Twenty years ago this morning, a ship called the Golden Venture ran aground in Queens. Inside its hold—a cramped, hot, windowless space that was about the size of a two-car garage—the vessel carried nearly three hundred undocumented immigrants from China. They came, mostly, from a series of villages in Fujian Province. Some of them might be called refugees, as they were fleeing political or religious persecution, or the occasional horrors of China’s one-child policy. But many, and perhaps most, would more accurately be described as economic migrants; they knew that in America there were dishes that needed washing, food that needed delivering, clothes that needed pressing. In a menial job on the margins of the U.S. economy, they could earn in a year what it might take a decade to make back home, and they were willing to risk their lives to get here.

The voyage was a Conradian nightmare, from Bangkok to Mombasa, Kenya, and then down around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1620, it took the Mayflower sixty days to reach these shores. In 1993, it took the Golden Venture a hundred and twenty.

When the ship plowed into a sandbar several hundred yards offshore, passengers mobbed the deck, then began, one after another, to jump over the side and into the chilly Atlantic. They had been informed by the “snakeheads”—human smugglers—who controlled the ship that if they could set foot on land in the United States before being caught by the authorities they would be permitted to apply for political asylum. Ten of the passengers did not survive the swim to shore. (In 2006, I wrote an article about the Golden Venture for the magazine, and then, later, a book.)

Today, after two decades of galloping economic growth in China, it may seem hard to imagine a time when people were willing to die in an effort to flee the country. But the Golden Venture arrived in New York on the crest of a great wave of illegal migration from China to the United States. In 1995, the C.I.A. estimated that a hundred thousand people were being smuggled here from China every year.

For the Clinton Administration, this posed an acute dilemma. When the Golden Venture arrived, it was quickly swarmed by TV news helicopters, which broadcast stark images of the malnourished passengers as they huddled in blankets on the beach. Until then, if you arrived in the United States without the proper documentation, but requested asylum when you got here, you were generally given a court date, then released. But many new arrivals failed to show up for these hearings, opting, instead, to try their luck as undocumented migrants. In the hours after the Golden Venture arrived, as the White House and immigration authorities tried to determine what to do with the passengers from the ship, it was decided that this catch-and-release asylum policy had become a “magnet” for illegal migration. The sheer magnitude of China’s population was enough to fluster even the most ardent of refugee advocates. (When Jimmy Carter admonished Deng Xiaoping in 1979 for not allowing more of his people to emigrate legally, Deng is said to have replied, “Why certainly, President Carter. How many millions would you like?”)

So a decision was made: rather than release the Golden Venture passengers while their asylum claims were processed, the authorities would throw them into immigration detention.

The United States has always suffered from a certain bipolarity when it comes to immigration policy, vacillating between a desire to embrace the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” described in the Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty, and an approach that is more nativist—and punitive. In 1993, immigration detention was not a widespread phenomenon, but after the decision to confine the Golden Venture passengers, the practice took root. Today, the United States imprisons some four hundred and thirty thousand people each year on immigration grounds—including several hundred who are kept, inexplicably, in solitary confinement. It is a brutal, extraordinarily unforgiving system, which now costs taxpayers two billion dollars a year. (The total cost of federal immigration enforcement is eighteen billion dollars—more than the budgets of all the other major federal law-enforcement agencies combined.)

Many of the Golden Venture passengers were quickly deported. Some were eventually granted asylum. But a large group of the passengers were simply forgotten, and they languished in county jails and detention facilities for the next three and a half years. In 1997, Bill Clinton released the last fifty-three passengers, but he did so by “paroling” them. This put the men—almost all of the people who’d been on the boat were men—in a peculiar legal limbo: they were allowed to live here, work here, pay taxes, and own businesses. But they were not given legal permanent residence, or the chance to work toward it, and they were subject to deportation any day. The passengers fanned across the country, started businesses, got married, had American-born children. They made up for lost time. But they were haunted by the knowledge that the lives they were busy constructing could be taken away from them at any moment.

In this sense, they were typical of the enormous, invisible underclass of people who are American in every respect except for the legal entitlement to be here. This population is believed to number between eleven and twelve million people. If we rounded them up and gave them their own jurisdiction, their state’s population would be the seventh largest in the Union—approximately the size of Ohio’s.

Like the prisoners at Guantánamo, this population poses a policy conundrum so intractable that Washington has opted to do what it often does in these situations: ignore the problem, and hope, fervently, that it will just go away. It is a sad commentary on our collective abandonment of the promise inscribed in that Lazarus poem that comprehensive immigration reform finally seems possible this year not because congressional Republicans feel any urgent sense of compassion for the millions living in limbo but because they have read the demographics of their trouncing in 2012, and made a calculation that is transparently political. “If we are not able to pass immigration reform in 2013—and it is the Republican Party’s fault—we are dead in 2016,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said recently.

One potential obstacle to new legislation is the demands of House Republicans for more stringent border control—notwithstanding the fact that, according to a recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of people migrating from the United States to Mexico is now at least as large as the number moving in the opposite direction. Another possible stumbling block is a pronounced disinclination among many conservative Republicans to sanction a path to citizenship.

This is ironic, because the path envisioned in the legislation proposed by the bipartisan Gang of Eight is neither short nor especially easy. It would take ten years for most eligible immigrants to qualify for a green card, and an additional three to obtain citizenship. And, should they have the misfortune to find themselves unemployed for a sixty-day period during their decade-long audition for legal permanent residence, they will be disqualified. The new law may establish a path, but it will be long, arduous, and strewn with obstacles.