Fairmind

Legalization of Unauthorized Immigrants

Millions of unauthorized immigrants have lived in the United States for over a decade. Should they be eligible for a path to citizenship?

14-minute read (main content)

A line of people with their hands raised, taking an oath of citizenship; the first person in the foreground is holding a small U.S. flag
Image: SDI Productions

A Fair-Minded Guide

Form your own view with:

  • Each side’s best arguments
  • A range of example viewpoints
  • All facts verified and footnoted

Skeptical? See Accuracy and Fairness

Facts

To understand the arguments pro and con below, here are a few preliminary facts about unauthorized immigrants (also called illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, or irregular immigrants) and their legal situation:

  • An unauthorized immigrant is someone born outside the United States who is living in the U.S. without lawful immigration status—neither a citizen, nor a permanent resident, nor the holder of a valid temporary visa. Government estimates of the unauthorized population also include people with temporary or provisional protections by programs such as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, or a pending asylum claim. These programs can authorize work and shield recipients from removal, but they do not confer lawful status.1

  • The U.S. has millions of unauthorized immigrants who are long-term residents. There is no official definition of “long-term,” but as one illustration, roughly eight million unauthorized immigrants who were in the country as of 2022 had entered before 2010.2

  • Unauthorized immigrants comprise roughly 5% of the U.S. labor force.3 Roughly 70% of adult unauthorized immigrants are employed.4 They are especially represented in farming (24%), construction (19%), and service occupations (9%).5

  • Unauthorized immigrants generally have limited access to public benefit programs. In most cases, they are ineligible for programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, SNAP, and federal unemployment insurance. Some exceptions and indirect public costs remain, including emergency medical care, public schooling for children, and certain state or local programs.6 People with temporary or provisional protections may have greater access to benefits, with eligibility varying by status, state, and program.7

  • A small percentage of unauthorized immigrants are deported annually.8 In recent decades, interior enforcement has generally focused on recent arrivals and those with criminal records. In 2025, the Trump administration launched an expanded enforcement campaign, including some long-term residents without criminal records.9 People with temporary or provisional protections are normally not deportable, but the Trump administration has sought to remove protected status from many groups.10 Even with these changes, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants are neither deported nor in removal proceedings in any given year.

  • Legalization would require an act of Congress. The last federal law to provide broad legalization for unauthorized immigrants—meaning a program available regardless of nationality or other specific circumstances—was enacted in 1986.11 Since then, Congress has considered multiple proposals for another broad legalization but has not approved any.12

  • Typical proposals for legalization would grant temporary legal status early in the process, including authorization to work, followed by a roughly decade-long path to citizenship. The path would look something like this:

    1. Apply for temporary legal status: Pass a background check and pay back taxes owed. For the government, these requirements can be difficult to enforce when applicants have lived or worked under false or inconsistent identifying information, or received off-the-books income.

    2. Maintain temporary legal status for several years: Pay ongoing taxes, renew status as required, and avoid disqualifying conduct such as criminal violations.

    3. Apply for lawful permanent residence (a “green card”): Complete another review process, confirming eligibility to continue.

    4. Maintain lawful permanent resident status for several years: Continue presence in the U.S., paying taxes and avoiding disqualifying conduct such as criminal violations.

    5. Apply for citizenship: Pass tests for basic English and civics knowledge. Receive citizenship some number of months later.

Factors to Consider

Below are six factors to consider about the legalization debate, each with opposing arguments. The debate is framed as legalization versus the longstanding policy of partial enforcement. At the end of this guide, Editorial Choices further explains our choices about framing, language, and arguments not included in the main content.

1. Moral Claim to Stay

Long-term unauthorized immigrants present a hard moral case. Over time, they become part of the communities where they live, but only because they remained in the country unlawfully.

Legalization supporters argue that after many years in a place, an unauthorized immigrant is as much a member of that community as people with full legal status. The immigrant’s work, relationships, children, and daily life are all rooted there. Supporters argue that the original act of entering or overstaying was long ago, whereas the life built since then is ongoing and real. On this view, recognizing that reality with a path to citizenship is the right thing to do. This is especially true, supporters say, for people brought to the U.S. as children and for those whose spouses or children are U.S. citizens. Supporters also point to the roughly four million13 U.S.-citizen children living with at least one unauthorized parent: deporting parents in these families can separate U.S.-citizen children from a parent or pressure them to leave the only country they know.

Legalization opponents argue it’s wrong to reward someone for breaking the law. They argue that an unauthorized immigrant did not merely enter or overstay at some point in the past; the immigrant continues to evade enforcement to the present. On this view, even if the immigrant’s place in a local community is well-established, it is still premised on violating the country’s laws. As a result, opponents see no moral claim to stay, although some would make exceptions for special cases, such as people brought to the U.S. as children, or parents whose deportation would separate them from U.S.-citizen children. Other opponents reject these exceptions, arguing that even narrow carve-outs—however justified in isolation—will perpetuate unauthorized immigration by creating expectations that future unauthorized immigrants may receive similar relief.

