Immigration Law Blamed for Job Bias : Discrimination: Study calls for eliminating employer sanctions provision of 1986 reform act. Scores of rights violations are documented.

Employers’ fears that they will be fined for hiring illegal immigrants have resulted in widespread job discrimination against legal residents, including U.S. citizens, according to a report scheduled for release today by two national civil rights organizations.

The report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund documents scores of cases in which employers, anxious to avoid fines, have trampled on the rights of legal workers.

Entitled “The Human Costs of Employer Sanctions,” the report documents numerous instances of discrimination: a U.S. citizen denied a job because he lacked immigration documents, a legal resident denied employment because he was not a U.S. citizen, an immigration amnesty applicant fired from his job because he did not have a permanent resident “green card.”

Calling for stricter enforcement of the anti-discrimination provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the report concluded that the law “jeopardizes the livelihood of too many minority or ethnic-looking United States citizens and documented immigrants.”

“It’s time to assess realistically the effects of this country’s experiment in immigration reform,” the report stated.

The study is part of a national campaign by immigrant rights advocates to strengthen anti-discrimination provisions in the law and do away with employer sanctions. It was released in anticipation of a crucial assessment of the 1986 law that is due in January from the U.S. General Accounting Office, which evaluates government programs for Congress.

A provision in the 1986 law calls on the GAO to monitor the law’s impact and advise Congress on whether the law is causing pervasive discrimination against legal workers or is posing an unnecessary burden on employers. If either finding is made, Congress must then consider whether to repeal employer sanctions.

A 1988 GAO report to Congress concluded that although 16%--or more 500,000--employers have discriminated against “foreign-looking” workers, at times demanding work authorization documents when none were required, this did not constitute “a pattern of discrimination.”

But the GAO, in a conclusion that drew criticism from immigrants’ rights advocates, also said that its survey of employers did not provide the necessary data to determine the extent of discrimination on workers.

“We’re trying to unmask the illogic of the GAO’s conclusion,” said Francisco Garcia-Rodriguez, a MALDEF attorney and one of the authors of the advocates’ report. “We give them some real live examples of how employer sanctions do impact workers.”

The ACLU/MALDEF report also includes results of an earlier survey by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles showing that out of 283 local discrimination cases it investigated, the vast majority of workers had been unfairly fired from their jobs, had been denied employment or had lost their seniority, mostly because employers were misinformed about the law’s requirements.

The coalition said that the cases it investigated represented only a small fraction of the total and concluded that the survey results show “a disturbingly consistent pattern of discriminatory practices across a variety of industries, affecting hundreds of workers.”

Last week in San Francisco, a coalition of 80 immigrants’ rights groups disclosed results of a survey of 416 Bay Area businesses that also showed widespread discrimination against workers. Half of the employers surveyed thought it was risky to hire workers who spoke little English, 79% refused to accept valid immigration documents, and 65% said they had not seen a government handbook that had supposedly been distributed to all employers.

The San Francisco-based Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services said its findings offer further proof for repealing employer sanctions.

GAO officials said they will take the reports into account in formulating their own report to Congress. They said Congress has given them some latitude in determining what constitutes widespread job discrimination.

Critics contend that the GAO only has looked at whether workers are hired or fired based on their national origin. Immigrants’ rights advocates say the government should also look at wage violations and failure to comply with other terms and conditions of employment.

Nevertheless, GAO officials indicated that their final report will go further in making a determination on the discrimination issue.

“Last year, our collective wisdom was that we didn’t have enough of the right kind of data” to make such a finding, said Lowell Dodge, director of Administration of Justice issues for the GAO. “This year, we have used new methodology and are more confident.”

Dodge said he could not comment on the GAO report since it has not been completed. He would only say that while the GAO and advocacy groups such as MALDEF have been at odds in the past, “you shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about where we might be now.”

But immigrants’ rights advocates are not optimistic that the final GAO report will differ greatly from previous conclusions.

If the GAO finds no widespread disruptions in the workplace caused by employer sanctions, Congress may permanently adopt employer sanctions and eliminate the anti-discrimination provisions, MALDEF’s Garcia-Rodriguez said.

He added that a consensus has developed among a network of immigrants’ rights groups across the country to pressure for an extension of the law’s three-year evaluation period, which ends with the GAO’s final report. Garcia-Rodriguez added that the advocacy groups are gearing up for a battle in Congress on the issue.