In 1994, Barbara Jordan emerged into the thick of the immigration debate with a voice, a delivery, and a message of economic justice as powerful as an Old Testament prophet and as job-centered as the legendary trade unionist A. Philip Randolph.
After 40 years of modest immigration and tight labor markets uplifted American workers of all races, Congress had voted to restart mass immigration in the mid-1960s—while promising it wouldn’t. But Jordan, the black trailblazer from Texas, presented a policy blueprint that could have corrected most of the anti-worker immigration mistakes of the 1965, 1986, and 1990 immigration laws.
The most powerful parts of Jordan’s mid-1990s proposal included setting an annual cap of 550,000 permanent legal immigrants (the twenty-first century average is around 1 million a year) and creating a verification tool to stop employers from hiring illegal foreign labor. This second step would have virtually ended illegal immigration.
Jordan, the first southern African American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was concerned about rising numbers of unemployed and underemployed black citizens in the overstuffed hiring lines of their country. But she was far from the first person to make the case.
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