What else to know: Some people accept that long-term residents have a moral claim to remain, but do not accept that the claim extends to citizenship. On this view, a special non-citizenship form of permanent legal status is a viable compromise: the right to work, live openly, and remain indefinitely, but not the right to vote, serve on juries, or later become a citizen.14 Enforcement-oriented critics say this would still reward illegal immigration. And citizenship-oriented critics say it creates a class of residents subject to the country’s laws but permanently denied a vote in shaping them.

The key question: Does longtime residence create a moral claim to stay? If so, does that claim extend to citizenship, or only to permanent lawful residence?

Other moral claims are at play. A key one is whether legalization of unauthorized immigrants would be unfair to those who have followed the rules, waiting in line for the legal immigration process.

Legalization supporters argue that legalizing a long-settled resident today is not a fresh jump ahead of anyone, because any line-jumping happened long ago. Supporters also note that many unauthorized immigrants had no realistic legal pathway available—no “line” to join—because U.S. immigration law generally offers permanent immigration through family sponsorship, certain employer-sponsored jobs, or humanitarian protection, not through ordinary demand for lower-wage labor. Legalizing people who were never in that line, they argue, need not delay those who are.

Legalization opponents argue that legalizing unauthorized workers is unfair to those pursuing the legal-immigration process. They note that roughly four million people are currently waiting abroad in approved visa queues, often for more than a decade.15 Even if many unauthorized immigrants could not qualify to join such queues, that does not justify their entering and remaining in the country illegally, opponents say. If it did, they argue, that would imply anyone from anywhere was justified in illegal immigration. Opponents say there is a legal process, and our laws should support the people who use it, not those who violate it.

What else to know: Some legalization proposals have included a “back of the line” provision: legalized immigrants would receive temporary status and work authorization up front but could not obtain a green card until everyone already in the legal-immigration backlog was cleared.16 Some supporters see this as a reasonable accommodation; others see it as unnecessary because, in their view, any line-jumping was from long enough ago to be irrelevant to those in line today. Most opponents reject the provision as still rewarding those who broke the law.

The key question: Would legalization be unfair to those using the legal immigration process? If so, to what extent does a “back of the line” provision help?

Legalization would not introduce unauthorized workers into the labor market; they are already here. But it could change how they compete. Legalization would make it easier for workers to change jobs, report abuses, obtain occupational licenses, and move into somewhat better positions. That would benefit legalized workers, but it could also increase competition for some lower-wage workers with legal status.

Legalization supporters argue that unauthorized workers are already in the workforce, co-existing with workers who have legal status, so any competitive effects from legalization will be marginal. In their view, the more important effect would be to reduce employers’ ability to underpay, threaten, or control workers based on immigration status. On this view, legalizing workers would raise the floor for everyone—including existing workers with legal status, who no longer have to compete against labor that can be paid below market and pressured into silence. Supporters also argue that keeping unauthorized workers vulnerable is not a fair way to protect workers with legal status, because it preserves a labor system built partly on exploitation.

Legalization opponents argue that even marginal effects from new competition will hurt lower-wage workers with legal status who are already economically vulnerable.17 They say this is a bad trade-off, even if the unauthorized immigrants gain more than the existing legal workers lose. In opponents’ view, the country’s priority should be the people who are here legally, which means not legalizing unauthorized workers. Some opponents would also like to see much tougher enforcement of labor laws to reduce the demand for unauthorized labor and increase it for workers with legal status. In their view, this is the correction the market needs.

The key question: How much, if at all, should the interests of workers with legal status be prioritized versus those of long-time unauthorized workers?

4. National Identity and Assimilation

Both sides accept that immigration and assimilation have shaped American national identity. They disagree about whether the assimilation process that worked in earlier eras can still function in today’s world.

Legalization supporters see America as “a nation of immigrants”—not just as a historical description but as a fundamental identity. On this view, extending legal status to long-term unauthorized immigrants reinforces national identity. Supporters cite research that indicates assimilation (English proficiency, intermarriage, educational attainment, economic mobility across generations) still works.18 They argue that legalization will accelerate this by bringing people out of the shadows and enabling fuller participation in education and society. Finally, supporters argue that earlier waves of immigration prompted similar fears—including that assimilation had hit its limit—yet assimilation still occurred.

Legalization opponents argue that assimilation has always had limits: immigrant groups adopted American national identity, but they also transmitted aspects of their cultures into American culture, particularly in the regions where they settled. Although that process worked overall for much of America’s past, opponents say it is less likely to work today because: (1) much of the unauthorized population comes from a single Spanish-speaking cultural region, unlike earlier eras when immigration came from more fragmented groups, (2) modern technology enables continuous ties with countries of origin in ways not possible before, and (3) the U.S. education system has evolved to emphasize multiculturalism over a unified American civic identity. In light of these changes, opponents argue that legalization risks entrenching a parallel culture, weakening American national identity rather than strengthening it.

The key question: Would legalization strengthen national identity by accelerating assimilation, or weaken it because today’s conditions won’t produce the assimilation that earlier eras depended on?

