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It is not only legal to ask if a person is legally entitled to work in a country; that information is required of every candidate for employment. An employer can get into plenty of trouble for hiring somebody who does not have legal permission to work in a country.
To illustrate the point, when I returned to the United States after over 20 years abroad, quite a few employers stated after hearing me speak that "we cannot sponsor immigrants," little suspecting that my accent came from living abroad, not from being a foreign national. I still recall with considerable glee the looks I got when I whipped out my US passport with my birthplace, North Carolina, emblazoned on the document. Anyone hearing me speak English would testify that nobody would suspect any link between Jesse Helms and me! However, they were well within their rights to ask for proof, which I provided without quarrel.
However, it is definitely illegal for an employer to ask questions regarding a person's ethnic origin, sexual orientation, marital status, age, and a list of other criteria that keeps changing. The law, however, is a paper tiger of sorts, because if a candidate goes to an interview, interviewers will invariably ask questions that will milk the candidate of information that would disclose this information, and if the candidate refuses to respond, he/she will be rejected with the claim that it "wasn't a good fit." Discrimination is still a fact of life, law or no law. Nobody has to say it's all right, good, or otherwise; the reality is what it is.
- Maury
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