Immigration question

Via Eschaton, I see that The Rude Pundit has an intresting question about the path to U.S. citizenship taken by Bush’s Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez.
It appears that Gutierrez and his family were illegal immigrants when they came to the U.S. in the early 1960s and then benefited from an amnesty program in 1966 that granted them citizenship.
I would think something like that would be of particular interest in light of the recent debate over immigration reform.