Will history repeat itself?  Arizona law SB 1070 may be the start a chain of events that ends well for law abiding undocumented immigrants.  Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.  Thirty-five years ago Texas passed a bad law restricting access to education.  Eleven years later, partially as a result of that law two million people were on the path to citizenship.

This is the story.  In 1975 Texas passed legislation forbidding the spending of public money for the education of undocumented people.  The law was challenged in the courts and in 1982 the Supreme Court struck down the statute.  The ruling in Plyer v Doe held that the Texas law violated the 14^th amendment.  What happened next was IRCA (The Immigration Reform and Control Act) also known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act or the Reagan Amnesty.  The result of Texas’s bad law was a Federal Law that moved in the direction of better treatment of immigrants.

 Simpson-Mazzoli was defeated in 1982 but after the Plyer v Roe ruling it was reintroduced in the next session of Congress.  According to Daniel Tichenor in Dividing Lines (Princeton University Press, 2002) Plyer “was a stinging indictment of federal inaction.” The compromises reached over the next three years to arrive at a bill that could pass should be instructive to those struggling to find an immigration compromise in this Congress.  Tichenor quotes a congressional staffer comparing IRCA to Lazuras being raised from the dead ten times.

 Will AB 1070 be the catalyst for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR)?  History says it is very possible.

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