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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Attention Immigrants: Thanks for Your Hard Work. Now Leave. Attention Immigrants: Thanks for Your Hard Work. Now Leave. What could be better for business than a workforce that toils for next to nothing, drives down wages for everyone else, can't protest or unionize, then goes away when you're done with them? Your guide to the guest worker program. James Ridgeway May 25 , 2007 Key to the Bush administration's approach to immigration reform is the controversial guest worker program, which preserves the flow of cheap, low-skilled labor to American businesses while limiting the potential costs to employers and taxpayers. Under the program, there will be no children to educate (since guest workers won't be allowed to bring their families with them), no old-age entitlements to dole out (since workers will have to return home after working here for a maximum of six years), not even any health care to pay for (since these low-wage workers will be required to purchase health insurance). The very existence of this program as a central tenet of the Kennedy-Kyl legislation, the bi-partisan immigration compromise that has drawn attacks from the left and right and inspired some of the most overwrought rhetoric in recent memory, points to the essential hypocrisy of the anti-immigrant stance. It appears their goal is not to keep out immigrants, who are indispensable to the U.S. economy, but rather to control and exploit them more effectively. Why give them the opportunity to become citizens—or even permanent residents—if we can get what we need from them and then send them packing? Though it's been cast by the Bush administration as a novel way to solve the nation's immigration problem, guest worker programs are nothing new in the United States. In fact, such programs have a uniformly sordid history that goes back nearly a century. "Emergency" guest worker programs were launched in response to labor shortages during both World War I and World War II and lingered long after the troops had returned home. At its peak in the 1950s, the notoriously exploitative Bracero Program (bracero translates to unskilled laborer) imported nearly a half-million temporary agricultural workers from Mexico. In its concise history of guest worker programs, the Center for Immigration Reform notes: "Citizen farmworkers in the Southwest simply could not compete with braceros. The fact that braceros were captive workers who were totally subject to the unilateral demands of employers made them especially appealing to many employers. It also led to extensive charges of abuse of workers by employers as most of the provisions for the protection of braceros' wage rates and working conditions were either ignored or circumvented." What could be better for business than a workforce that works for next to nothing, drives down wages for everyone else, can't protest or unionize, then goes away when you’re done with them? As currently envisioned, the guest worker program would grant immigrant-workers two-year visas that are renewable three times (provided they return to their home countries in between each two-year stint). The original Kennedy-Kyl proposal estimated that 3.6 million guest workers could be employed in the U.S. within a decade. Whether that target remains viable after the Senate and House get through tearing the bill apart is another matter altogether. Just yesterday, the Senate fought off an amendment, by a one vote margin, that sought to end the guest worker program after five years—this only after Ted Kennedy appealed to Senator Daniel Akaka, the Hawaii Democrat, to change his vote. The Senate also defeated an amendment that aimed to kill the part of the bill that would give illegal aliens who entered this country before January 1, 2007 the right to apply for an eight-year visa. As it stands, liberal Democrats, led by California's Barbara Boxer and South Dakota's Byron Dorgan, want to kill the guest worker provision outright, and they are joined in this sentiment by organized labor and most immigrants’ rights groups. But since they don't have the votes, they keep hacking away at the program piecemeal. After losing a vote earlier this week to axe the program, they succeeded Wednesday in reducing its size, from 400,000 workers to 200,000, in a bipartisan vote of 74 to 24 that also included concessions to Republicans, including a measure proposed by South Carolina's Lindsey Graham that requires mandatory prison sentences for illegal immigrants who are caught re-entering the country. Some immigration advocates seem ready to overlook the program's obvious flaws, viewing it as a small price to pay in exchange for the legislation’s promise to grant legal status to the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants now living in the United States, provided they jump through the required hoops. (The legalization plan, one of the bill's most controversial provisions, roundly condemned by some Republicans as providing amnesty to illegals, survived a challenge in the Senate on Thursday.) But if we're letting them stay, it's not because we're doing illegal immigrants a favor, it’s because we couldn't survive a day without them. These 12 million undocumented workers, who are for the most part employed, are only filling an obvious need. They are vital to the profits of American agribusiness (which also stands to be a primary beneficiary of the guest worker program) and form the