Cite as: 535 U. S. 137 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
spondent 17-24. The Court of Appeals agreed with this view. 237 F. 3d, at 642-646. Another Court of Appeals, however, agrees with Hoffman, and concludes that Sure-Tan simply meant what it said, i. e., that any alien who is "not lawfully entitled to be present and employed in the United States" cannot claim backpay. See Del Rey Tortilleria, Inc. v. NLRB, 976 F. 2d 1115, 1118-1121 (CA7 1992); Brief for Petitioner 7-20. We need not resolve this controversy. For whether isolated sentences from Sure-Tan definitively control, or count merely as persuasive dicta in support of petitioner, we think the question presented here better analyzed through a wider lens, focused as it must be on a legal landscape now significantly changed.
The Southern S. S. Co. line of cases established that where the Board's chosen remedy trenches upon a federal statute or policy outside the Board's competence to administer, the Board's remedy may be required to yield. Whether or not this was the situation at the time of Sure-Tan, it is precisely the situation today. In 1986, two years after Sure-Tan, Congress enacted IRCA, a comprehensive scheme prohibiting the employment of illegal aliens in the United States. § 101(a)(1), 100 Stat. 3360, 8 U. S. C. § 1324a. As we have previously noted, IRCA "forcefully" made combating the employment of illegal aliens central to "[t]he policy of immigration law." INS v. National Center for Immigrants' Rights, Inc., 502 U. S. 183, 194, and n. 8 (1991). It did so by establishing an extensive "employment verification system," § 1324a(a)(1), designed to deny employment to aliens who (a) are not lawfully present in the United States, or (b) are not lawfully authorized to work in the United States, § 1324a(h)(3).3 This verification system is critical to the
3 For an alien to be "authorized" to work in the United States, he or she must possess "a valid social security account number card," § 1324a(b)(C)(i), or "other documentation evidencing authorization of employment in the United States which the Attorney General finds, by regulation, to be acceptable for purposes of this section," § 1324a(b)(C)(ii). See
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