Monograph presenting a survey of management attitudes toward the employment of irregular migrants and the need for a migrant worker programme in respect of the agricultural sector, Hotel industry and the electronics industry in the USA - considers the need for guest workers in view of migration policy and short term labour demand, and concludes with disagreement as regards lower labour costs of undocumented workers. Diagrams, photographs and references.
With the vow to protect U.S. jobs by cracking down on immigration, the current federal anti-immigrant agenda appears to limit any opportunities for comprehensive immigration reform. To the extent that such an agenda interferes with their low-wage immigrant workforces, many employers will likely turn to the expansion of guest worker programs as a way to obtain immigrant workers within a controlled migration program. The justification offered for such programs is that low-wage foreign guest workers are an easy way to fill “bad jobs” that no U.S. workers want. This Article challenges this commonly accepted narrative and explores how such programs create a cycle that fuels both U.S. worker shortages and the necessity for guest workers. In so doing, it demonstrates that guest worker programs are harmful to all low-wage workers.Scholars have amply criticized guest worker programs because they impair the rights of guest workers and contravene liberal egalitarian principles of social membership. These criticisms about how foreign workers are treated on U.S. soil, however, have been insufficient to tip the balance against these programs. What is missing from this debate is an attempt to understand why guest worker programs persist despite their many flaws. The programs' legal framework broadly delegates power to employers to create U.S. worker shortages and to demand highly productive and compliant guest workers in the alternative. Cultural narratives operate to mask this reality by tying these trends to cultural explanations about low-wage workers. Together they create a climate that is favorable to guest worker programs.This Article's close examination of these problems exposes why guest worker programs should not be a ready solution for immigration reform. It suggests a new approach to challenging such programs by broadening the lens to consider the plight of the U.S. worker. My purpose is not to pit U.S. workers against guest workers, but rather to offer a viewpoint that might connect normally disparate groups in unified opposition to guest worker programs. The U.S. worker can help shift the legal and social norms surrounding such programs by revealing how the fate of all low-wage workers is interconnected with government-enabled degradation of low-wage jobs. This approach thus suggests new advocacy strategies to eliminate guest worker programs in their current format in order to protect the dignity of all low-wage workers.
To help our economy move forward we must ensure, first of all, all American workers have the tools they need to compete for good-paying jobs here at home. Additionally, we must do all that is reasonably possible to ensure employers are searching far and wide for American workers. Guest worker programs include a number of provisions intended to protect domestic workers. We do realize, however, there are times when the supply of domestic labor falls short of demand. For a variety of reasons and despite their best efforts, some employers simply cannot hire the workforce necessary to run their businesses. Guest workers help fill that void. The Immigration Nationality Act currently includes several guest worker visa programs, such as the H-1B program for highly skilled workers and the H-2B program for temporary non-agricultural workers. The law allows foreign workers to be admitted for a specific period of time and purpose. Under the H-2B program specifically, guest workers can enter the United States for up to 10 months and their stay can be extended up to 3 consecutive years.
Beside the Golden Door: U.S. Immigration Reform in a New Era of Globalization proposes a radical overhaul of current immigration policy designed to strengthen economic competitiveness and long-run growth. Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny outline a plan that favors employment-based immigration over family reunification, making work-based visas the rule, not the exception. They argue that immigration policy should favor high-skilled workers while retaining avenues for low-skilled immigration; family reunification should be limited to spouses and minor children; provisional visas should be the norm; and quotas that lead to queuing must be eliminated.
Guest worker programs allow migrants to work abroad legally, and offer benefits to workers, firms, and nations. Guest workers are typically authorized to work only in specific labor markets, and are sponsored by, and must work for, a specific firm, making it difficult for guest workers to switch employers. Critics argue that the programs harm host country citizens and permanent residents ("existing workers"), and allow employers to exploit and abuse vulnerable foreign-born workers. Labor market institutions, competitive pressures, and firm strategy contribute to the effects of migration that occur through guest worker programs.
Political scientist Immanuel Ness thoroughly investigates the use of guest workers in the United States, the largest recipient of migrant labor in the world. Ness argues that the use of migrant labor is increasing in importance and represents despotic practices calculated by key U.S. business leaders in the global economy to lower labor costs and expand profits under the guise of filling a shortage of labor for substandard or scarce skilled jobs. Drawing on ethnographic field research, government data, and other sources, Ness shows how worker migration and guest worker programs weaken the power of labor in both sending and receiving countries. His in-depth case studies of the rapid expansion of technology and industrial workers from India and hospitality workers from Jamaica reveal how these programs expose guest workers to employers' abuses and class tensions in their home countries while decreasing jobs for American workers and undermining U.S. organized labor. Where other studies of labor migration focus on undocumented immigrant labor and contend immigrants fill jobs that others do not want, this is the first to truly advance understanding of the role of migrant labor in the transformation of the working class in the early twenty-first century. Questioning why global capitalists must rely on migrant workers for economic sustenance, Ness rejects the notion that temporary workers enthusiastically go to the United States for low-paying jobs. Instead, he asserts the motivations for improving living standards in the United States are greatly exaggerated by the media and details the ways organized labor ought to be protecting the interests of American and guest workers in the United States.
