Getting to Work: Governing the Workplace through Immigration Law
An Oppenheimer Chair Brown Bag lunch seminar with Juliet Stumpf, Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School (Portland, Oregon).
ABSTRACT
Employment is traditionally conceptualized as a private contract between employer and employee.听 The workplace is also one of the most racially integrated places in most U.S. employees' lives, and can therefore act, even in a limited way, as a place where democratic integration can occur.
In 1986, the United States passed legislation that 听introduced the government as a decision maker into this private relationship, requiring employees to present documents showing identity and work authorization.
Today, comprehensive immigration reform initiatives propose to implement a nationwide system called E-Verify that requires employers to check employees' identity and work authorization through on-line government databases.
E-Verify unveils how the employment verification laws establish U.S. employees as a class circumscribed by government authorization to work.听 The advent of E-Verify also changes the traditional conceptualization of employment in a different way: by increasing the presence of government in the establishment of the employment relationship for all employees, regardless of citizenship status.
E-Verify represents a clear contemporary example of a recurring phenomenon in U.S. immigration law: the imposition of immigration enforcement costs on the U.S. population as a whole.听 In pursuit of enforcement goals, E-Verify impacts significant individual interests but does so by creating a very small risk per individual, dispersed across a majority of the population, of a harmful and erroneous effect, paired with larger risks that the harmful error will fall on a minority of the population.
BIOGRAPHY
Juliet Stumpf is a Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.听 Stumpf's current research explores the intersection of immigration law with criminal law and other substantive areas including constitutional law, civil rights, and employment law.听 Her research is interdisciplinary, examining the insights that sociology, psychology, criminology, and political science bring to the study of immigration law.听 Before joining the Lewis & Clark Law School faculty in 2005, Professor Stumpf was on the Lawyering Program faculty at the New York University School of Law.听 She clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit, served as a Senior Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, and practiced with the law firm of Morrison and Foerster.
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