We spent an emotional day with one of Atlanta's top immigration attorneys. Here's why he says the system doesn't work.

In November 1986, when Atlanta-based immigration lawyer Charles H. Kuck was a first-year law student at Arizona State University, President Ronald Reagan signed what remains to this day the only major immigration reform measure ever passed by Congress. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (also known as the Reagan Amnesty Act) civilly and criminally penalized employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. It also allowed 3 million immigrants already in the country to obtain legal status.

At the time, Arizona State offered a course in immigration law. But as Kuck told me when I visited him at his Sandy Springs office not long ago, he shrugged the course off then. Why take it? , he thought. They fixed the problem, right? It was for liberals and whackos.

But the 1986 law had onl