[EternalVigilance]

Driver’s records and property ownership records have never been the province of the national government. Those functions have been exercised at the state and county level.

Can you point me to any portion of the U.S. Constitution which empowers Congress to pass laws dictating who may or may not work?

[muawiyah]

To start with 'Uniform law on naturalization' pretty much empowers the US government to figure out who shouldn't be here ~ that necessarily requires figuring out who should be here.

Then there's the "call out the militia" clause, and a number of others.

"Work" is a derivative of a number of other concepts ~ just one of the reasons it doesn't appear in the Constitution.

[srajan]

Fair point about federal authority.

So how would a patchwork of state by state laws work for employment authorization? Big business wants the cheapest labor and the unions want the most members. Neither group cares about displacing legal workers with illegal workers at low wages. What do we the people do, just watch our country go down the drain?