Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Political Science

Advisor

Michael O. Sharpe

Subject Categories

American Politics | Comparative Politics

Keywords

immigration, international migration, immigration federalism, employer sanctions, E-Verify, IRCA, immigration reform, immigration control, labor law, nativism, human rights

Abstract

Since the breakdown of comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, a growing number of states have enacted work verification laws aiming to accomplish what the federal government could not: halt unwanted immigration by building a "wall" around the labor market. However, the empirical record on these laws remains mixed. While scholarly and journalistic reports observe that states appear to lack both the institutional capacity and political will to enforce their own work authorization policies, economic impact studies show that these same “poorly enforced” laws nonetheless produce substantive effects on the strategies of employers and migrants alike. This thesis asks the question: do state-level work authorization laws signal a shift from “symbolic” to substantive restriction? Drawing on public enforcement data, media reports, and scholarly literature on the impacts of state-level sanctions, I argue that while sub-federal sanctions are not meaningfully enforced by state agencies, these policies are neither strictly “symbolic” actions nor strategic instruments for nationally interested partisans. Rather, sub-federal work authorization laws serve the larger cause of immigration “enforcement by attrition” by indirectly severing the de facto “right to work” from the formal protections of “workers’ rights.”

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