The Findings and Policy Implications of the GAO Report and the Urban Institute Hiring Audit

Abstract

In March, 1990 die General Accounting Office of the United States submitted its third and final mandated report on the impact and implementation of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Its conclusion was diat the law had given rise to widespread discrimination against foreignsounding and foreign-looking job applicants. This result had been antic? ipated during the two-decade debate over IRCA by opponents of the law's principal policy innovation: employer sanctions. Sanctions were intended to right an asymmetry in American law that made it illegal for undocumented aliens to enter and work in the United States but imposed no penalties on employers who hired them. Righting this asymmetry involved the largest expansion of labor-related regulation since 1970, as well as the broadest regulatory expansion to take place during the fiercely antiregulatory Reagan Administration. By deputizing employers as junior immigration officers (Roberts and Loehr, 1987), sanctions for the first time brought the hitherto obscure and little-encountered world of immigration law and immigration law enforcement to the nation's workplace and indeed, because sanctions govern all hiring transactions, in theory, to the homes of die nation's citizens. The battle for sanctions was a long and arduous one that forced its proponents to consent to a series of major political trades. Among other things, it led to the enactment of the two largest legalization programs in recent history (one for aliens who had been in the U.S. since 1982, the other