A Civil Rights Icon’s Blueprint for Immigration

Barbara Jordan and the victory for workers that almost was.

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.

As early as 1895, Booker T. Washington beseeched white industrialists to “cast down your bucket where you are” to hire black Freedmen rather than importing foreign workers. A century later, Jordan appeared before a joint congressional panel and said, “immigration policy must protect U.S. workers against unfair competition from foreign workers, with an appropriately higher level of protection to the most vulnerable in our society.”

Unlike Booker T. Washington, Jordan was not a political outsider speaking for her race, but instead someone who spoke from inside of the halls of power for all struggling Americans.

President Bill Clinton appointed Jordan as chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform shortly after he took office. Jordan had delivered the keynote address at Clinton’s 1992 Democratic nominating convention, calling for an economy where “a young black woman or man from the Fifth Ward in Houston or South Central Los Angeles” could attend public schools and gain employment that would “enable her or him to prosper.” That was more likely to happen in a time of reduced immigration.

Clinton believed in Jordan’s abilities. He awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, declaring her the “most outspoken moral voice of the American political system” who had “captured the nation’s attention and awakened its conscience in defense of the Constitution, the American dream, and the community we share as American citizens.”

The Jordan Commission took the best parts of the two prior immigration eras, combining the principle of admission numbers friendly to U.S. workers that existed between 1924 and 1965 with the admissions criteria put in place afterward that did not exclude applicants by race or ethnicity.

Jordan’s commission recommended fewer admissions while prioritizing spouses, minor children, skills, and needs that were, above all, the American community’s needs. The proposed system would give anyone in the world who met the criteria a chance, regardless of race, color, or creed—but the numbers would also be limited in order to serve the national interest.

Barbara Jordan believed in welcoming immigrants. A civil rights icon herself, Jordan rejected discrimination and bigotry, calling the United States “the most successful multi-ethnic nation in history” even while acknowledging that “[w]e have our troubles.”

“The Commission recommendations are intended to continue the many benefits of legal immigration, while limiting the costs,” she said in 1995. “We are a nation of immigrants, dedicated to the rule of law. That is our history—and it is our challenge to ourselves.”

Yet Jordan made no apology for setting immigration limits, and she advocated for enforcement that would give those limits teeth. Combining the best aspects of the 1924 and 1965 immigration laws was in line with the principles of prominent black leaders dating back to the late nineteenth century.

Prioritizing Vulnerable Workers

Born in 1936, Jordan was a product of the great black migration which was unleashed by the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. Her mother (a maid) and father (a preacher and warehouse clerk) were among those who remained in the South but benefitted nonetheless from increasingly tight labor markets and improved working conditions forced by the departure of such a large number of workers to the North and West.

Jordan grew up in Houston during segregation and Jim Crow, but also witnessed a steady leveling of incomes and the rise of the black middle class during the moderated-immigration era. Along with economic gains, black Americans achieved new political power. The year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Jordan was elected to the Texas State Senate, and she later became the first African American since Reconstruction to represent Texas in Congress.

But even as people like her were breaking racial ceilings in the post-civil rights era, immigration admissions began accelerating, and most black Americans were finding their economic prospects stagnating or declining.

The expanding middle class and shrinking racial wealth gaps of Jordan’s childhood were halted and reversed throughout her adulthood following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. So, when called to confront the politically intractable issue of immigration in the 1990s, she accepted despite the fact that she was facing advanced multiple sclerosis.

“The Commission is particularly concerned about the impact of immigration on the most disadvantaged within our already resident society,” she said, “[meaning] inner city youth, racial and ethnic minorities, and recent immigrants who have not yet adjusted to life in the U.S.”

Jordan kept those Americans in mind as her priority when people advocated leniency for illegal immigration as if it were a victimless crime. “Unlawful immigration is not acceptable,” she said. “There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough,” she testified before Congress.

Jordan was emphatic that “deportation is crucial” in any country’s immigration system. For a system “to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process,” she told a congressional committee. But she also demanded humane treatment in all dealings with the foreign born, legal or not.

