by James Ridgeway
Published on Saturday, May 26, 2007 by Mother Jones

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.

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James Ridgeway is the Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones.