There was something disquieting about this level of intrusion into the decisions of business owners, even if it had precedents in the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration and in the Civil Rights Act, particularly in affirmative action, which had by then been up and running for more than a decade. That turned out to be the core of the problem. The parts of the law that encouraged immigration—the amnesty, the processing of working papers—were unpopular, but their introduction went smoothly. They were real. The parts that retarded immigration—the border controls, the employer
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