5. Economic Effects

Legalizing millions of people would have complex economic costs and benefits:

Legalization supporters argue it would produce positive economic effects overall. They cite research that showed the 1986 legalization law increased immigrants’ wages and ability to pursue higher-productivity roles such as those that require licensing.19 In turn, they argue, this creates an incentive for the workers (and in some cases, their employers) to invest in improving their job and language skills—a compounding gain in productivity over time.20 Supporters also emphasize that tax revenues would rise substantially, driven both by higher reported wages and by higher rates of tax compliance.21 They acknowledge that legalization also brings costs to the government from use of social programs, but they argue that the compounding economic benefits and greater tax revenue will outweigh these costs.

Legalization opponents argue that the economic effects of legalization would be immediately bad for some workers who have legal status and would be negative overall in the long term. The economic effects on existing lower-wage workers have already been covered in Fairness to Workers with Legal Status. In addition, opponents argue that even if legalization lifts immigrants’ wages, many would remain in households that receive more in government benefits and services than they pay in taxes.22 Opponents argue that the added costs of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other public benefits are more certain than the potential gains from higher tax payments and economic activity, especially as legalized immigrants age into retirement.23

What else to know: When thinking about the conflicting claims, it’s helpful to separate near-term and long-term effects:

  • Near-term effects: Over a ten-year timeframe, it’s reasonable to believe there will be an economic benefit overall. The main winners will be those legalized. There will be some losers among lower-wage workers with legal status who face new competition from legalized workers. The costs of government-benefit outlays will be relatively modest because access to benefits would be delayed and then phased in as people move through legal statuses.

  • Long-term effects: Estimating effects several decades out involves many assumptions and uncertainties. For example, will major benefit programs look the same in 2050 as they do today, and how heavily will legalized immigrants draw on them? The uncertainties are large enough that assumptions can drive results either way.

The key question: Does the boost in tax revenue and economic activity from legalization outweigh the near-term wage pressure on some workers and the possibility that long-term costs will exceed economic gains?

6. Rule of Law and the IRCA Precedent

Both sides of this debate invoke the rule of law, but they disagree about how legal order should be restored after decades of partial enforcement.

A useful reference point is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).24 It granted legal status to three million unauthorized immigrants—most having lived in the U.S. since before 1982, including a separate group of farmworkers. This was paired with new sanctions on employers who hired unauthorized workers.

At the time, IRCA was framed as a one-time reset, but the sanctions intended to stop new illegal immigration were weakly implemented. As a result, in the decades after IRCA, the unauthorized population grew quickly again.

Legalization supporters argue that the rule of law has already broken down in its treatment of long-term unauthorized immigrants. They say the U.S. has tolerated a system in which unauthorized immigrants came, were hired by employers, worked for years, raised families, and became embedded in communities while remaining in legal limbo. On this view, legalization would acknowledge that the existing system failed, replacing a long-running legal fiction with a more honest framework. Supporters argue that IRCA was the right response to a similar breakdown, and that a new legalization program should learn from IRCA’s shortcomings by having stronger employer sanctions, more realistic legal pathways, and robust border enforcement.

Legalization opponents argue that mass legalization would not restore the rule of law but instead ratify its decline in credibility. In their view, legalization would confirm that immigration law can be violated for long enough that the violation is eventually forgiven. They say that the rule of law requires that laws be enforced consistently, not periodically rewritten to absorb the consequences of their non-enforcement. Opponents cite IRCA as the cautionary tale: legalization rewarded unlawful immigration, promised employer sanctions and then didn’t follow through, and set a precedent that encouraged more illegal immigration—regenerating the problem it was supposed to solve. Instead of another reset, they argue, the U.S. should enforce the laws already on the books.

What else to know: Some supporters of a new IRCA-style reset believe it should be sequenced. That would mean new enforcement measures—particularly strong employer verification—must take effect before any legalization of unauthorized immigrants. Most opponents would see this as an improvement but still reject the larger principle of rewarding lawbreaking.

The key question: After decades of partial enforcement, is it better to reset the law or recommit to enforcing it as written?

Example Viewpoints

The questions above represent genuine tensions without easy answers. Below are examples of how different people might weigh these and other considerations to arrive at coherent positions. You might find yourself aligning with one of these viewpoints, or you might form your own opinion by combining elements from more than one.

“Bring People Fully Into the System”

If you’ve lived here for ten or fifteen years, raised your kids here, paid taxes, worked in your community—you are American in every way except on paper. We’ve spent decades pretending otherwise, building up a shadow population that the economy depends on but that lacks key rights. That’s not a policy; it’s a fiction. The honest path is to bring long-term residents who’ve stayed out of trouble fully into the system through a pathway to citizenship. It’s good for them and for the economy. They’ll pay more in taxes and be able to contribute more fully to the workforce. The alternative is leaving millions of people stuck in legal limbo forever, which doesn’t serve them and doesn’t serve the country.

“Fix the System First”

I’m open to letting long-term residents become citizens. I’m not open to doing it like the last time it was tried, in 1986: legalize everyone, promise changes to the system, then watch the same problem grow back larger because the system didn’t really change. This time, legalization must be tied to reforms actually taking effect. That means employers have to verify who they hire, the border has to be strictly controlled, and legal immigration has to expand to cover additional workers our economy needs. Without those things, we’re just setting up the next round. With them, I can support a path to citizenship for people who’ve been here a long time. But the deal is the deal. No fix, no path.

