The standards follow the logic that it is best to address all immigration problems this session of Congress, even if in different bills. The standards follow the Senate’s approach of promising border security and workplace enforcement (through typically meaningless “triggers”) in exchange for immediate amnesty of those here unlawfully.

Because amnesty by itself is extremely unpopular, sometimes policymakers include other, more popular measures alongside it.
For example, in 1986 Congress passed, and President Reagan signed, a “one time” amnesty of some 3 million unlawful immigrants and was promised border security and workplace enforcement. Unfortunately, the promises were not kept. Today more than 10 million unlawful immigrants reside in the United States. Instead of repeating past mistakes, a truly step-by-step process would be to ensure border and workplace laws are being enforced, period. The only real way to be sure that unlawful immigration has been stopped is to count the number of unlawful immigrants in the census.