s. The Tea Party movement that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis pushed the Republican Party toward stricter border-enforcement positions, and the 2016 election produced an administration that ran on a border wall, a travel restriction on residents of seven majority-Muslim countries that the press called the Muslim ban (signed as Executive Order 13769 in January 2017 and revised twice before the Supreme Court upheld a third version in Trump v. Hawaii in 2018), and an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that the Supreme Court rejected on procedural grounds in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California in 2020. Sanctuary cities, a label adopted by jurisdictions that limited their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, became one of the central battlegrounds of the period. The political fight over immigration in the 2010s was a fight over the legacy of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986: whether the next major reform package would repeat the 1986 legalization-plus-enforcement bargain or break decisively with it (KC-9.2.II.B).

Internal migration ran alongside the international story. The Sun Belt continued to absorb the largest share of the country's population growth, with Florida, Texas, and Arizona posting the fastest expansion in the early twenty-first century. The Rust Belt of the Northeast and the upper Midwest continued to contract as manufacturing employment fell, and cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo lost a substantial share of their post-1945 populations. Suburbanization continued, with the share of Americans living in suburbs surpassing both rural and central-city shares for the first time. The African American Great Migration partly reversed during the 1990s and 2000s as middle-class African American families returned to the South, particularly to metropolitan Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, and the Washington, D.C. region, in a movement scholars have called the New Great Migration. Native peoples remained the most rapidly urbanizing population in the country, with more than seventy percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives living off reservation by the 2010 Census, concentrated in cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tulsa, Anchorage, and the Twin Cities (KC-9.2.II.A).

The MIG theme on this topic ties together three stories the rest of Unit 9 develops. The international migration story sits next to the post-1980 economic transformation in Lesson 4: the same global supply chains that pulled American manufacturing offshore also pulled migrant labor in. The internal Sun Belt rise sits next to the conservative political ascendancy in Lesson 2: the demographic and electoral weight of Texas, Florida, and Arizona is one of the structural reasons the conservative coalition has remained competitive in national elections. And the political debate over citizenship sits next to the post-September 11 War on Terror story in Lesson 6: the Department of Homeland Security that runs immigration enforcement is the same agency that runs counterterrorism, and the post-2001 fusion of the two has shaped American immigration policy in ways the next three decades will continue to work out.

A migration lesson works best when it samples sources that span both the legal framework and the demographic record. The five excerpts below capture the legalization compromise of 1986, the demographic snapshot of 2000, the constitutional protection of public education for undocumented children, the foreign-born population in 2010, and the restrictionist border-security executive order of 2017. Government documents and federal statistical releases are the safest classroom sources for this period because contemporary journalism and photography remain under copyright.

1. (Causation) Account for the gap between the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the demographic transformation that the College Board CED dates to the 1990s and 2000s. Why did the effects of the 1965 law take twenty years to surface, and what conditions in the sending countries and the United States accelerated migration after 1985?
2. (Comparison) Compare the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Identify two policy continuities and two significant differences. Which set is more historically consequential, and on what grounds?
3. (Causation) Account for the rise of the Sun Belt and the contraction of the Rust Belt during the 1990s and 2000s. How did air conditioning, federal defense and aerospace contracts, post-1945 highway construction, immigration from Mexico and Central America, and the relocation of manufacturing combine to redraw the demographic map of the United States?
4. (Continuity and Change) The DREAM Act has been introduced in nearly every Congress since 2001 and has never been enacted, yet the population of undocumented residents who arrived as children has been protected, briefly, under DACA, and then contested in federal court. Account for what this pattern reveals about how the federal political system handles immigration questions.
5. (Comparison) Compare the post-1986 enforcement regime that runs through the Immigration and Naturalization Service with the post-2002 enforcement regime that runs through the Department of Homeland Security. What does the September 11 fusion of immigration enforcement and counterterrorism reveal about the underlying logic of American immigration policy after 2001?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.