The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)

The U.S. may be a country of immigrants, but it has not always put out the welcome mat for newcomers. Northern Europeans were often welcomed, while Southern Europeans were frowned upon and racist attitudes prompted the U.S. government to exclude immigrants from Asia. Nonetheless, immigration provided a huge supply of cheap labor for a nation that had barely tapped its western frontier. From 1880 to 1920, demographic changes altered the makeup of the immigrant population, as Southern and Eastern Europeans eclipsed Northern Europeans as the predominant immigrant group. During that period, many began to call for limitations on immigration and the first substantial barriers were erected (Simpson 149).

World War I fueled those sentiments, leading to immigration quotas in 1917 and 1924, followed by another major piece of immigration legislat

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bviously might lead some employers to not consider people of certain backgrounds for fear that the individual is an illegal alien. Congress anticipated that possibility, so the IRCA includes an anti-discrimination provision to prevent exactly that. The IRCA, coupled with other federal regulations, forces employers to walk a tightrope. Moreover, regardless of an employee's legal status, all federal and state regulations still apply, including labor laws governing workplace safety and collective bargaining (Shuster 609). A California employer recently provided an example of what happens when a business falls off that tightrope. The employer asked a prospective employee (a U.S. citizen) for too many documents. By the time the would-be worker returned with all of the materials, the company had been forced to fill the job with another person. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice determined that the employer, in trying to comply with the INS' dictates, had violated the prospective employee's civil rights and fined the employer $5,000 (Cleeland C1). The IRCA's privacy protections also run counter to requirements imposed on businesses by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS requires empl
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Approximate Word count = 2714
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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