COLUMN LEFT : Repeal the Law That Fosters Bias in Hiring : Something’s very wrong when U.S. citizens are denied work because they lack ‘green cards.’

Something momentous happened at last month’s NAACP convention in Los Angeles, but in national media coverage, it got swamped by the more glamorous debate about African-Americans’ role in Hollywood: In a courageous move, the delegates voted to call for repeal of the employer-sanctions provision of the immigration law.

The move was courageous not because this is a difficult position--the evidence is overwhelming that employer sanctions cause enormous levels of discrimination--but because it required the NAACP to overturn previous policy. Under the leadership of Dr. Benjamin Hooks, the African-American community now stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Latinos in a mutual struggle to repeal employer sanctions.

“Sanctions” is shorthand for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act’s holding employers responsible for determining whether employees are legal U.S. residents. Latino leaders knew in the early 1980s, when Congress was considering immigration reform, that this policy inevitably would lead to employment discrimination. We have since been proven right by more than a dozen studies by city, state and federal human-rights commissions. The evidence culminated in a report released last March by the U.S. General Accounting Office, in which 19% of the employers surveyed admitted to adopting discriminatory hiring practices directly because of employer sanctions.

Apologists for the present immigration policy have made specious attacks on the GAO’s findings; Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) even dredged up an internal GAO memo that “cast doubt” on the methodology in the report. That had already been addressed by the GAO, and the memo’s author ultimately approved the final report.

Unfortunately, these tactics have focused attention on numbers and methodology rather than on the hardship being inflicted on human beings. On the East Coast, Puerto Ricans applying for jobs are being asked for “green cards,” which, as U.S. citizens, they cannot produce. (“Green cards”--which are any color but green these days--are issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to resident aliens.) Other U.S. citizens report being told to provide “INS registration numbers” before they can work. Hiring personnel are refusing to interview anyone who seems “foreign,” locking Latinos, Asians and Caribbean people out of jobs before they get a chance to apply.

If even one such incident were the result of a federal policy, the policy should be reconsidered. Given the widespread human suffering that sanctions have produced, repeal is a moral imperative.

Some argue that this discrimination results from employer “confusion.” This “benign” motive for unlawful discrimination does not make the impact on Latino workers any less painful. The effort to educate employers about sanctions doubled last year, yet reports of discrimination increased. Some in Congress are considering proposals to educate 7 million more employers in order to fix the problem.

Others suggest trying to expand our anti-discrimination laws. While welcome, this approach would have little practical effect; research shows that most discrimination victims are unaware that their rights have been violated.

Ultimately, these “quick fixes” require that we embrace a law that creates wide-scale discrimination, clean up a tiny amount of that bias after the fact, and tolerate what’s left in the name of border control. As the NAACP action confirms, this approach is inconsistent with the commitment to eliminate invidious discrimination in all forms.

Defenders of sanctions have precious little evidence that they are working. The number of undocumented migrants--and tension at the border--continues to grow.

The costs of this policy are unacceptably high, especially when so many Americans are paying with their rights.

Once our society accepts laws that jeopardize the rights of one group of people, other such laws become permissible. The NAACP joins a number of groups that previously supported or took no position on employer sanctions, including the International Ladies Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers unions.

Congress should gather its courage, reexamine the issue of border control, recommit itself to the principle of equal opportunity for all Americans, and repeal employer sanctions.