backbone of the low-cost workforce in the service industries. (They are actively sought out by American companies for the purpose of breaking unions.) They also serve in large numbers in the U.S. military. Not only do these undocumented immigrants fight our wars, grow our food, care for our children and elderly, and serve us in a hundred ways every day, but they have also become an integral cog in American economic growth. According to a February 2007 study by New York's Center for an Urban Future, immigrants are more likely to be self-employed than non-immigrants, spurring growth in new businesses from food manufacturing to health care. "Immigrant entrepreneurs are now the entrepreneurial sparkplugs of cities," according to Jonathan Bowles, the Center’s director. "While immigrants have a long history of starting businesses in the U.S., their contributions have grown in recent years thanks to an explosion of immigration and their high rates of business formation. They are an incredible asset for cities that has only begun to be tapped for economic development," Bowles said. It may, in fact, be the very success of recent immigrants that has some people nervous. It's one thing to have them picking artichokes or cleaning bedpans, and another to have them nipping at the heels of the already insecure and debt-ridden middle class. This, again, speaks to the backhanded appeal of the guest worker program, which promises to keep immigrants in their place—and can always be expanded to meet the demands of various low-wage industries. James Ridgeway is the Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones.
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#2. To: Zipporah (#0)
This is such a thought-provoking and reasonable demonstration, it's really giving me second thoughts. I am thinking of allowing our maid to settle on our property and maybe raise her own family in the basement or maybe in the dog house. It would be cruel and unfair not to give her unlimited use of our pool and jacuzzi, after all the work that she performed. That would be only fair, if I had a maid. My wife an my kids were laughing when we saw some diversity guy on the teevee, explaining that it would be unacceptable not to have 'a citizenship path' for the temporary guest workers. They were laughing because I challenged them to explain the logic of it all.
Interesting how the far left and the far right are in agreement on illegal immigration.. of course they advocate it with a different spin.. one takes the philantropic position.. the other takes a rather condescending point of view.. that is they see the illegals as pack animals.. work that Americans wont do.. but both have the same objective.. which of course points yet again that we do not have a a two party system.. both are sides of the same coin.
I've been saying for a long time that the guest-worker programs and not only that the work-visa programs are nothing but indentured servant programs. They're policies of government that provide to business compromised people who are in fact semi-slaves. We have millions of people working in the US on these work-visa programs like H1-b & L-1. Many of the foreigners who took these jobs have concluded that America is a bad place to work because business treats them badly. The reputation America is gaining among the high-tech workers of the world is that this is a bad place to work. They work for years at wages they know are suppressed, they're taken advantage of, they're exploited by managers. If you've every worked a high-tech job especially one requiring creativity & talent, then you likely know what I mean. American managers love to exploit talented high-tech people, take credit for their work and not reward the person who produced. and with these foreigners who have reduced rights it is easier for the greedy managers to exploit them. We have a lot of greedy managers in our country. And after these workers do this for years, then they try to get a permanent green card and path to citizenship and they see that the US bureaucracy drags its feet and is slow. The H1-b is only supposed to have to work as an indentured servant for 6 years and then get green card. But the bureaucracy processes the application so slowly that it normally takes 7-8 years and sometimes 9. Imagine being told you can work for 6 years at reduced status and then be a free person after that, then the bureaucracy jerks you around. This happens to almost all of them. and they talk. the reputation that America is getting among them is negative. With this new guest worker program, they're just going to push the workers into the ground. It is completely un-american and anti-american both. It is exactly the same as the King of England in the 1600's developing the original indentured servant program to acquire labor for companies in America. That was the pre-cursor for the slavery institution. Back prior to 1650 there were many blacks and whites who came to america (some voluntarilly some not) to work as indentured servants. Their labor was owned by their sponsor for 7 years and then they were free after that. I don't know exactly what year they made all the blacks slaves, but originally many of them were only indentured servants and did become free after 7 years. I think digging ditches & doing manual labor are very good jobs. I hate those who want these jobs reserved for foreigners.
I was taught there is no honest job, or worker, that should be looked down upon.
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