I’ll grant that there are reasonable moral or economic cases for why long-term unauthorized residents should be legalized. But there’s a way to do it that doesn’t reward their illegal presence with citizenship: a special form of permanent legal status. It would have the same requirements as the citizenship path but stop short of full citizenship. They’d have the right to work, live openly, and remain indefinitely, but not the right to vote, serve on juries, or later become a citizen. They could also still be deported if they committed a serious crime. This addresses the core problem—getting long-term residents out of the shadows and fully into the economy—while preserving citizenship for those who came the right way.

“Yes for Special-Case Groups, No Otherwise”

Consider someone brought here at seven years old. She didn’t choose to violate immigration laws. Now she is 22, and America is the only country she’s ever known. She should have a path to citizenship. That’s different from saying every long-term unauthorized immigrant should have such a path. A lot of them made a deliberate choice as adults to come here illegally or overstay a visa. I don’t think they should be rewarded with legalization. But there are special-case groups with legitimate claims. Congress should decide which groups qualify for legalization as exceptions. The rest should remain accountable to the laws they intentionally broke.

“Fully Enforce the Existing Law”

I am against legalization—which is a polite way of saying “mass amnesty”—for unauthorized immigrants. It would punish the wrong people: vulnerable American workers who’d face new competition, including recent legal immigrants who came here by the rules. It would strain assimilation in a time when multiculturalism has undermined what used to be a reliable process of Americanization. It would encourage more illegal immigration by sending the message that breaking the rules pays off. The better way is to actually enforce the laws we have. This includes deporting people already in the country who get caught and sanctioning employers of unauthorized workers to the point that they only employ workers with legal status. When we get serious about enforcement, we can control the border and reduce the existing unauthorized population. This reinforces lawful immigration as the legitimate path to citizenship.

Deciding

The debate about legalization mixes questions of belonging, fairness, national identity, economic consequences, and the rule of law. It’s no surprise that reasonable people reach different conclusions. Our goal has been to give you the facts, arguments, and a range of viewpoints to help inform your own thinking. What you decide is up to you.

(If you are wondering about something we didn’t mention, check the Editorial Choices section below. It includes other aspects of the debate we didn’t include in the main content, with explanations why.)

Appendix: Editorial Choices

In writing this guide, there were many choices to make—for example, how to frame the issue, which factors, arguments, and viewpoints to include, and how to phrase them. For those interested, below are notable choices. You can quickly scan the topics, clicking any for details.

Naming and Framing

We recognize that perceptions of immigration policy can be influenced by how issues are framed and by the terminology used. As in the rest of this guide, our goal is to present the topic in a way that is fair, accurate, and understandable to readers with different perspectives.

Guide Name

In the public discourse, supporters and opponents often use different terms for the topic of this guide:

  • Supporters often use terms like “path to citizenship” or “earned legalization.” These emphasize the idea that long-term residents should have a structured way to gain legal status, usually spanning years of meeting various milestones.

  • Opponents often use the term “amnesty.” They argue this is the most straightforward description of granting legal status to people who violated immigration laws.

We used “legalization” in the guide’s name, and in most places in the text, because it is common in research and policy analysis, and because it describes the basic policy question without adopting either side’s preferred framing.

We used “path to citizenship” in the guide’s subtitle to clarify that “legalization” refers to a process, not an immediate grant of citizenship.

“Unauthorized Immigrants”

In describing the people at issue in this debate, several competing terms exist:

  • “Illegal immigrant” is widely used in law and public discourse, but some interpret it as defining a person primarily by a legal violation rather than describing their immigration status.

  • “Undocumented immigrant” is often preferred by advocates but can be criticized as incomplete, since some individuals have documents but lack lawful status.

  • “Illegal alien” appears in some federal statutes and older legal materials, but it is now widely viewed as outdated and, by many critics, dehumanizing or stigmatizing. It is therefore less common in neutral public-facing writing, even though it remains part of some legal terminology.

  • “Unauthorized immigrant” is commonly used in research and government contexts. It aims to describe legal status without additional connotations.

For the purposes of this guide, we chose “unauthorized immigrant.” We believe it is the best combination of descriptive and neutral.

Overall Framing

We framed this guide around the question of whether long-term unauthorized immigrants should be legalized. This framing reflects how the issue is commonly debated in national policy discussions.

Legalization Proposals and the Status Quo Alternative

This guide is not about a particular legalization bill. Instead, we used the most relevant modern proposals and precedents to describe the type of policy associated with broad legalization in the U.S. debate.

The main reference points were the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the 2013 Senate “Gang of Eight” bill, and the 2021 U.S. Citizenship Act. The first became law; the other two did not. These proposals differed in their details but shared the same essential structure: temporary legal status after vetting, a multi-year compliance period, and eventual eligibility for permanent residence and citizenship. Where we refer to “legalization” in this guide, we mean a proposal in this general shape.

