(José Niño, Headline USA) Illegal aliens attending schools in the University of California system are demanding administrators bow to a court ruling and hand illegal immigrant students access to on campus jobs, according to a report from The College Fix.
The Daily Bruin reports that California’s Supreme Court refused to overturn an appeals court ruling from last October declaring the UC system “cannot bar undocumented students from holding on-campus jobs” and that its “current hiring policies discriminate based on immigration status,” as cited by The College Fix.
That activist ruling directly contradicts Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) own veto of Assembly Bill 2586 two years ago, legislation that would have “allowed undocumented students equal access to campus jobs at public universities.” Even Newsom, no stranger to pro-illegal alien policies, balked at the legal exposure, citing concerns about “complying with federal law, including potential criminal and civil liability for staff who hire undocumented students,” per The College Fix.
Undeterred, California Democrats are pushing Assembly Bill 713, now parked in the State Senate Appropriations Committee, which would forbid public universities “from disqualifying a student from being hired for an employment position due to the student’s failure to provide proof of federal work authorization.” The bill goes even further, instructing schools “to treat a specified prohibition in federal law on hiring undocumented noncitizens as inapplicable because that provision does not apply to any branch of state government,” a provision The College Fix emphasized in its coverage.
Immigrant rights activists claim the UC system is dragging its feet and defying the court’s order. UC officials, however, insist the ruling doesn’t “mandate the UC to hire undocumented students,” pointing out the system already employs illegal immigrant students through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, per The College Fix.
UC has echoed Newsom’s own defense, arguing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 bars it from hiring workers who are in the country illegally. The IRCA, signed by President Reagan, paired new employer sanctions and I-9 work-authorization checks with a legalization program that granted legal status to roughly 3 million illegal immigrants who had resided in the United States since before 1982.
A previous College Fix report noted that the appellate court itself conceded its decision “does not require the University to take any specific action, let alone one that will necessarily place the University community at risk.”
Ahilan Arulanantham, faculty co-director of UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, isn’t buying that excuse. He insists UC “is required to change its policy” and argues the 1986 federal law “does not specifically designate government entities as ’employers,'” according to The College Fix.
“As of now, their policy is literally identical to the policy that the court struck down,” Arulanantham said, per The College Fix. “They have to make a change at some point reasonably soon.”
Senior legal fellows from the Center for Immigration Studies and the Heritage Foundation have torched the California court’s decision, as The College Fix reported.
George Fishman of the Center for Immigration Studies predicted the ruling won’t survive federal scrutiny, telling The College Fix that “in the end, federal courts will rule that IRCA does indeed apply to States as employers, just as Congress intended in 1986.” Heritage’s Zack Smith was even more direct, stating plainly that “federal law, which trumps any state law to the contrary, prohibits any employer from hiring illegal aliens.”
Smith, a former Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Florida, has previously slammed the underlying decision as “another absurd ruling by activist judges that makes a mockery of the law,” per The College Fix’s prior reporting.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