The commission’s greatest enforcement passion was in insisting that employers behave legally. “As long as U.S. businesses benefit from the hiring of unauthorized workers, control of unlawful immigration will be impossible,” Jordan said. And that stirred the passions of powerful industries in the opposite direction.

As 1996 began, Jordan’s opponents coalesced into a massive and well-funded lobbying campaign against legislation containing her commission’s recommendations, which previously had enjoyed broad support.

President Clinton had praised the work of Jordan and her commission by name in his 1995 State of the Union address. When the commission’s blueprint was unveiled later that year, he endorsed it as being “pro-family, pro-work, pro-naturalization.” Jordan was planning on the power of that endorsement to see her effort through.

Polling found that most of the American public wanted immigration reduced to at least the 550,000 cap Jordan recommended. In a 1995 Gallup poll, for example, 65% of Americans said they wanted immigration numbers cut. The Associated Press reported on another survey, this one from Roper, which found that nearly 80% of Americans wanted immigration rates scaled back “drastically.” One-fifth wanted all immigration halted. Yet it was not to be.

Sadly, on Jan. 17, 1996, Barbara Jordan passed away unexpectedly at the age of 59. She had been in poor health, but her untimely death of pneumonia was a shock. Rarely is one person so influential, so pivotal, that the fate of tens of millions of people rests on whether she lives or dies. Jordan was such a person. That was such a day.

Perhaps the legislation she backed should have breezed through Congress as a testament to her illustrious career of public service, just as the legislative branch had done in passing the 1965 immigration act in honor of the assassinated President Kennedy. But it didn’t happen this time.

“The effort to reform legal immigration policy was routed by its well-organized and influential opponents,” investigative journalist Jerry Kammer wrote in his book, Losing Control: How a Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked the Backlash That Elected Trump. Kammer detailed how “fierce opposition” gutted the legislation and kept Congress from enacting key recommendations.

Jordan was at her most forceful in condemning immigration policies that thoughtlessly brought in foreign workers without regard to whether their skills were needed or whether their presence would harm the resident labor force.

“Many American workers do not have adequate job prospects,” she said. “We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder.”

But the 1996 Congress—like all other congresses since 1965—continued to allow mass migration of less-skilled foreign workers to directly compete with America’s most vulnerable citizens. That edition of Congress eventually passed a bill preserving all mass immigration categories. It included some enforcement measures that targeted illegal immigrants, but protected the businesses that enticed them with jobs.

The Foreign-Worker Tradition of the Titans

The 1996 Roper poll found that 72% of African Americans wanted annual immigration cut to 300,000 or below (near its level before the 1965 act). In the end, though, the black working class was not a priority for Congress.

The key blow came on the afternoon of March 21, 1996, when the House voted on an amendment that stripped all the Jordan commission’s immigration reductions. The final tally was 238 in favor to 183 opposed. The heart of the Jordan blueprint would have survived if just 28 members had voted the other way.

According to a Wired piece by author John Heilemann, Jordan’s blueprint for a time had been expected to pass because of backing by “conservative restrictionists,” the Democratic White House, and the bipartisan commission chaired by what he called “the famously liberal” Barbara Jordan.

“It was a powerful, if unlikely, alliance,” he wrote. “And with no politician daring to risk being called ‘weak’ on immigration in an election year, it seemed an unstoppable one as well.”

But once the tech industry titans were alerted to the threat to their supply of foreign workers, a cascade of actions peeled off the support of enough Republicans to create an anti-reform majority, as Wired explained.

Hundreds of executives flooded the halls of Congress, a raft of studies were commissioned to refute claims that immigration was depressing wages, and a cadre of bright, young free-market libertarians who over the next two decades would come to occupy top Republican congressional staff and member positions combined to block Jordan’s recommendations.

In this sense, the 1990s were a sad historical echo of the 1890s. In 1896, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge passionately appealed for limits to the Ellis Island immigration surge, saying that nothing “does so much to bring about a reduction of wages and to injure the American wage earner as the unlimited introduction of cheap foreign labor through unrestricted immigration.”