For the alternative, we took the status quo as it has long existed: partial enforcement. Although the Trump administration had increased interior enforcement against long-term residents without criminal records, the unauthorized population remained in the many millions, and most long-term residents continue to live and work in the country without legal status.

We recognize that some legalization opponents would prefer a different alternative: a larger commitment to mass deportation, in which the federal government devotes the resources needed to remove most unauthorized immigrants within a defined timeframe. We did not adopt this as the baseline because it is far from current practice and would be a major policy shift in its own right. We mentioned it a few times in the guide but not as the default state to which legalization is compared.

Another alternative would be to not broadly legalize, not mass-deport, but instead encourage unauthorized immigrants to voluntarily leave due to far greater employer accountability—for example, mandatory E-Verify and serious sanctions for employers who hire unauthorized workers. The theory is, if unauthorized work becomes difficult enough to obtain, unauthorized immigrants will leave for the same reason they came: to find better opportunities. We alluded to this position in the “Fully Enforce the Existing Law” viewpoint.

Factor Choices

In debates about legalization, the arguments that most often shape people’s views fall into three types of questions:

  • Moral claims and fairness: Do long-term residence and social ties create a claim to remain, even if the initial entry or overstay was unlawful? How should the law balance that with fairness to those who might be affected negatively?

  • Practical impacts: What are the economic, social, and cultural consequences of legalization versus continued enforcement?

  • Policy design: If some form of legalization is allowed, where should the boundaries be drawn—who qualifies, under what conditions, and how inclusive or restrictive the policy should be?

These types of questions are reflected across the Factors to Consider. The goal is to structure the debate so that competing arguments address the same underlying issues, rather than talking past each other.

For more on Fairmind guides’ structure and authoring principles, see Fairmind Format.

Electoral Consequences

Some opponents argue that legalization would have major electoral consequences. Because recent generations of unauthorized immigrants have leaned more Democratic than Republican, Republicans worry that legalization would give Democrats a long-term electoral advantage. On this view, legalization is not only an immigration policy but also a partisan gift to the Democrats.

The consideration is real, but treating it as a factor to consider on par with the others would distort the deliberation the guide is designed to support. The main factors invite readers to weigh moral claims, fairness, national identity, economic effects, and the rule of law—questions where readers’ own reasoning and values do the work. Adding electoral consequences as a co-equal factor invites the reader to short-circuit everything else on partisan grounds.

Also, the electoral consequences are harder to project than claims on either side suggest. Hispanic voters have historically leaned Democratic, but the 2024 presidential election saw a significant shift toward Republicans.25 Because legalization would have many steps, it would likely take a decade or more for a large number of applicants to reach citizenship status. By then, the electoral landscape could have shifted more.

Economic Effect on States

Most economic projections for legalizing unauthorized immigrants focus on effects at the federal level. But if legalization were to occur, states would also have taxes and costs related to the legalized population. We did not break out this aspect in the main content because it’s secondary in magnitude to the federal effects and is less well-studied.

Legalization is less impactful for states because they already provide most of the costlier services—public schooling, emergency services, and infrastructure upkeep—to those same people in their current unauthorized status. Legalization doesn’t change these costs.

For most states, the main cost difference would be in Medicaid, a program administered by the states and jointly funded by the federal government and the states. Legalized immigrants would add new costs to states’ share of Medicaid funding, which is typically smaller than the federal government’s contribution.26 That said, the state’s Medicaid costs would be partly offset by increased state tax revenue from increased on-the-books work and economic activity.

So, relatively speaking, the effect of legalization on states is marginal compared to the effect on the federal government.

Fraud in Who Qualifies

Legalization opponents sometimes argue that large-scale legalization programs cannot reliably verify who qualifies, making major fraud inevitable. They point to reports of such fraud in the IRCA program.

We did not include this argument in the main content because the IRCA fraud problem was limited to a special agricultural worker program. It required documenting temporary farm work, which was often paid in cash, without a paper trail. This gave rise to a major fraud opportunity.27

In contrast, IRCA’s main legalization program required documenting years of U.S. residence. Actual long-time residents could readily do this by well-accepted means. As a result, it was not the subject of major fraud.28

Modern legalization proposals look much more like IRCA’s main program than its agricultural program. So although some amount of fraud is inevitable in any large-scale program, the precedent from IRCA’s main program is that it need not be major.

Administrative Capacity

Opponents sometimes argue that processing several million legalization applications would strain federal immigration agencies, producing backlogs, inconsistent vetting, weak fraud detection, and distraction from their enforcement mission.

IRCA shows why the concern should not be dismissed: its legalization programs required new offices, regional processing facilities, appeals procedures, coordination with community organizations, temporary staffing, and large-scale adjudication under uncertain demand. That said, a retrospective analysis found that the programs were implemented reasonably successfully overall, but also identified problems with compressed timelines, fee-based financing, staff quality, backlogs, changing rules, and uneven local implementation.29 There were also fraud issues with a program for agricultural workers, as discussed in Fraud in Who Qualifies.

