Legal updates, new research, interesting ideas for students-- past and present-- of LER Prof. Michael H. LeRoy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Welcome, also, to friends who are curious about employment and labor law.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Can A State Enact a Quota on the Employment of Foreign-Born Workers?
100 years ago, the Supreme Court decided Truax v. Raich (see here ), a
case involving an Arizona law that limited employers to a quota of foreign-born
employees. The law criminalized employment relationships that exceeded a 20%
cap on foreigners, even if corporations hired aliens who were lawfully admitted to the U.S. The U.S.
Supreme Court weighed an Austrian cook’s interest in retaining his employment
against the state’s power to set limits on the number of jobs available to
foreign nationals. Striking down the
law, the Court said in 1915: “It requires no argument to show that the right to
work for a living in the common occupations of the community is of the very
essence of the personal freedom and opportunity that it was the purpose of the [14th]
Amendment to secure. If this could be refused solely upon the ground of race or
nationality, the prohibition of the denial to any person of the equal
protection of the laws would be a barren form of words.” Would a Justice nominated by Donald Trump or
Ben Carson overrule Truax? Has the
U.S. progressed since Arizona enacted this law more than century ago?
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