Andrea Batista Schlesinger

DMI on the SOTU: Guest worker programs

Guest workers programs threaten to institutionalize an underclass of workers with no labor protections, dragging the rest of American workers with them.

* President Bush's guest worker programs would institutionalize a two-tiered labor market, undermining middle-class wages and working conditions and restricting access to the American Dream. It's not that all guest worker programs are bad; it's that the President's proposal does little to strengthen workplace rights for immigrants and a great deal to undermine them. And when immigrants lack rights in the workplace, labor standards are driven down, and all working people have less opportunity to enter or remain part of the middle class.

On the plus side, those immigrant workers who participate in the guest worker would have legal status in this country, and their working conditions would thus be more open to enforcement of U.S. wage and hour laws, workplace safety standards and other labor regulations. By moving workers and workplaces out of the shadows, immigrants' rights in the workplace could be enhanced to some degree. However, this benefit is far outweighed by the fact that the President's proposal would put excessive power into the hands of employers, undermining the rights of immigrant workers and thus the strength of the middle class. And with the lack of opportunities for temporary workers to attain permanent status, Bush's plan threatens to create a program in which interchangeable workers shuttle in and out of the country with little incentive to improve their working conditions and little opportunity to establish themselves economically or to advance in the workplace.

The President's guest worker programs won't make much real progress; As long as a cheaper and more compliant pool of immigrant labor is available, employers will be less willing to hire U.S.-born workers if they demand better wages and working conditions, and therefore less likely to support those aspiring to a middle-class quality of life.

* A sound and successful immigration policy needs to do more for workers than what's suggested in the President's proposals. Eliminating the second-class labor market in this two-tiered system, allowing foreign and U.S.-born workers to compete on an even playing field with equal labor rights and making sure that employers cannot use deportation as a coercive tool in the labor market would strengthen the existing middle class and give both immigrants and U.S.-born workers trying to join the middle class a leg up.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 9:46 PM, Jan 31, 2006 in Immigration
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