Two lives changed by the 1986 immigration amnesty, with very different results

Walter Torrez and Tomas Villalta share some history. In the early 1980s, they both paid coyotes to hurry them across the desert and into the United States illegally. In the late 1980s, both became legal residents and eventually U.S. citizens after President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the program often cited as the last mass effort to legalize undocumented aliens.

But the two men went on to vastly different lives in the Washington region, illustrating the mixed results of the 1986 program for 2.7 million participants and the arguments it offers for both sides in the current immigration debate.

President Obamas recent executive action temporarily shielding an estimated 4 million immigrants from deportation is not as dramatic as the permanent legal residency offered by the Reagan-era initiative. And comparisons are further complicated by the lack of research on the beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty.

Even so, the fates of Torrez and Villalta provide a glimpse at how differently the new protections could play out for those just now able to, in the presidents words, come out of the shadows.

After getting his green card, Torrez, 46, went on to college, started a series of small businesses and now owns La Nueva 87.7 FM, a Spanish-language radio station broadcasting from Silver Spring. The Bolivian native lives a comfortable suburban life in Prince Georges County and is driving his seventh Mercedes-Benz. He credits becoming a legal citizen with setting him on the path to American success.

Without it, maybe I would still be painting houses, said Torrez, taking a break from the morning radio show in which he regularly exhorts his largely immigrant audience to seize the opportunities available in their adopted country. Hes been a vocal advocate for legalizing todays undocumented residents and offers on-air advice to those navigating the immigration system.

By contrast, Villalta remains on the lowest rungs of the regions economic ladder 26 years after getting his first residency card. Even unskilled work dried up after the Georgetown restaurant where hed washed dishes for 16 years closed in August. Villalta, 65, who became a U.S. citizen a year ago, recently found himself in a Home Depot parking lot, hustling for work with undocumented day laborers.

The Salvadoran-born Villalta is proud of his new blue passport. He was thrilled last month to cast his first vote in the D.C. mayoral election (por Muriel!). He knows he is better off in Northwest Washington than in the poor mountain village in El Salvador where he was born. But he has begun to question the value of a legal right to work in a country where no one wants to give him a job.

Now I see all the young guys getting work who dont have papers just because they are young, he said in Spanish. He has never learned more than a few workplace phrases of English.

Into the sunshine

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Two lives changed by the 1986 immigration amnesty, with very different results