|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Immigration NewsIllegal Immigration
Guest Worker Fundamentals
By Mike Scruggs
Posted on: January 26, 2006
Government programs often have unintended results far beyond the imagination of their originators. However, guest-worker programs, such as the Bush Administration and two Senate bills now propose, have a track record both in the United States and Europe. That record strongly suggests that the potential for adverse and possibly even disastrous results is great.
Several Congressional Committees have studied guest-worker or similar programs in the past and strongly recommended against them. In 1997 the Commission on Immigration Reform, headed by the late Congresswoman, Barbara Jordan, identified illegal immigration as the most pressing problem of national immigration policy. That commission adamantly rejected guest-worker programs as a solution. Past guest-worker programs exacerbated rather than relieved immigration problems. The Commission specifically stated that a guest-worker program would be a “grievous mistake,” and gave powerful reasons for rejecting such programs.
1. Guest-worker programs have depressed the wages of American workers.
2. Those most adversely affected were the unskilled and thus poorest segment of the labor force.
3. Foreign guest-workers are often more exploitable than U.S. workers. They are less likely to complain of exploitive pay practices or unsafe working conditions.
4. The presence of large numbers of guest-workers in particular localities presents substantial costs in housing, healthcare, social services, education, and basic infrastructure that are borne by the broader community and even the federal government rather than by the employers who benefit from cheap labor.
5. Guest-worker programs also fail to reduce illegal immigration. In fact, they tend to encourage more illegal immigration. Guest-workers themselves often remain in the country permanently in violation of the conditions of their admission.
According to the investment firm of Bear Stearns and several other academic studies, illegal immigration has depressed the wages of U.S. workers four to six percent since 2000. This amounts to about $1600 per year per worker. This will not change with a guest-worker program. It will only make short-changing American workers to benefit employers of cheap foreign labor legal. A recent study by ESR Research Economics Consultants in Indianapolis indicated that this burden does fall more heavily on the poor. Their wages have been depressed 8.9 percent. But all wage levels have been affected from new college graduates to engineers and computer software analysts with fifteen or more years of experience. Illegal immigration has hurt American workers and their families. A guest-worker program may benefit some employers and financial institutions and some taxes may be collected that are not now being paid, but it will not benefit the common good. It flies in the face of justice to hurt many, especially the poor and middle class, for the profits of a few.
The guest-worker plans now before the U.S. Senate require the contracted workers to return to their home country after several years. Past experience has shown this sort of provision is impossible to enforce. Besides that, once these guest-workers have been in the U.S. for several years, there will be enormous political pressure to make their status permanent. In other words, guest-worker programs have a high probability of becoming guest-worker amnesty programs. Congress has given seven amnesties since 1986. But they are never called amnesties. Some euphemism is always invented to fool the voters.
Amnesties always bring millions of new illegal immigrants assured that illegal immigration will be rewarded with eventual amnesty.
One thorny issue that would make sending guest-workers home after a few years very difficult is birthright citizenship, so-called anchor babies. Once guest-workers have taken advantage of the opportunity to have a newborn child automatically become a U.S. citizen (usually at taxpayer expense), sending them home would become both difficult and unpopular.
Does anyone outside of a madhouse believe that many guest-workers would actually go home after two to six years? Are we talking pipe dreams, deliberate political deception, incredible naivety, or just lazy analysis? Let the reader study and decide.
According to Americans for Immigration Control, for every 100 illegal immigrants hired by U.S. employers, 65 American workers are displaced. Other studies show even higher job displacement ratios. Would this improve with a guest-worker program? Again, both experience and common sense dictate against a positive outcome. There is too much political pressure from big corporate and employer association donors for many politicians to resist rewarding such donors with an ever larger stream of cheap foreign labor.
Does anyone seriously believe that a guest-worker program could be kept small and limited? Experience and political reality suggest that guest-worker programs are very difficult to control and nearly impossible to limit. Furthermore, cheap labor is fatally addictive in a world economy that demands constant innovation. As we are already experiencing, falling wage rates will eventually strangle consumer demand. The ultimate two-prong result of this addiction to a steady stream of cheap labor will mean an economy at first stagnant and then steadily declining.
Several decades ago I visited two plants in the Netherlands and one in Germany that had just begun to hire guest-workers from Turkey and Yugoslavia. One reason for this was that German and Dutch welfare and unemployment benefits were so high that many workers found welfare more economical than work. But the usual lazy excuses were also heard, such as “These are jobs the Dutch won’t do,” and “These are jobs Germans don’t want.” Actually one of the main problems was that it was so much easier to hire Turks and Bosnians by the lot than to recruit Dutch and German workers. And once the guest-workers were hired, management felt no urgency for labor or engineering innovations. All this was exacerbated by the short-sighted social-welfare policies of the Dutch and German governments, but it was made worse by employer laziness and greed for ever more and easier to get cheap foreign labor.
The outcome of guest-worker programs in Europe can now be seen. It is ugly now and bodes horrendous evil in the future. The troubles of the Netherlands and Germany and the burning cars in France and Belgium ought to flash a huge warning to U.S. politicians eager to join their lot. Do these burning cars not register on their brains? We don’t have to speculate too much about the long-term outcomes of guest-worker addiction. Like an addiction, guest-worker programs have an almost unstoppable momentum. Once seduced by the siren call of maintaining profits by importing ever more and cheaper foreign labor, it is very difficult to recover. Economic, social, and political disaster will inch ever closer until inevitable. The record speaks for itself.
Very recently the U.S. House passed an excellent immigration reform bill, H.R. 4437, which promises border security and important internal enforcement of sanctions against employer hiring of illegal immigrants. Although there is much else that could be done to reform our immigration system, such as eliminating birthright citizenship and the chain-migration provisions of the current law, tacking on a guest-worker program to the House bill is likely to either kill immigration reform altogether or render it ineffective. We do not need the sort of “comprehensive” immigration reform that kills the good work of the U.S. House in H.R.4437 or renders it an ineffective sham. We have already had enough phony immigration reform.
One might ask, if we already have 34 million low-wage workers in the U.S., whose wages and job prospects are declining, and of whom some are experiencing the despair of hopeless poverty, why must we have even more? It is a corrupt addition that calls for bigger short-term profits for influential corporations at the expense of the public good and the despair and poverty of many of its most vulnerable citizens. It is also a short-sighted practice of economic capitalism that would severely damage the nation’s economy and even its political stability.
The battle for immigration reform in the Senate will be a battle for the common good against the elite corporate syndicates that are now benefiting from illegal foreign labor and who now insist that their unfair labor advantage and depredations on their fellow Americans and the public purse be made legal.
Thomas Jefferson once put it this way:
“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man
shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
Real immigration reform is urgently needed to correct a corrupt and out-of-control immigration system and to restore the confidence of the American people in their elected leaders. Guest-worker proposals should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
Valuable Reference and Suggested Reading:
Center for Immigration Studies (www.cis.org), Backgrounder, March 2004, Guestworker Programs: Lessons from the Past and Warnings for the Future by Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University.
Mike Scruggs is a retired financial consultant and corporate business executive. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BS from the University of Georgia. He is a USAF combat veteran of the Vietnam War, holding a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart. He was recently Chairman of the Board of a Classical Christian School and is a former Republican County Chairman. He writes and lives in Hendersonville, NC.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| |
|
