Contract Workers: Human Exploitation

In the not-so-distant future, some may argue that support for legal immigration should include a new guest-worker or contract-labor program with Mexico. The short-term argument is attractive: Illegal workers who enter through increasingly difficult-to-cross territory to provide labor to U.S. employers face an inherently dangerous situation. If we could legalize the flow, some may argue, we could successfully regulate and protect them.

Unfortunately, we have plenty of evidence to show that such short-term fixes do not achieve our basic economic goal: to create and maintain a level playing field that fuels and ensures international competitiveness.

Contract labor is inherently an exploitable labor force. Despite the government’s best efforts, contract workers are defenseless, falling prey to employers willing to pay less than market-value wages, and to hold contracts over workers to maintain silence about substandard conditions.

The short-term rationale also relies on a very shaky premise: that it is possible to recruit single adult workers, employ them for specific jobs, then return them to their families when their work is complete. A society cannot, and should not, believe it is not responsible for the overall, social well-being of workers and their families. History shows that every contract-worker program falls victim to the inexorable goal of workers who wish to reunite with their families or to become members of the community in which they work. We should not want workers who are unable to enjoy the benefits of their taxes and involve themselves and their families in the community where they live.

Eventually, contract-labor programs create an even worse immigration-enforcement problem. Not only must we stop people at the border, but after several years of an organized labor flow, we would face the need to find, detain and remove workers who, despite program intentions, have formed families and other intimate connections in communities. Our enforcement goal is to deter illegal entry, not to encourage a migration flow that lets people in, then forces us to split families and communities in the process of removing them.