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Expanding Guest Worker Program—a No Winner for Immigrants or the Nation |
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In today’s Los Angeles Times, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, describe how temporary worker programs will negatively impact immigrant workers—and the nation.
Those programs
will assure a steady flow of cheap labor from essentially indentured workers too afraid of being deported to protest substandard wages, chiseled benefits and unsafe working conditions.
Such a system will create a disenfranchised underclass of workers. That is not only morally indefensible, it is economically nonsensical. We’ve had plenty of bad experiences with such shortsighted answers to a complicated problem.
The H-2A and H-2B visa programs bring in agricultural and other seasonal workers to pick crops, build houses and process seafood, among other jobs. Sweeney and Alvarado point out that workers in these programs typically borrow large amounts of money to pay travel expenses, fees and sometimes bribes to recruiters.
That means that before they even begin to work, they are indebted. They leave their families at home, and they are essentially “bound” to employers who can send them home on a whim and who do not have to prove a need to hire them in the first place.
A new study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, relates that it is not unusual for a Guatemalan worker to pay more than $2,500 in fees to obtain a seasonal guest worker position, about a year’s worth of income in Guatemala. And Thai workers have been known to pay as much as $10,000 for the chance to harvest crops in the orchards of the Pacific Northwest. Interest rates on the loans are sometimes as high as 20 percent a month. Homes and vehicles are required collateral.
The workers in these programs also receive little protection, if any. In late March, legislation was introduced to enhance protections for skilled guest workers. For more information on the legislation, click here.
The solution to the immigration crisis will require a new approach, Sweeney and Alvarado say. First, everyone who is admitted to work must immediately be on a track toward permanent residency or citizenship.
Other key reforms should include:
- Employers who can prove that they tried and failed to find U.S. workers should be able to hire foreign workers, but not under abusive conditions that have a negative effect on the wages and working conditions.
- Caps on the number of employment-based visas issued each year should be set by the U.S. Department of Labor based on economic indicators that establish the needs of particular industries, not by political compromise.
- Employers should not be allowed to recruit abroad, a practice that invites bribes, exorbitant fees and potential abuse. Instead, employers should be required to hire from applications filed by workers in their home countries through a computerized job bank.
- Foreign workers should enjoy the same rights and protections as U.S. workers, including freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.
6 Comments
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We should not reward those who came here illegally, whether it be for work or whatever, with permanent residency or citizenship.
Doing this only encourages more people to try to come. We should be working for them to have decent jobs in their home countries.
And American businesses are trying to comply with your wishes by closing US factories and starting new ones in third world countries. For example, Maytag, a very profitable US company, moved much of its manufacturing from Illinois to a plant in Mexico. So be careful for what you wish for.
Once this country starts enforcing its immigration laws and sends the illegal immigrants back to there own country, we then can concentrate on getting legal immigrants good paying jobs and good working conditions. I spent 35 years as a union member to help legal Americans, not illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants take good jobs from Americans and bring the wages down for the rest of us. As well, they bankrupt our social programs, meant for Americans.
I think the requirements you suggested for Immigration in this Article make a lot of sense,but sadly I think it’s wishful thinking. Corporate America just doesn’t get it!! We tried It before!! Free Labor just doesn’t work!
What about immigrants who have roots here in the states? Many of them have american spouses and american children, should they be rounded up and deported? We don’t need guest worker programs or authoritarian law inforcement. Immigrants do not set wages, and the 4.5% unemployment rate proves they are not “taking” good jobs from americans. The reason the bosses are able to lower wages is because the explotation of one group of workers hurts all of us. People, an injury to one is an injury to all! Unionism will not work without solidarity.
Eleven million “illegal” immigrants are not going to leave this country. There will never be enough police to get them out. We should remember our labor roots and help these people out. If organized labor turns our backs on these people, who are only trying to keep a roof over their families’ heads, shame on us. We need to help them get organized and demand a higher wage and benefits and help them become voting citizens. The Mexicans I have met have a much better sense of economic justice than a lot of the U.S. citizen brothers and sisters that I have met.