Expanding Guest Worker Program—a No Winner for Immigrants or the Nation

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/04/10/expanding-guest-worker-programa-no-winner-for-immigrants-or-the-nation/

Expanding Guest Worker Program—a No Winner for Immigrants or the Nation

by James Parks, Apr 10, 2007

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.

FULL story at link.

[papau]

1. The House's bi-partisan bill's "guest worker" is as far as I would go -

Germany's open guest worker program has caused major social problems, with economic problems stopped only because of very strong unions - But in the US unions are something every red blooded American thinks they do not need.