That effort failed, and African American workers suffered for nearly three more decades before the federal government finally removed the immigration barrier to a tighter job market. By greatly reducing the foreign labor flow in 1924, Congress and President Calvin Coolidge cleared the way for four decades of rapid black economic improvement in America’s hiring lines. As we’ve seen, that improvement stalled and regressed after Congress re-installed the barriers with its 1965 mass immigration act.

If she had lived a few months longer, could Barbara Jordan have held her ground against such an onslaught? It’s impossible to say. Polling continued to find an American public eager to see migration levels reduced, as it still does today. But for decades most members of Congress—and most presidents—have found it more convenient to ignore the public, mandate or not.

Jordan’s Vision Today

Following the rejection of Jordan’s recommendations, the federal government has provided an additional 30-plus million foreign citizens with lifetime access to the labor and housing markets of American communities. Millions more foreign citizens have been allowed to join the illegal workforce.

The percentage of working-age (18-64) U.S.-born men outside the labor force has been climbing steadily since Congress restarted mass immigration in 1965. African American men have been most affected, especially those without a college education. Federal data found the percentage of that group who were not in the labor force more than doubled, from 12% in 1960 to 25% in 1990.

By 2024, the percentage of black men who were left out, dropped out, or pushed out of the labor market had nearly tripled from its 1960 rate, reaching 35%

Not surprisingly, 25% of all black children lived in poverty in 2024, a rate three times higher than for white children. This is related in part to the sharp decline in family formation which has been exacerbated by the sharp decline in men with meaningful work.

Immigration policies certainly were not the sole cause of this disheartening reversal from the stunning black march into the middle class between 1924 and 1965. But higher immigration rates have been one of the key factors. According to economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, who wrote the book Unequal Gains, a magisterial history of inequality in America. “Immigration has thus been part of the story of rising U.S. inequality since the 1970s, much as rising immigration was also part of the inequality story between the 1860s and World War I.”

Absent grassroots citizen outrage, the George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations would have increased annual legal entries of foreign labor still further. But both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders have also spent the ensuing three decades blocking legislation aimed at reducing foreign labor.

After House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) won committee passage of a mandatory E-Verify bill in 2011, with endorsements even from most major business lobbies, the Speaker of his own party refused to bring it to a House floor vote. In 2017 and 2018, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) introduced bills containing most of the Jordan Commission’s recommendations to reduce legal and illegal immigration. The leaders of their party in both chambers ensured those bills were defeated.

Many Democrats in Congress supported Jordan’s solutions for the first decade after she died. But in recent years, elected members of her party have almost universally turned away from her immigration policies that would protect American workers.

The current Congress again has an opportunity to approve most provisions of the Jordan blueprint with the Americans First Immigration Act (H.R. 8586), sponsored by Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.).

Backing Jordan’s vision, the legislation would end chain migration, eliminate the visa lottery, and significantly reduce legal immigration levels. It differs from the Jordan Commission in creating a single, merit-based, points-driven system to replace all existing employment-based green card categories. However, the sponsors’ intent, backed by substantial new restrictions to prevent the use of those visas to undercut American workers, is the same as Jordan’s—to protect American workers.

This Congress also has a choice of bills that would enact individual Jordan Commission recommendations to end chain migration (H.R. 2705 and S. 1328), stop the visa lottery (H.R. 1241 and S. 4983), and mandate E-Verify (H.R. 251 and S. 1151).

All those bills would mitigate a practice decried by black leaders ranging from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. DuBois to A. Philip Randolph to Coretta Scott King to Barbara Jordan: Employers using foreign labor to avoid recruiting and advancing formerly enslaved people, and then their descendants, on the nation’s job ladders. The effect has been to steal black wealth before it could be earned.

Our surplus-labor economy of the last six decades has severely exacerbated racial disparities that ethically challenge and destabilize our national community. Had Congress passed Jordan’s blueprint 30 years ago, we’d be living in a very different country today. That doesn’t mean it’s too late to act now.

Adapted from the newly released Second Edition of “Back of the Hiring Line: A 200-year history of employer bias, immigration surges, and depression of Black wealth.” Roy Beck is a former newspaper journalist, founder of the NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation, and author of five books on public policy and ethics.