National Origin Discrimination and Immigration-Related Retaliation in California
California law prohibits employers from discriminating against workers based on where they come from — and separately prohibits employers from using immigration status as a weapon against workers who assert their rights. These protections exist because the workforce that built California includes millions of people whose vulnerability to exploitation is greatest when employers believe the law does not reach them.
An employee is passed over for a promotion because of an accent. A worker reports unpaid wages and the employer threatens to call immigration authorities. A job applicant is asked where they are “really from.” A long-tenured employee is subjected to comments about their country of origin, their food, their English proficiency, their cultural practices — comments that the speaker treats as observations but that function as hostility.
California law addresses each of these scenarios with specific and overlapping protections. National origin discrimination is prohibited by FEHA as a core protected category. Immigration-related retaliation is separately prohibited by statutes designed to prevent employers from exploiting workers’ immigration status to suppress legal claims. Together, these protections establish that the rights of California workers do not depend on where they were born or how they came to be here.
National origin discrimination under FEHA
FEHA prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of national origin and ancestry. Government Code section 12940. The protection covers every aspect of the employment relationship — hiring, firing, promotion, compensation, job assignments, and working conditions — and applies to employers with five or more employees.
“National origin” encompasses the country or region from which a person or their ancestors came, as well as the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic characteristics associated with that origin. It includes, but is not limited to: the employee’s birthplace, ancestry, native language, accent, surname, and cultural practices. Discrimination based on any of these characteristics is discrimination based on national origin.
Language and accent. An employer that takes adverse action because of an employee’s accent — denying a promotion, restricting customer-facing assignments, or terminating the employee — has engaged in national origin discrimination unless the accent materially interferes with the ability to perform the job’s essential functions. An accent that is noticeable but does not impede communication is not a legitimate basis for adverse action. Similarly, an employer that imposes an English-only policy in the workplace must demonstrate that the restriction is justified by business necessity and is narrowly tailored — a blanket prohibition on speaking other languages, applied during breaks or in casual conversation, is presumptively discriminatory under California law. Government Code section 12951.
The CROWN Act and cultural expression. The CROWN Act, enacted in 2019 as SB 188, amended FEHA to include traits historically associated with race — including hair texture and protective hairstyles — within the definition of race discrimination. While principally aimed at racial discrimination, the protections overlap with national origin in cases where hairstyles, grooming practices, or cultural dress are associated with a particular ethnic or national heritage.
Immigration-related retaliation
California has enacted specific protections against employers who use — or threaten to use — a worker’s immigration status as a tool of coercion. These protections are critical because they address a dynamic that would otherwise render other employment protections meaningless for undocumented workers and workers with precarious immigration status.
Labor Code section 1019 prohibits an employer from engaging in, or directing another person to engage in, an unfair immigration-related practice against any person for the purpose of retaliating against the person for exercising a right protected under the Labor Code or by a local ordinance. An “unfair immigration-related practice” includes: threatening to file or filing a report with immigration authorities; threatening to contact or contacting immigration authorities; or using the federal E-Verify system to check the employment authorization of a person at a time or in a manner not required by federal law.
The statute is direct: an employer that threatens to report a worker to Immigration and Customs Enforcement because the worker complained about unpaid wages, filed a workers’ compensation claim, or reported unsafe working conditions has violated section 1019. The threat need not be carried out. The threat itself is the violation.
Labor Code section 244 further provides that immigration status is irrelevant to the enforcement of state labor laws. All protections of the Labor Code — minimum wage, overtime, meal and rest breaks, workplace safety, anti-retaliation provisions — apply to every worker regardless of immigration status. An employer cannot defend against a wage claim by arguing that the worker was not authorized to work in the United States.
Civil Code section 3339 provides that in any civil action for damages arising from employment, a person’s immigration status is irrelevant to the merits of the claim and is not admissible to reduce the amount of damages. This provision prevents employers from arguing that an undocumented worker’s damages should be reduced because they could not have continued working legally.
How national origin discrimination manifests
National origin discrimination operates through many of the same mechanisms as other forms of employment discrimination — pretextual terminations, biased hiring decisions, unequal discipline — but it also takes forms specific to the characteristic.
Accent and language bias. An employer promotes employees who speak “unaccented” English and passes over equally or more qualified employees whose accents reflect a non-English-speaking background. The employer does not articulate a business necessity for accent-free speech — the preference is cultural, not functional.
Stereotyping and assumptions. An employer assumes that an employee of a particular national origin is less educated, less ambitious, less capable of leadership, or more suited to manual labor. These assumptions, when they drive employment decisions, are discrimination — regardless of whether the employer is consciously aware of the bias.
Hostile environment. An employee is subjected to comments, jokes, or slurs about their national origin, their country of origin’s politics or culture, their immigration status, their food, or their religious practices as associated with their ethnicity. As with other forms of harassment, the conduct must be severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile work environment, but a single severe incident — a supervisor’s explicit ethnic slur directed at the employee — can suffice.
Document abuse. An employer demands more or different documents than required by federal law (Form I-9) during the hiring process, based on the employee’s appearance, accent, or apparent national origin. Requesting additional documentation from employees who “look” or “sound” foreign, while accepting standard documents from others, is a form of national origin discrimination and may also violate federal anti-discrimination provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Protections for all workers
The principle that animates California’s immigration-related employment protections is that labor rights attach to work, not to status. A worker who is undocumented has the same right to be paid minimum wage as a citizen. A worker on a temporary visa has the same right to a workplace free from harassment as a permanent resident. A worker who lacks employment authorization has the same right to report unsafe conditions without retaliation.
This principle is not merely aspirational. It is enforced through specific statutes with specific remedies. An employer that exploits a worker’s immigration vulnerability — by underpaying them, by subjecting them to unsafe conditions, by retaliating when they complain — faces liability under the same statutes that would apply if the worker held a United States passport.
The practical consequence is that immigration status should never be a reason to tolerate unlawful working conditions, and it should never be a barrier to seeking legal recourse. The law is designed to ensure that the workers most vulnerable to exploitation have the same access to its protections as everyone else.
If you have experienced discrimination because of your national origin, your accent, your ancestry, or your cultural identity — or if your employer has used your immigration status to threaten or retaliate against you for asserting your rights — California law provides specific and enforceable protections. Those protections apply to you regardless of your immigration status.
This article is general information about California law and is not legal advice. Every situation turns on its particular facts.