Special Home-Care Worker Visas Urged : Employment: Demands of the marketplace outpace supply, experts tell reform panel. Others warn of adding another class of low-wage workers.

Experts on immigrants, child care and elderly care called Friday for the creation of temporary visas for day care workers and companions to the elderly.

The visas would prevent the kinds of hiring dilemmas that recently forced attorney general candidates Zoe Baird and Kimba M. Wood to withdraw their names from consideration.

The panel described to the Commission on Immigration Reform a marketplace in which need for legal, quality care far outpaces supply. The commission issues periodic reports to Congress on the impact and implementation of U.S. immigration policy.

Even in a country where millions of unskilled workers are without work, newspaper ads for nannies and elderly home aides often go unanswered or do not attract applicants with the necessary credentials and experience, the panelists said.

Immigrants--many of whom come from cultures that prize domestic skills--often are suited to fill those vacant positions, panelists said. But for employers who want to follow the letter of the law, a large portion of the foreign labor pool is disqualified, not because of ability but because of their status as illegal immigrants.

Many of the panelists--who ranged from the director of White House Nannies Inc., a private, Washington-based nanny placement firm, to immigration lawyers and social service administrators--recommended the creation of a new type of visa, one designed especially for immigrants who want to work with children or the elderly.

Advocates described a situation similar to one in Canada, in which immigrants could obtain three-year work visas on the condition that they remain in home-care jobs for the entire period. When their visa expires, they would be eligible to apply for permanent residency.

“We have had to turn away eight out of every 10 workers responding to adds we place in local papers,” said Barbara G. Kline, president of White House Nannies. “Often, these people were skilled workers with years of experience. (They) are not only willing to do child care, but they come from countries which value this kind of work. (But) we could not place them because of lack of proper documentation.”

But other panelists warned commissioners that importing care-givers to solve the nation’s child and elderly care provider crisis would only exacerbate a separate, existing labor problem.

“Let’s be wary of creating a long-term, disenfranchised work force when we already have a long-term, disenfranchised work force,” said Rhonda Williams, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Economic and African American Studies. “That (work force) is black and brown.”

While immigrants’ advocates suggested training illegal workers before granting them child or elderly care work visas, others on the panel said the same training money should be spent instead on unskilled American workers, who could then fill nanny and elderly companion positions instead of filing for welfare benefits.

The trouble, most agreed, is that many Americans are not interested in domestic labor.

The work is low-paying and difficult. Kline said her company places nannies at salaries ranging from $200 to $400 per week, plus room and board. But that is the top of the wage scale for live-in help. The work typically runs 50 hours or more a week and provides few if any health or pension benefits to workers.

For many poor women with children of their own, nanny or elderly care work is an economic impossibility, as wages are not high enough to allow them to place their own children in day care while they care for someone else’s family.

Perhaps most important, panelists said, the care of children and the elderly has typically been regarded as women’s work--and women’s work, as evidenced by the fact that women make 66 cents to a man’s dollar, is often undervalued in American society.