Students, legal scholars push California universities to hire students who entered U.S. illegally

They have attended school in the United States, spent their childhoods in U.S. neighbourhoods and grown up as Americans in every way but one — brought to the country their parents, who entered the country illegally, as children, they have no legal authority to live in the United States.
The political and legal turmoil over the federal program that since 2012 has shielded many of them from deportation, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, has left thousands of the so-called “Dreamers” — immigrants whose plight has won sympathy at times from Democrats and Republicans alike — in legal limbo. Federal law makes it illegal to hire immigrants without legal status, and, under the law, many of these young immigrants will graduate from college to a life of under-the-table jobs as nannies and construction workers.
Now, a coalition of immigrant student leaders and some of the nation’s top legal scholars is proposing that California, a state that has served as an incubator for progressive policies on immigration, begin employing students in the country illegally at the 10 University of California campuses.
The proposal, which almost certainly would face significant political and legal challenges, calls for the state to defy current interpretations of a 1986 federal immigration law that prohibits U.S. employers from hiring immigrants without legal status. But a new legal analysis drafted at the University of California, Los Angeles, and reviewed in some of the nation’s top law schools argues that the law does not apply to states.
Backed Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law; Adam B. Cox of New York University Law School; and constitutional and immigration scholars at Cornell, Stanford and Yale, among other universities, the concept that those in the country unlawfully could be hired for state jobs could have implications for California, where the UC system is the third-largest employer, and for the broader population of 11 million people who live without legal permission in the United States.
Immigrant student leaders from UCLA presented a letter to the president of the University of California, Michael V. Drake, on Wednesday, formally proposing that the university system begin hiring students in the country illegally for a range of jobs, including as research and teaching assants and paid interns.
“At the University of California, students who cannot access DACA are being systematically denied opportunities afforded to their classmates, including employment opportunities that would enhance the research, education and public service mission of the university,” the letter said.
California, which has the largest population in the country of immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally, has a hory of resing federal immigration controls, issuing driver’s licenses to all state residents regardless of immigration status and offering in-state college tuition to students without legal status. It recently became the first state to offer state-funded health care to all low-income people. Several cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, have declared themselves as “sanctuary cities” that will not cooperate with federal efforts to deport people simply because of their immigration status.
Hiring immigrant students would go a step further, and critics said it would most likely lead to legal challenges, as well as potential conflicts with the federal government. The Biden adminration has tried to expand DACA protections and would be unlikely to take enforcement action, but a Republican adminration could take a much stricter approach, said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston.
“It’s all fun and games with the Biden adminration in town,” he said. “But in January 2025, if a Republican president takes office, California could be in for litigation and some ruinous fines.”
Congressional haggling over legislation to produce a solution has gone nowhere for 20 years, and attempts the Biden adminration to shore up the DACA program have been stymied in the courts. Under recent court rulings, those already enrolled in DACA are allowed to retain its protections, but no new enrollments are allowed, creating a growing class of young immigrants, many now of college age, who do not have the same rights as the aging “Dreamers.”
The class of young immigrants who grew up in the United States but are not eligible for DACA is expanding at the rate of 100,000 people each year. California alone is home to more than 44,000 college students who cannot apply. Another 27,000 are graduating from high schools in the state each year.
Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, said he began hearing last year from faculty about a worsening problem with the increase in the number of students without DACA protections — students who could not be paid to work as research assants or in other campus jobs.
Arulanantham’s team had already concluded that the federal law against hiring people without legal status did not bind states, and they began holding lening sessions with scholars across the country to vet their reasoning.
Twenty-six experts agreed, concluding in a legal analysis being released with the students’ letter Wednesday that when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, it did not curtail the states’ horic power to determine whom they could employ. The legal scholars also noted that the Supreme Court has repeatedly found that Congress has no power to regulate state governments in certain areas, such as employment, absent “clear language” to allow it.
“This proposal has been hiding in plain sight,” Arulanantham said. “For nearly 40 years, state entities thought they were bound the federal prohibition against hiring undocumented students when, in fact, they were not.”
Other legal experts said the argument might be a difficult one to make. “No one has read this statute like these professors have for all these years,” Blackman said.
Conservative critics said that hiring students without legal status would encourage more unauthorized immigration.
“Under the law, it is illegal to hire unauthorized aliens — and for good reason. Work opportunity is the No. 1 pull factor of illegal immigration,” said Lora Ries, director of the border security and immigration team at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former acting deputy chief of staff at the Homeland Security Department.
But the UCLA legal group has found substantial support within the university community.
“Some of the finest students in my career have been undocumented students. And yet I can’t hire them as researchers or teaching assants. This is not only detrimental to their education and career, but it negatively impacts the university as a whole,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, a research department focused on organized labor and labor rights.
Among them is Karely Amaya, 22, a graduate student in public policy who is among the organizers of the campaign.
“We have a window of opportunity here. All of these prominent legal scholars are backing us up,” said Amaya, who was born in Mexico and has been in the United States since she was 2.
“I have a job offer on the table. If we win, I can get hired and have my tuition covered,” she said in an interview. “In the meantime, I’m barely surviving. I’m patching together resources.”
Offering students the ability to work for their universities would not provide protection from deportation or change their legal immigration status. And it is too early to tell how the proposal will be received the UC president, individual university chancellors and the Board of Regents, a governor-appointed body that oversees the system.
“The University of California has long been committed to supporting our undocumented students,” Stett Holbrook, senior communications strateg for the UC president’s office, said in a statement. “These are complex issues that deserve careful and thoughtful review.”
The student organizers said they planned to mobilize students without legal status on all 10 UC campuses to attend meetings of the Board of Regents and push the issue with the UC president’s staff. They said the campaign would also target local and state elected officials who could exert pressure on the UC leadership.
Given the persent gridlock in Congress over DACA and other immigration legislation, immigrant student leaders said that seeking solutions at the state level was their only viable strategy.
“What are the changes we can make while we continue to fight for a permanent solution?” said Jeffry Umaña Muñoz, 20, a student leader who was brought to the United States from El Salvador at the age of 2.
After he gained admission to Harvard and Yale, in addition to UCLA, he chose the California school because he felt it would offer more support for immigrant students. But his educational experience would be diminished, he said, without the ability to legally work.
“Since we know DACA is headed to an end, Congress isn’t acting and Biden won’t take any meaningful action on immigration, this campaign came at the right moment for us,” he said.