Immigration Reform and Control Act 100 Stat. 3359 (1986)
IMMIGRATION REFORM AND CONTROL ACT 100 Stat. 3359 (1986)
The major innovation in the lengthy Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was the adoption of employer sanctions penalizing businesses that hired or continued to employ aliens who were not legally authorized to work. On a symbolic level the statute corrected a policy that had condoned utilization of illegal workers while threatening those workers with deportation. The statute nonetheless impaired the enforceability of employer sanctions by prohibiting the development of a national identity card, in order to protect the right of privacy of citizens. The statute accompanied its new enforcement regime by an amnesty ("legalization") for undocumented aliens who were already residing in the United States. More than two million aliens, most of whom were Mexicans, achieved lawful resident status through this program. Ambivalence toward these former illegal aliens contributed to debates in the 1990s on immigration and alienage.
Gerald L. Neuman
(2000)
Bibliography
U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform 1994 U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
Calavita, Kitty 1990 Employer Sanctions Violations: Toward a Dialectical Model of White-Collar Crime. Law and Society Review 24:1041–1069.