One popular argument against a legalization, or amnesty, of unlawful immigrants is that it will merely incentivize future unlawful immigration. Unlawful immigrants will be more likely to break immigration laws because they will eventually be legalized anyway, so why bother to attempt to enter legally (ignoring the fact that almost none of them could have entered legally)? This claim is taken at face value because the stock of unlawful immigration eventually increased in the decades after the 1986Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) that amnestied roughly 2.7 million.
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