The introductory chapter of this volume on immigration into the United States is entitled "Overview: A Time of Reform and Reappraisal" (D. Simcox), and it introduces the topics of reform, legal and illegal immigration, the effect of immigration on the labor market and social welfare, and immigration enforcement methods that are discussed in the other 15 articles. The articles include: "Network Recruitment and Labor Displacement" (P. Martin); "Seeking Common Ground for Blacks and Immigrants" (J. J. Jackson); "Hispanic Americans: The Debased Coin of Citizenship" (R. Estrada); "Ellis Island: The Building of a Heritage" (E. Sevareid); "Immigration and the National Interest" (O. Graham, Jr.); "A Kind of Discordant Harmony: Issues in Assimilation" (G. Bikales and G. Imhoff);"Immigration, Population Change, and California's Future" (L. Bouvier); "Mexicans: California's Newest Immigrants" (The Urban Institute); "Immigration in the Golden State: The Tarnished Dream" (R. Marshall); "Mexico's Dilemma: Finding a Million Jobs a Year" (D. Simcox); "Employer Sanctions in Europe: Deterrence without Discrimination" (M. Miller); "Europe's Lessons for America" (M. R. Lovell, Jr.); "Principles vs. Expediency in U.S. Immigration Policy" (L. Fuchs); "The U.S. Refugee Industry: Doing Well by Doing Good" (B. Zall); and "How Many Americans?" (L. Grant). The appendix contains a summary of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
What originally began as a State Department program to facilitate exchanges of scientific and cultural knowledge has deviated far from its original intent. While some aspects of the J-1 exchange Visitor Program are unquestionably valuable - for example, allowing exceptionally talented non-U.S. citizens to study, research, and teach in the United States as Fulbright Scholars - most exchanges under the program are primarily employment-related. In fact, the J-1 Exchange Visitor Program is now the largest U.S. guestworker program in terms of annual admissions. Of the 350,000 exchange visitors and their spouses and dependents who entered the country in 2010, nearly 300,000 were employed in full- or part-time jobs during their stay. Exchange visitors from China, Russia, Brazil, and other countries all over the world are working in the United States as au pairs, ride operators at amusement parks, hotel maids, laborers on dairy farms, and other semi- or unskilled workers as well as in professional occupations such as teachers and physicians. This report is the product of an extensive six-month review of the J-1 Exchange Visitor Program. The analyses, described in the body of the report, led to a number of key findings, which are summarized below: The program displaces U.S. workers by providing significant direct and indirect financial incentives for individuals, companies and organizations that recruit exchange visitors as workers, “sponsor” exchange visitors, and hire them as lower-cost labor alternatives to U.S. workers or foreign guestworkers in other nonimmigrant visa classifications that provide greater protections for U.S. workers. Employers can legally discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of J-1 exchange visitors because they are not required to advertise their available jobs or seek available U.S. workers. This is true even in areas with persistently high unemployment, where many able and available U.S. workers may be willing to take even temporary jobs. Lax oversight and inadequate regulations allow employers to simply coordinate with sponsors to obtain foreign workers or sponsor those workers themselves, entirely bypassing the U.S. workforce. U.S. workers that are displaced by J-1 workers have no protections or enforcement tools under the State Department regulations. For example, employers are not required to pay exchange visitor workers a prevailing wage, the lack of which exerts downward pressure on the wages of U.S. workers. The State Department has outsourced the monitoring of compliance with program rules and oversight of program performance to the program sponsors and employers, who have a vested interest in optimizing their returns from the program. Sponsors and employers cannot be expected to report violations, which would jeopardize their financial gains. This amounts to an obvious conflict of interest. Because participants incur significant debt to participate in the Exchange Visitor Program and to travel to the United States, and because they are unable to easily switch between employers, they arrive virtually indentured to their employer. Outsourcing oversight of the program to sponsors and employers leaves the J-1 worker without adequate protection- and some have suffered exploitation as a result. Some program participants have been found living in overcrowded conditions, others begging, and in the most extreme cases forced to work in the sex trade. Housing what is essentially a labor program (and advertised as such on recruitment websites) in an agency concerned with foreign affairs doesn't make sense. In addition to a lack of expertise in policing the labor market, the State Department currently has only 13 compliance officers overseeing a program with more than 350,000 participants; thus their ability and resources to investigate complaints or violations by employers and sponsors are extremely limited. Over the past 21 years, government auditors, including the State Department's own Inspector General, have published three reports with scathing criticisms of the lack of oversight, the lack of data to make meaningful labor market assessments, and many other failings in the program. Nevertheless, while the size of the program has increased by 96% in those 21 years, no significant steps have been taken to address the concerns outlined in the reports. The four major flaws in the program that are most critical to address include: the lack of protection for U.S. workers; the State Department's overbroad authority to create new guestworker programs; the significant and inappropriate financial incentives for J visa sponsors and their partners; and the program's flawed system of management, data collection, oversight, compliance, and enforcement.
