My thesis will be on the topic of undocumented immigration into the United States. I will narrow this theme to focus primarily on undocumented labor migration. What I propose to do within this focus is to examine the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The reason why I want to focus on this 1986 Law is because it was created with the purpose of stopping the undocumented flow of labor into the United States.

I will argue that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act in reality did not achieve what the legislature wanted. In fact, what happened was that IRCA actually increased undocumented labor movement in to the United States. There fore, I will further argue that the law was symbolic rather than real. I will concentrate on two sections of the Law. These are the employer sanctions and the legalization of the undocumented labor already in the U.S. I will do this in order to prove that the Law did not achieve what it was supposed to do.