The lesson is not that legalization is administratively impossible, but that program design matters. A future legalization law would need adequate funding, staffing, verification procedures, fraud controls, appeals rules, and flexibility to handle uneven application volume. Those requirements will affect how well a legalization program works, but they are downstream from the more fundamental debate over whether long-term unauthorized immigrants should be legalized in the first place.

“They Do Jobs Americans Won’t Do”

Legalization supporters sometimes argue that any economic concerns are unfounded because unauthorized immigrants are already here, doing the jobs Americans won’t do. This view sees long-term unauthorized immigrants as complements, not competitors, to American workers.

Although it’s an intuitive concept for many people, the academic research does not reveal such a simple story. As indicated in Economic Effects, there is good reason to expect that legalizing unauthorized immigrants will allow them to compete for jobs that previously weren’t available to them and are now held by lower-wage workers with legal status.30

Opponents would press this point harder. They’d say that unauthorized immigrants are doing jobs Americans won’t do largely because the immigrants will accept lower pay and worse working conditions. Deport the unauthorized immigrants, some opponents say, and employers will need to provide pay and working conditions that legal Americans will accept. However, economists note that this, in turn, would raise prices to consumers of food, housing, and other goods where immigrant labor plays a major role.

“Chain Migration”

Legalization opponents sometimes argue that a decision to legalize millions of unauthorized immigrants currently in the country is actually a decision to bring in millions more of their relatives later. This concept is sometimes known as “chain migration.” It is based on longstanding family-reunification rules, which allow citizens to sponsor family members abroad for legal immigration to the United States.

This is a real phenomenon, but we didn’t include it in the main content because it would play out gradually over many decades, not as a near-term mass migration. Based on the IRCA experience, we can expect each authorized immigrant to sponsor an average of roughly one additional immigrant over thirty years, mostly spouses and minor children.31

Economic Effects of Immigrants’ Children

In debates about the longer-term effects of legalization, supporters sometimes point to the positive economic contributions of the U.S.-born children of immigrants who would be legalized. As native English speakers educated in U.S. public schools, these children tend to fare better economically than their immigrant parents.32

The simplest version of the argument—that legalization itself unlocks second-generation contributions—does not quite follow: U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants are citizens by birthright, and they have access to public education whether or not their parents are legalized.

A more plausible version is that legalization improves parents’ wages, legal security, and household stability, which may in turn improve outcomes for their U.S.-born children.33 That is a real consideration, but it is more indirect and less central to the public debate than the direct effects of legalization on adults who would receive legal status. For that reason, we are noting it here rather than including it in the main content.

Self-Identification Research

Legalization opponents sometimes point to longitudinal research by sociologist Rubén Rumbaut and colleagues. It shows that immigrant children identify less as American as they move through American schools and into adulthood; most come to identify by their family’s country of origin or by cross-ethnic categories like “Hispanic.” Legalization opponents argue that if children of immigrants raised here come to identify less with America over time, this signals that assimilation is no longer producing Americans in the substantive sense, and mass legalization will compound the problem.

We did not include this argument in the main content because the researchers interpreted their work differently from legalization opponents. The researchers found that strong ethnic identification typically coexisted with an American identity rather than replacing it. They found the strongest version of opponents’ concern—“reactive ethnicity,” in which immigrants’ children develop hardened ancestral identities in opposition to American society—to be rare.34

Enforcement Costs and Priorities

Some supporters argue that legalization would avoid the costs of finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting long-term unauthorized immigrants who do not have serious criminal records. Until the second Trump administration, this was not the government’s priority. Interior enforcement more often focused on people with criminal records, while border enforcement focused on stopping people from entering the country unlawfully.

With the second Trump administration, enforcement against non-criminal long-term unauthorized immigrants has expanded. So the costs and benefits of this additional enforcement is relevant. But because it is still a relatively small part of the enforcement effort, and is subject to change with the political environment, we have held off including it as its own factor to consider. If expanded enforcement against long-term non-criminal residents becomes a durable policy rather than a period-specific enforcement priority, we will revisit this editorial choice.

The Congressional Budget Office’s 2013 Analysis

Legalization supporters sometimes cite the Congressional Budget Office’s 2013 analysis of S.744, the “Gang of Eight” Senate bill. It was a comprehensive bill that combined legalization, increases in future legal immigration, and new enforcement spending. The bill did not become law, but the CBO analysis estimated the bill would have reduced the federal deficit by roughly $200 billion over its first decade and another $700 billion over the second.35

On the surface, this appears to be a highly relevant analysis. However, closer inspection indicates that most of the fiscal benefit would have come not from legalization but from another part of the bill: expanded legal immigration. The bill would have allowed millions of additional legal immigrants, many of whom would be highly educated and skilled. These people’s contributions to payroll and income taxes would be substantial, and their draw on social programs relatively modest. In the analysis, this is what drove the deficit reduction. The report did not cleanly break out the effect of legalization.

