Ellington

This week, the U.S. Senate is considering comprehensive immigration reform that includes the creation of a new temporary worker program.

The legislation would allow the government to issue 400,000 visas a year to immigrants who will work temporarily in the U.S. In order to hire immigrants, businesses would have to show that they first attempted to hire American workers, and they would have to pay immigrants the same wages offered to citizens. Unlike previous programs, this one would include industries beyond agriculture, including meat packers and construction workers, among others.

There are several problems with the proposed program, however. Businesses have complained that their hiring would bog down in government bureaucracy. Unions have objected that the program would create a new underclass of workers while driving down wages in general. The program is vulnerable to wage and safety abuses by placing laborers already separated from their families and social networks into labor-intensive workplaces with little oversight. At its worst, the program could give businesses legal cover for continuing to pay immigrant workers substandard wages for working in inhumane conditions.

Today, that practice is already illegal, if largely unpunished.

The chief problem with the program, however, is that it offers few incentives to either businesses or immigrant laborers, and everyone is likely to ignore it. Under this program, businesses would have to pay temporary workers the same wages they pay citizens, but temporary workers will remain relatively unattractive hires who lack sufficient education and English proficiency. The bill would increase fines on businesses that employ undocumented workers, but the problem today is not so much that fines are low but that few businesses are fined at all. What then is the incentive for businesses to go legal? Unless the government substantially expands enforcement, businesses will have little reason to stop hiring undocumented workers.

As for undocumented workers, they are willing to take undesirable work because even that offers them a foothold in the U.S., where they hope to build new lives. The proposed program, however, offers immigrants no path to citizenship—the program would extract as many as six years of grueling labor from temporary workers and then simply send them home. So what is their incentive to apply?

If we look back in five years and determine that the temporary worker program is a failure, we should not be surprised—it never made much sense from the beginning. It should not be passed.

Previous Comments

ID

74934

Comment

Look at this: Advocates worry loan sharks may profit off of fees required for citizenship

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2007-05-24T19:05:31-06:00