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Mary Richards Reporting"We have an utterly broken immigration policy."
Many protestors are calling for giving some illegal immigrants permanent residency status. President Ronald Reagan did it in 1986. Senator Orrin Hatch tells KSL Newsradio's Doug Wright it failed.
"President Reagan tried to show compassion as well, gave amnesty to between one and two million people, and, as you can see, all it does, it doesn't work, well it gives incentives for people to sneak into the country."
Immigration lawyer David Littlefield says perhaps five million people were given amnesty in the 1986 act, and employer sanctions were put in place.
"The theory being that it was really impossible to make these five million people leave the U.S. so we'd regularize their status and dry up the source or the draw for people to come here."
Littlefield says the reform didn't work because laws punishing business for hiring illegal aliens are pretty much not enforced.
"There's a big economic factor that says we want these people to do this work."
President Clinton tried immigration reform in the 90s by creating the unlawful presence definition. Littlefield says it isn't working either.
"I think that unlawful presence bar is a lot of what's creating part of the problems today, because I would never tell anybody to leave the country unless they wanted to leave for good."
Littlefield says the challenge today is creating immigration reform that solves today's problems but won't have to be fixed again in the future, like the past reforms.
