Who Governs Immigrant Labor? Status, Residency, and Rights in Federal and State Law

This article examines a collection of 244 state bills selected from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) Immigrant Policy Project between 2006 and 2018 covering three areas of immigrant work and worksite regulations. Even though employment regulation is an area where states claim statutory and court-backed authority and therefore where states might have been expected to act independently of the federal government, state employment, and workplace laws are in many cases aligned with federal policy. The significant degree of alignment of state and federal law in this area reveals how states face downward pressures from federal efforts to regulate and crack down on immigration broadly, and unauthorized immigrants specifically. This, in turn, suggests that immigration federalism scholarship, which has generally highlighted state–federal conflict in the area of policing and enforcement, needs to account for different types of intergovernmental relationships that accompany distinctive immigrant policy areas, and researchers should consider the different spheres where enforcement occurs.