Al's Opinions

There is a proposal in Congress to expand the guest worker program. In the same proposal there is a requirement for stricter enforcement of our immigration laws. Some see this proposal, or bill, as a political solution to the concern and disputacious comment about the six million (or is it twelve?) undocumented immigrants in this country. From what little I know about it, the bill is intended to placate both the right-wing advocates of rounding them up and sending them back and the business people who use these immigrants as a source of low-cost, unskilled, complacent workers.

Under the guest worker program, a person in Mexico, for example, comes to this country to work for a specific employer for a specific time period. The worker can not leave the specified employment to take a job with better pay or better working conditions. The guest worker is not represented by a union. The employer should under our laws provide safe working conditions and should pay the worker the wages due. Not all employers do these things. Our Republican business-friendly administration is not motivated to enforce the law on employers. Of course, if a guest worker does something to break his agreement, such as demonstrating against some employer abuse, he is summarily sent back to his own country.

At present the guest worker program affects only a small fraction of the immigrants. The administration proposes to enlarge it to cover all of the current immigrants that manage to enter the United States without proper visas. If that is to be done, the program must be changed to provide more choices for the guest workers. A guest worker should not be tied to a particular employer. Rather, the Department of Labor should make an estimate of the need for additional workers in the various industries that use immigrant workers and direct the Immigration Service to grant a suitable number of guest worker visas. These workers should then be free to choose among many employers.

Labels: guest worker program, immigration, undocumented workers

I don't pretend to have a solution to the problem posed by undocumented or "illegal" immigrants. I know that there is a lot of anger and frustration about the presence of undocumented immigrants, especially those from Mexico and other parts of Central America. Responding to this anger, our political leaders have done or tried to do some rather foolish and impractical things, such as:

• Deny driver's licenses to persons without Social Security numbers
• Build a high fence through the desert we share with Mexico
• Conduct unannounced sweeps through factories to round up persons who may be undocumented immigrants, mainly for the purpose of harassing them and intimidating other immigrants without papers
• Prevent such workers without papers from receiving emergency medical care
• Prevent their children from attending public schools
• Introduce punitive legislation in the federal Congress to make it a felony for a foreigner to be in the United States without a valid visa
• Demand that all six million or so (or whatever the number is) of the undocumented visitors be rounded up and shipped out of the country

There is lots of anger and resentment. It strikes me that the anger is associated with the visible presence of these workers, who are willing to take on jobs with low wages that native Americans are not interested in doing. I emphasize the phrase visible presence. It seems that most of us are happy to have these immigrants taking care of our lawns, serving us food in restaurants, making our beds in hotels, and other necessary but menial tasks. What we don't like is to be reminded of the presence of the people who do these things by finding them congregating in parking lots at Costco, Home Depot, and the like, waiting for contractors to come along and offer them jobs for the day. We believe in a society of equals and we don't like to be reminded that there are some members of our society who are less equal than others.

Labels: immigrants, middle-class anger, undocumented workers