Race and Historically Unequal Immigration Enforcement

Some legalization supporters argue that the current unauthorized population cannot be understood apart from race and America’s history of immigrant enforcement. For much of U.S. history, federal immigration law imposed minimal restrictions on most European immigrants. For example, from 1880 until World War I, the United States excluded only 1% of the 25 million immigrants from Europe.36 The only group specifically limited then was Chinese immigrants, barred from entry under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; subsequent laws extended the restriction to other Asian nationalities.37

In the past hundred years, as immigration became less European and more Latino, quotas, border controls, and immigration enforcement increased. Today’s unauthorized population is predominantly Latino, and modern immigration law imposes far harsher consequences for unlawful presence, unauthorized work, and border crossing than in the past.

In this context, some say that legalization would not simply excuse unlawful presence. It would also correct an unequal legal history in which similar immigration violations were treated more leniently when the affected immigrants were more likely to be white and European, and more harshly once unauthorized immigration became associated with Mexico and Latin America. Supporters who make this argument often describe legalization as a racial-justice measure or as a partial remedy for structural inequities in immigration policy.

We did not include this angle in the main content because the legalization debate is usually framed more directly around membership, fairness, enforcement, economics, and national identity. The racial-justice argument overlaps with those factors, especially the question of whether long-term unauthorized immigrants should be seen mainly as lawbreakers or as people shaped by an inconsistent and historically unequal system. We include it here because it is a legitimate critique and because it complicates the common comparison between today’s unauthorized immigrants and earlier immigrants who are said to have “come the right way.” In many cases, earlier immigrants came under a much less restrictive legal system, and some who violated immigration rules faced far weaker enforcement.

Crime

Although debates about immigration often involve questions of crime, crime is not a major factor in the legalization debate. The reason is that legalization proposals screen out applicants with serious criminal records as well as those who commit serious crimes during the decade-long process toward citizenship. As a result, legalization would mainly affect unauthorized immigrants who can pass those screens, not those with disqualifying criminal convictions.

Further Reading

The arguments summarized in this guide were informed by a range of writings and research about the legalization debate. Beyond the citations in the footnotes, a web search will return many articles, academic papers, and other content freely available online, usually taking one side or the other.

For readers who want to go deeper, we like to recommend books or other long-form content that keeps the fair-minded perspective. However, this topic has been a hard one in that regard. Although books about immigration may have a chapter about the legalization debate, there are few books on the topic itself, and fewer that seek to provide a balanced view.

The only candidate we found was Joseph H. Carens’ Immigrants and the Right to Stay from 2010. Carens makes a case in favor of citizenship based primarily on moral factors like those articulated in the Moral Claim to Stay factor. Other academics respond with commentary and critiques, often employing arguments reflected in other parts of this guide. The book is out of print, and used copies are expensive. However, we were able to read it online by borrowing it from the Internet Archive’s Open Library.

If you have a recommendation for another book that focuses on the legalization debate and provides a balanced perspective, let us know.

Footnotes

  1. For the U.S. government’s definition, see Bryan Baker and Robert Warren. Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2018–January 2022. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) / Office of Homeland Security Statistics. April 2024. Page 1. DHS and many researchers include people with temporary or provisional protections in the “unauthorized” population because they lack permanent legal status and their permission to remain may be time-limited, discretionary, pending, or revocable. This terminology can be contested: in ordinary usage, people with Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, DACA, or pending asylum claims may be understood as legally authorized to remain while that protection is in effect. In this guide, “unauthorized immigrant” follows the government usage unless otherwise noted. ↩

  2. The last official estimate from the Department of Homeland Security was in 2022. It estimated that 8.7 million then-current unauthorized immigrants had entered the country before 2010. We used “roughly 8 million” to account for a modest percentage of people leaving the country or dying. We used 2010 as the cutoff because that is what the DHS data used. For the DHS estimate, see Bryan Baker and Robert Warren. Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2018–January 2022. U.S. Department of Homeland Security / Office of Homeland Security Statistics. April 2024. Pages 3 and 4. ↩

  3. Jeffrey S. Passel and Jens Manuel Krogstad. What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. Pew Research Center. July 22, 2024. ↩

  4. Profile of the Unauthorized Population: United States. Migration Policy Institute. Accessed May 13, 2026, when the data was from 2023. ↩

  5. Jeffrey S. Passel and Jens Manuel Krogstad. U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Population Reached a Record 14 Million in 2023. Pew Research Center. August 21, 2025. ↩

  6. Valerie Lacarte. Explainer: Immigrants and the Use of Public Benefits in the United States. Migration Policy Institute. October 2024. ↩

  7. Fact Sheet: Immigrants and Public Benefits in 2026. National Immigration Forum. March 31, 2026. ↩

  8. Between 2000 and 2022, the average number of annual deportations was roughly 290,000—a small percentage of the total unauthorized immigrants in the country. Noncitizen Removals, Returns, and Expulsions: Fiscal Years 1892 to 2022. Department of Homeland Security / Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Accessed April 20, 2026. The figures we cited are formal “removals” (those based on an order of removal from a deportation process). DHS also tracks “returns,” but those primarily involve people apprehended at or near the border, not the settled long-term residents this guide focuses on. ↩

  9. Maria Ramirez Uribe. Trump promised mass deportations. Where does that stand six months into his administration? Politifact. July 24, 2025. ↩

