Employer Sanctions Violations: Toward a Dialectical Model of White-Collar Crime

This article examines violations of the employer sanctions provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 as a case study in white-collar crime. Using interviews with 103 “immigrant-dependent” employers in three southern California counties, the study reveals that employer sanctions violations are numerous and that violators feel relatively protected from detection and punishment. It then traces both the prevalence of this crime and the impunity felt by violators beyond a simple cost/benefit analysis on the part of employers to the nature of the law itself. The study shows how legislative and implementation processes produced a low-risk crime, indicating that the shape the law took from the beginning ensured that its effect would be primarily symbolic and that violations would be widespread. This pattern suggests that the symbolic nature of the law and subsequent violations are dialectically linked and that both stem from contradictions inherent in immigration lawmaking. The article concludes that lawmaking and lawbreaking, while analytically distinct processes, must be seen as connecting pieces of the same theoretical puzzle.