‘Guest Workers’ or Legal Slaves?

You’ll never be able to find an illegal alien when you need one. That’s the plaintive cry of the agribusiness lobbyists who last week got a congressional committee to revive the infamous bracero program that trucks in foreign farm workers like so much chattel. Suddenly the truth is out: Clamp down too hard on illegal immigration and America can’t feed itself.

Don’t take my word for it. In a “Dear Colleague” letter supporting this massive loophole in their tough new immigration law, mostly Republican members of Congress stated a truth rarely heard: “This country has historically been unable to provide a sufficient number of domestic workers willing to do the difficult manual labor required in the production of many agricultural commodities. As a result, it has had to rely upon the assistance of foreign workers.”

What hypocrisy. More than 50 agricultural organizations whose lobbyists never made a peep during this season of immigrant bashing have suddenly demanded an amendment to the immigration bill allowing them to import 250,000 “guest workers” a year to harvest their crops.

The Florida Citrus Packers joined with the New York Apple Assn. in insisting that their fruit would rot were it left to legal American workers to pick. The Wisconsin Christmas Tree Producers said it would be a bleak Yule season were it not for those undocumented workers who now tend to the baby firs, and the Assn. of North Carolina Tobacco Growers warned about a dearth of smokes if we really get serious about stopping illegal immigration.

The rationalization for this gaping hole in the GOP’s get-tough-with-immigrants line was provided by Newt Gingrich in his book “To Renew America,” when he wrote that a guest worker program “may be a safety valve that allows Mexico and its neighbors to accept the tough, decisive United States policy against illegal aliens.”

What garbage. It’s not Mexico that Gingrich seeks to placate but rather corporate growers who profit enormously from the exploitation of illegal immigrant labor. What Gingrich and his agribusiness buddies are saying is that if we crack down on illegal immigration, growers might have to pay decent wages to agricultural workers who are legal.

Instead, the growers have pushed for their dream of an even more docile work force, and so their congressional allies have tacked on the guest worker provision to the immigration bill due for debate next week.

The so-called guests would actually be indentured servants totally under the power of their employer, restricted in their physical movements and monitored by “biometric identifiers.” The employer would hold out 25% of their wages until the job was completed to his satisfaction and the workers had returned meekly home. The employers would not have to provide transportation, housing, a written contract or medical insurance. The retained wages could be used to reimburse hospitals that treat these workers on an emergency basis.

Nor will these workers be allowed to bring their families with them. The new law specifically excludes spouses and minor children of guest workers from eligibility for admission to this country. Since the law allows these workers to stay in this country for up to two years, this provision hardly seems consistent with the profusely expressed “pro-family” concerns of congressional Republicans.

But families are for people, and the workers referred to in this bill are merely “H-2B aliens,” a new subcategory of the species even lower than that of “illegal aliens.” Undocumented workers at least have the option of quitting an exploitative boss for one who is less so and have been known to join a union and strike for better working conditions. Not so the H-2B alien, a barracks dweller cut off from family and friends whose life is totally in the hands of his employer.

The whole thing stinks. If we need foreign workers, we should encourage their legal immigration to this country and ensure them all the rights of other legal residents. For those who recoil at the sane and sensible solution of increased immigration, which, sub rosa or not, has always been our country’s economic salvation, there is a humane alternative: End the exploitation of farm workers by increasing the minimum wage, expanding its coverage and seriously strengthening and enforcing the labor laws that might make farm work attractive to those here legally.

Jobs are, and have always been, the magnet that draws immigrants, legal or otherwise, to cross our borders. Those who seek to tighten even legal immigration, Bob Dole included, claim that foreigners steal Americans’ jobs. The corporate farm interests and their Republican congressional allies now say that legal residents don’t want those jobs. The answer is to make those jobs fit for American workers and then assess the need for increased immigrant labor that is composed of people who are free, not government certified indentured servants.