US Guest Worker Plan: Immigration Reform Done Right

The current immigration situation is untenable. We are spending vast sums to funnel immigration into delicate and dangerous desert areas. Immigrants die every year, in alarming numbers. And all of this money and blood do very little to stem the tide of immigration.

Unethical businesses shamelessly exploit these illegal workers, and more ethical businesses find themselves facing bankruptcy if they don’t also break the law. In some areas and fields, businesses that need large numbers

of relatively low-skill workers are facing a critical manpower shortage, while in others competition from illegal labor is driving down wages for American workers. Nobody wins, except the dishonest and the unethical. Clearly, this cannot stand.

However, most approaches that deal with the problem either are vastly impractical or utterly ignore the interests of one of the legitimate parties in this equation. As I see it, there are three major parties with legitimate interests in this debate: the immigrants themselves, US employers, and US labor interests.

Immigrants want to work, and to not die getting here. US employers want an adequate pool of reasonably priced labor. US labor interests want to avoid unfair competition from low-paid immigrant workers.

Most plans in the past have primarily involved border enforcement. However, the US has very, very large borders. All our current enforcement efforts have done is channel the bulk of illegal immigration into harsher, less-populated desert areas, and the occasional dangerous boat ride. Unless we wanted to surround the entire country with a manned concrete wall, we are not going to stop illegal immigration by border enforcement alone. And that would clearly be an untenable plan.

Other major approaches are somewhat more practical, but hold their own perils. Simply cracking down on employers of illegals, without doing anything to ensure there is a reasonable supply of workers to replace the illegal immigrants, would lead to economic chaos, especially in certain regions and sectors of the economy. Throwing open the floodgates to any and all immigrants would unfairly depress US wages, and expose border areas to an increase in social ills such as over-strained heath care and school systems. Quota systems, unless they are tuned more carefully than government agencies can generally manage, run the risk of letting in either far too many workers, or far too few, causing in smaller scale the same ills as unrestricted or entirely restricted immigration. Even most guest worker programs are, aside from the scale, far too bureaucratic and inflexible for many employers.

I believe I have a concept for a guest worker program that, coupled with appropriate enforcement, would reasonably answer the concerns of all major parties, as well as paying for itself in large part. It would involve the creation of a new category of visa called, for the purposes of this document, a guest worker visa.

Any law-abiding citizen of a friendly country would be eligible to apply for a guest worker visa. A relatively modest annual application fee would pay for a basic background check, and an unlimited, or at least very large, number of visas would be available. This visa would allow a worker to be employed by any employer in the country within the program’s restrictions, to stay in the country indefinitely while employed, and to enter or stay in the country for limited periods when not presently employed–something on the order of a few weeks a year.

In addition to the usual restrictions on immigrant workers on temporary visas–ineligibility for most public services, enforced reporting of residency to immigration officials, and so forth–guest worker visa holders would be required, under penalty of law, to report the fact that they are guest workers to any employer. Employers of guest workers would be required to pay to the guest worker program a fee proportional to the employee’s wages and other compensation–probably on the order of 3 to 5 percent. This is in addition to paying the worker the legal minimum wage, and all other usual restrictions according to federal, state, and local law.

Enforcement would be primarily a matter of heavy fines for employers, and loss of visas and deportation for guest workers. The program, and the necessary enforcement, would be paid primarily or entirely from the guest worker fees, and from the fines for errant companies.

With this or a similar program in place, immigrant workers could enter the country legally, come and go more or less at will, and seek legal remedy for abuse, unsafe working conditions, and the like. This would end most of the perils currently faced by illegal migrant workers. At the same time, employers would continue to have an incentive to hire US workers where available, thus reducing or eliminating any wage depression from the influx of immigrants. But employers would have a simple system whereby they can legally get extra workers not available locally, flexibly at need, with a minimum of bureaucracy and confusion. Everybody wins.