There are rows of books in stores dealing with immigration and the laws that wrapped around it.

One of them is entitled “U.S. Immigration Made Easy.” It’s not a title that should be taken literally.

What is easy about the book is that it goes about explaining relatively clear terms what it takes the individual to move to the United States, work within its borders and within its laws.

The book, which is subtitled “The plain-English information you need to visit, live or work in the United States, legally,” comes with a cover recommendation from the United States Information Agency: “Highly recommended, instructive and explanatory.”

And, indeed, the book is just that in terms of the range of questions and answers, common and more esoteric, spread through its many pages.

But the real clue as to everyday reality in the world of immigration law and its never-ending evolution is more evident in terms of the book’s size. Drop it on the floor and it makes a thump that can be heard yards away.

And this is not even an especially large tome compared to some others that seek to explain the many rules and regulations that govern migration to these shores.

Immigration, quite simply, isn’t easy. It has never been easy in human terms anyway and it isn’t easy today in both human and legal terms.

It’s even harder if you’re Irish without a direct family connection to one of the 50 states.

And it looks like getting harder again by virtue of a new package of rules being proposed by the Bush administration.

As Congress wrestled with reform in the earlier months of the year, the Bush White House straddled the thorny line between outright reformers and members of the House and Senate from both parties, though mostly Republicans, who saw reform almost entirely in terms of better securing the nation’s borders and tightening up on workplace regulations inside those borders.

Now, with the Senate effort at reform fast fading in the year’s wake and the House not expected to do much of anything on its own, the White House is stepping into the void with a series of border security and employment verification proposals aimed at turning the screw even tighter on the undocumented and the illegal.

Administration officials were signaling that they intended to clamp down on employers of illegal immigrants even without a new immigration law to offer legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the work force, the New York Times stated in an August 8 front-page report.

“We are tough and we are going to be even tougher,” the paper reported Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke as saying with regard to the proposals.

By tough, Knocke means in part of campaign to crack down on the use of false or recycled Social Security numbers by the illegal or undocumented.

The main focus of any new enforcement will be on employers who already face sanctions, but who will risk much stiffer penalties under the new rules.

Still, apart from the name of his immediate employer, Knocke might have been speaking in 1986.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act passed that year tightened up immigration controls at America’s borders and placed heavy sanctions on employers for hiring illegals. These tough new rules were intended to put an end to illegal immigration or legally admitted people overstaying their status.

Clearly, the view now is the ’86 act didn’t do the business.

At the same time, the Bush White House is not proposing anything like a broad provision that would provide relief for the millions of undocumented as was the case with the 1986 legislation that was shepherded through Congress by the Reagan administration.

That now dusty measure included an amnesty that ultimately opened America’s door for three million people.

The new package of sanctions has a figure at least four times that number squarely in the crosshairs. Amnesty by that name or any other term isn’t part of the deal.

The new proposals are seemingly at odds – though perhaps not much of a far cry – from previous positions taken by the 43rd president that pointed to a broad based guest worker program, and even possibly a path to legalization for many living outside the bounds of current immigration laws.

Those laws are most deeply rooted in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, the legislation that closed the door on the kind of immigration that had been the lot of succeeding generations of Irish.

The 1965 bill, very much in the spirit of those changing times, did away with national quotas and set an effective ceiling on immigrant numbers from European countries, Ireland among them.

The bill’s effect on the Irish-American community was pretty well immediate.

In the first three months of 1965, 1,036 visas were allocated to Irish applicants. Irish migration to the United States was tailing off at this point anyway and was a mere trickle compared to the 1950s.

But the new law would turn even that trickle into a drip. After enactment, and during the first three months of 1966, only 82 U.S. visas were issued by the U.S. embassy in Dublin.

The mid 1960s and the middle years of the first decade of the new century have something in common in Irish immigration terms: the island of Ireland is easier to stay on while America is getting harder to get into.

But in all the intervening years, and despite new layers of immigration law spawning shelf loads of immigration advice books, the Irish have still managed to come to America, work in America and somehow law claim to being American.

The new regulation, however, are likely to be the last straw.

Described in a Washington Post/Los Angeles Times news service report as a “multi-pronged effort” aimed at illegal workers, the new rules don’t have to necessarily directly effect individual undocumented Irish in order for some to throw in the towel after years of just getting by in the shadows.

But if past experience is anything to go by even a new volley of restrictions will not see all the Irish packing or even deter others in Ireland from eyeing America as a prospect.

“Don’t give up. Hang in there. There will be change,” was the message from Tom Conaghan, director of the Irish Immigration and Pastoral Center in Philadelphia.

As with Mr. Knocke’s statement, Conaghan’s words could have been uttered in 1986.

And change did indeed come for the Irish after that year of supposedly once and for all immigration reform.