The informal economy includes work activities involving a limited number of workers, irregular working hours, income paid in cash and even not regulated by law. The gender binary is the classification of gender into distinct notions of feminine and masculine. Both the concepts of the informal economy and the gender binary are significant in the case of my research article because the exploitation of employers is made possible by gaps in the binary-imbued immigration policies that limit the employment of immigrant women and impose a hierarchical structure to women. They. The research questions I intend to investigate are: How has the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) affected the lives of immigrant women in the informal economy of the United States? How have immigration policies like IRCA failed to address (and, to some extent, cause) the oppression of immigrant women in the informal economy? Therefore, in an attempt to address these research questions, I will analyze two fundamental principles of the informal economy. IRCA through the work published by anthropologist Leo R. Chavez and associate professor of sociology and ethnic studies Estevan T. Flores in “In Defense of the Alien.” The IRCA was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on November 6, 1986. The IRCA has two main components: First, "undocumented immigrants, to be eligible for the legalization program, must have entered the United States before January 1, 1982". and second, “undocumented workers employed after November 6, 1986 (the date the IRCA became law) must be able to demonstrate to their employer that they are eligible to work.” This law favors employers, in a sense, since they do not face sanctions if their immigrant employees are hired before N... middle of paper... x. This comparison with male immigrants helps illustrate my argument that employer exploitation works to a different extent with female immigrants, as Prokhovnik emphasizes that “men deal in an ad hoc way” with the pressures of work versus women. women who face additional work, which includes mental or emotional work. However, since the focus of my article will be to address the conflicts faced by immigrant women, discussions regarding their male counterparts will only be considered as counterarguments. Furthermore, a discussion worth mentioning in my research article is simply the relationship between biological differences between men and women and the distribution of immigrant men and women in their respective informal economies, with the former typically involved in manual or hard labor while the latter last in the least physically demanding labor.