  10. Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh. Unleashing Power in New Ways: Immigration in the First Year of Trump 2.0. Migration Policy Institute. January 13, 2026. ↩

  11. Muzaffar Chishti and Charles Kamasaki. IRCA in Retrospect. Migration Policy Institute. January 2014. ↩

  12. The most prominent attempts were the 2013 “Gang of Eight” bill (overview | official) and the 2021 U.S. Citizenship Act (overview | official). ↩

  13. Profile of the Unauthorized Population: United States. Migration Policy Institute. Accessed May 7, 2026, when the data was from 2023. ↩

  14. Standard lawful permanent residence (sometimes called “green card” status) ordinarily includes a path to citizenship after several years. The concept described here would create a similar status without that path. An example of the concept as proposed legislation is the Dignity Act of 2025. ↩

  15. Annual Report of Immigrant Visa Applicants in the Family-sponsored and Employment-based preferences Registered at the National Visa Center as of November 1, 2023. U.S. Department of State. 2023 (the latest available year as of May 2026). ↩

  16. A Guide to S.744: Understanding the 2013 Senate Immigration Bill. American Immigration Council. July 10, 2013. ↩

  17. Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny. “Does immigration affect wages? A look at occupation-level evidence.” Labour Economics 14, no. 5 (2007): 757-773. A publicly available version exists as a discussion paper from 2006. ↩

  18. The Integration of Immigrants into American Society. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2015. ↩

  19. Sherrie A. Kossoudji and Deborah A. Cobb-Clark. Coming out of the shadows: Learning about legal status and wages from the legalized population. Journal of Labor Economics 20, no. 3 (2002): 598-628. ↩

  20. Ryan Edwards and Francesc Ortega. “The economic contribution of unauthorized workers: An industry analysis.” Regional Science and Urban Economics 67 (2017): 119-134. This paper is illustrative of supporters’ arguments. It was funded by the Center for American Progress, an organization aligned with the pro-legalization position. A publicly available working version of the paper is here. ↩

  21. Carl Davis, Marco Guzman, and Emma Sifre. Tax payments by undocumented immigrants. Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). 2024. ITEP is a left-leaning tax policy organization. ↩

  22. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. See chapters 7 and 8. Although the context is assessing the economic impact of additional immigration, rather than legalization of those already here, one of the main findings holds for both: that native and immigrant groups with similar demographic characteristics will have similar fiscal impacts. ↩

  23. Jason Richwine and Robert Rector. The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer. The Heritage Foundation. 2013. This paper’s arguments are illustrative, but its calculation of costs includes costs that currently exist without legalization, such as the cost of public education of unauthorized immigrants’ children. The Heritage Foundation is against legalization. ↩

  24. Muzaffar Chishti and Charles Kamasaki. IRCA in Retrospect. Migration Policy Institute. January 2014. ↩

  25. Hannah Hartig, Scott Keeter, Andrew Daniller and Ted Van Green. Behind Trump’s 2024 Victory, a More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Voter Coalition. Pew Research Center. June 26, 2025. See the “Voting patterns in the 2024 election” section. ↩

  26. Alison Mitchell. Medicaid Financing and Expenditures. Congressional Research Service. May 5, 2025. ↩

  27. Roberto Suro. Migrants’ False Claims: Fraud on a Huge Scale. The New York Times. November 12, 1989. ↩

  28. Referring to studies that analyzed fraud in the IRCA agricultural work program, a review article by the Migration Policy Institute said, “None of these studies found significant levels of fraud in IRCA’s general legalization program.” Muzaffar Chishti and Charles Kamasaki. IRCA in Retrospect. Migration Policy Institute. January 2014. ↩

  29. Susan González Baker. The Cautious Welcome: The Legalization Programs of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. RAND Corporation and Urban Institute. 1990. Executive Summary, pp. 3–9. RAND and Urban are policy research institutions. RAND is generally regarded as nonpartisan and technocratic. Urban is generally regarded as center-left but research-oriented rather than partisan. ↩

  30. Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny. “Does immigration affect wages? A look at occupation-level evidence.” Labour Economics 14, no. 5 (2007): 757-773. A publicly available version exists as a discussion paper from 2006. ↩

  31. Cascio, Elizabeth, and Ethan Lewis. Opening the Door: Immigrant Legalization and Family Reunification in the United States. Journal of Labor Economics 43, no. 4 (2025): 1101-1133. ↩

  32. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. See Chapter 8 on the historical fiscal contributions of the second generation. ↩

  33. Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, and James D. Bachmeier. Parents Without Papers: The Progress and Pitfalls of Mexican American Integration. Russell Sage Foundation. 2015. ↩

  34. Cynthia Feliciano and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Varieties of ethnic self-identities: Children of immigrants in middle adulthood. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4, no. 5 (2018): 26-46. ↩

  35. Cost Estimate: S.744, Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. Congressional Budget Office. June 18, 2013. ↩

  36. Mae M. Ngai. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press. 2004. Page 18. ↩

  37. Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, First Arrivals, First Reactions. Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress. Accessed May 15, 2026. ↩