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Its been a long and winding road, this journey to craft effective immigration policy in the U.S., and one that has encountered not a few dead-ends along the way.

Experts say the modern debate over immigration has its roots in a 1986 law signed by President Ronald Reagan, which enabled 3 million people in the country illegally to attain legal status. It became known as the Reagan Amnesty.

There were promises of a new era of enforcement, and strict adherence to a law barring employers from hiring workers who didnt have permission to work in the U.S. But they were never fully realized.

Revisions were completed in 1990 under PresidentGeorge H.W. Bush and in 1996 under President Bill Clinton. Still there was dissatisfaction.

In the 2000s, Republican President George W. Bush proposed a comprehensive immigration reform package. That went nowhere. Democratic President Barack Obama also tried and failed to steer something through both houses of Congress.

In the absence of reform, there have been persistent cries that the system is broken. Against that backdrop, Donald Trump road a tidal wave of discontent all the way to the White House. And on Tuesday, the president gave the clearest indication yet where he is going on immigration, when it was announced federal authorities would deportanyone convicted of any criminal offense, whether serious or minor.

Trump is not only different from Obama, he is very different from George W. Bush, saidKarthick Ramakrishnan, UC Riverside professor and associate dean of the universitys School of Public Policy.

Experts suggested that both Bush and Obama were tough in their approach to enforcing immigration laws. Deportations reached 2 million under Bush and exceeded 2.5 million the most of any president under Obama.

Obama was not called the deporter-in-chief by accident, saidRamakrishnan, who authored a book titled, The New Immigration Federalism.

Yet, said Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont-McKenna College, They were both broadly sympathetic to immigration and not wanting to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

Manuel Pastor, USC professor of sociology and director of the universitys Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, saidBush set the stage for Obama tried to do later.

Bush was a border governor and had a great deal of familiarity with immigrants in his own state, Pastor said.

At the same time, Bush sought to bolster the GOPs outreach to Latino voters, he said.

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But then something called 9/11 happened. The response to the nations deadliest terror attack consumed Bushs agenda, and immigration became predominantly a national security issue.

When youre worrying about whether your gardener is illegal, thats different than worrying about whether the person sitting on the airplane next to you is illegal, Pastor said.

In his second term, Bush circled back and tried to push forward a program for immigration reform.That ran into a buzz-saw of opposition from conservatives and also from trade unions who were worried about competition, he said.

Then, when Obama leaped onto the scene, Pitney said, he vowed to deliver comprehensive immigration reform as well. But, like Bushs, Obamas plan was abruptly reshaped by a earth-shattering event early on: the worst economic crisis to hammer the country since the Great Depression, he said.

Pastor saidObama was absorbed with trying to rescue the economy, expand health care and reform immigration.

He focused on the first two and squandered a lot of political capital, Pastor said.

Meanwhile, Obama stepped up deportations, he said.

Pastor said Obama believed that, if he signaled he was tough on enforcement, hed garner political support to pass reform legislation. And he managed to persuade the Senate to pass a bill in 2013.

It got bottled up in the House, he said.

Frustrated with the roadblock in Congress, Obama signed an executive order in 2014 providinga legal reprieve for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens.

And here we are today.

What Trump is doing now is dramatically increasing the number of people who are going to get targeted for deportation, Ramakrishnan said.

He said the president set the stage for many more deportations than were processed under either Obama or Bush.

Ramakrishnan said the stepped-up enforcement comes when the undocumented population is stable: There are an estimated 11 million living in this country, as many as were here a decade ago.

The Pew Research Center and the Public Policy Institute of California say more than 10 percent 1.3 million reside counties Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Because the population is stable, Pastor said, todays community is different than a decade ago. In 2008, he said, 40 percent of undocumented immigrants had been here a decade. Today, 60 percent have been here that long.

And, he said,Heavy removal is much more likely to affect a family now someone who has kids, someone who has a home, someone who is a neighbor, someone who has had a job for a very long time.

Pitney it is unclear how the administrations policy will play out.

With Donald Trump, the one certainty is that what he says and what he does is not always the same thing, said Pitney. But already he has taken a tougher approach to immigration than his predecessors.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Immigration reform failures set stage for Trump's strategy - LA Daily News