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Guest-Worker Programs Are a Dead End
By Mark Krikorian
Human Events
Online
March 24, 2006
Many Republican politicians have a weakness for guest workers. After all, a
"temporary" foreign worker program seems like the ideal way to reconcile
competing interests: It appears to satisfy the voracious appetite of business
for cheap, servile labor but without stoking public concern over fiscal costs
and social disruption.
President Bush and most Senate Republicans, including John McCain and Arlen
Specter, have backed guest-worker proposals ranging from the huge to the
unlimited. Something of the sort is likely to be included if the Senate manages
to pass an immigration bill this year, though the companion bill passed by the
House of Representatives in December does not contain such a program.
Well, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Far from being
the silver bullet that promoters imagine, guest-worker programs are a dead end,
both morally and practically, and the sooner lawmakers reject this approach to
immigration, the better.
First, an important distinction: Much of the current debate in Congress is about
using a guest-worker program as the means of legalizing the 12 million illegals
already in the country. In other words, give them amnesty by re-labeling them as
"temporary" workers in order to launder their status and make them legal. The
guest-worker programs in this case are merely disguises for amnesty and must be
debated in that context.
Immoral Premise
But most of the proposals before the Senate would also put in place mechanisms
to import new workers from abroad, and this is what needs more scrutiny.
Assuming there were no illegal aliens here at all to amnesty, would guest-worker
programs then be advisable?
No. To begin with, they are founded on an immoral premise. Workers are not
merely factors of production, but are human beings, created by God, and
possessed of all the attributes, positive and negative, of our stiff-necked
species.
Henry Ford once asked, not regarding immigration, "How come when I need a pair
of hands in the factory, I always get a human being as well?" Likewise, after it
became clear that Germany's post-war guest-worker program had failed, one
observer noted ruefully, "We asked for workers, but they sent us men."
Of course, workers are always men (and women) -- this is why one's views on the
admission of inanimate objects (trade) have no necessary connection to one's
views on the admission of human beings (immigration). Nonetheless, guest-worker
supporters are usually free-traders as well, because they view foreign labor as
merely another economic input, to be used and disposed of like any other
resource.
Two Models
Throughout our nation's history there's been a tension between the two models of
immigration -- one providing for the admission of free labor (whether in large
numbers or small), the other based on the importation of captive labor, whether
as indentured servants, African slaves, 19th-Century Chinese contract workers,
or Mexicans in the Bracero program. Congress is once again facing a choice
between free labor and servile labor, and the choice it makes will echo for
generations.
A related problem with guest-worker programs is that they subvert the republican
virtues that underlie a free society by promoting a master-servant environment.
This is what the talk of "jobs Americans won't do" is really about. It's not
that our nimble and inventive free market cannot respond to evanescent labor
shortages, but rather that certain jobs are considered by lawmakers to be
beneath the dignity of an American, and therefore foreigners must be procured to
do the work. Improbable as it is that something could be beneath the dignity of
a politician, such a perspective moves us dangerously in the direction of Saudi
Arabia, a society few Americans would want to emulate.
The good news is that this anti-republican view of work has not yet taken root
in the United States. A new study by my Center for Immigration Studies finds
that native-born Americans make up the overwhelming majority of workers in
virtually all occupations. In only three of the hundreds upon hundreds of
occupations classified by the Census Bureau do the foreign-born make up even a
bare majority of workers. In other words, there is no job that Americans won’t
do.
The bad news is that the mass importation of cheap foreign labor already seems
to be undermining our commitment to the virtue of work, a process that can only
be accelerated by a guest-worker program. The same report found that, as
immigration has increased, native-born low-skilled workers (those most directly
affected by foreign-labor programs) are increasingly dropping out of the labor
force, and the tendency seems most pronounced among teenagers.
Repeated Failures
In addition to their moral hazards, guestworker programs just can't work even on
their own terms. Every guest-worker program -- everywhere -- has failed. In
every instance, they lead to large-scale permanent settlement, they spur
parallel flows of illegal immigration, and they distort the development of the
industries in which the foreign workers are concentrated.
To take the first point, the President asserted two years ago that his
immigration proposal "expects temporary workers to return permanently to their
home countries after their period of work in the United States has expired."
Policymakers would do well to familiarize themselves with the first rule of
guest-worker programs: There's nothing as permanent as a temporary worker. Once
they’ve worked here for a while and learned the ropes, all the incentives and
gimmicks in the world aren't going to prevent large numbers of foreign workers
from settling down.
The Bracero program, for instance, dramatically increased the number of Mexicans
living permanently in the United States. During the 22 years the program lasted
(1942-1964), annual Mexican immigration -- permanent immigration, leading to
citizenship -- grew from little more than 2,000 to as high as 61,000, for total
permanent settlement of more than a half-million Mexicans. This compares with a
total of only a million or so Mexican men who actually participated in the
Bracero program.
Germany had the same experience with its post-war guest-worker program for
Turkish and other workers. When it was ended after the 1973 Oil Shock, the
government thought that the "temporary" workers would leave, because of
assurances that there was "circular" movement of such people, going back and
forth between Germany and Turkey (the same story that today's guestworker
boosters are telling about Mexicans). Instead, the "temporary" workers not only
stayed, they brought their families, too, causing Germany's foreign population
to nearly double over the next 25 years.
Slowing Innovation
Nor do guest-worker programs achieve their goal of replacing illegal
immigration. During the Bracero program, for instance, there were 4.6 million
Bracero admissions, but also 5.3 million Mexican illegal-alien apprehensions
(both numbers include people entering multiple times). What's more, the
immigration momentum created by the Bracero program has increased the
Mexican-born population here from less than 600,000 in 1960 to some 11 million
today, half of them illegal aliens. In the words of economist Philip Martin, one
of the foremost experts in the field: "Rather than work temporarily and go home,
large numbers of Mexican guest workers over time settled and served as magnets
for further immigration, sparking one of the largest migrations in human
history."
Guest-worker programs also have the perverse effect of distorting the industries
in which the foreign workers are concentrated. The artificial superabundance of
cheap labor slows the process of technological innovation and productivity
increases because it's no longer economically rational for employers to invest
in labor-saving machinery and techniques. To look yet again at our previous
experiment with guest workers, we see that the end of the Bracero program
sparked a period of significant agricultural mechanization, as farmers invested
in higher-productivity methods of harvesting fruits and vegetables.
In short, guest-worker programs are both immoral and unworkable. But their
appeal is enduring, because they can satisfy the immediate economic demands of
an important constituency while pretending not to have any adverse consequences
on the rest of society. Our country has too often succumbed to this temptation
for policymakers to be able to claim ignorance of the guaranteed outcome of
another experiment in servile foreign labor.
Mark Krikorian is Executive Director of the
Center for Immigration Studies.
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