Yes

by Nancy Seddens

Created on: June 13, 2007   Last Updated: January 23, 2010

It would seem that a guest worker program is not only necessary to solve the illegal immigration issue but is an inevitability. There is obviously both a need and a desire for employers to have access to workers who will do what it is difficult to impossible to hire Americans to do. It is equally obvious those workers coming from south of border have a need for the work they can find in the U.S. What we must guard against is an underclass of underpaid workers undermining the wages of Americans, therefore employers will have to register aliens and pay them at least minimum wage. Before a workable program can be put in place however, the border must be tightened to slow the addition of illegal immigrants and guidelines must be in place to insure that guest workers can be accounted for. Employers would also be required to prove that they made a legitimate effort to hire American workers first.

Guest workers will benefit from better wages, working conditions and benefits. A fund would need to be set up, paid into by the employers of guest workers, to insure these workers so that they would not burden the health care system. A department would need to be set up, perhaps even a separate cabinet position, to regulate how many guest workers a company could hire and to police companies to insure they follow the guest worker regulations. Employers of guest workers would need to pay a sliding scale fee to participate in the guest worker program to defray the cost; that would be an additional incentive for them to hire guest workers only as a last resort. We would need strict enforcement of these labor laws, any employer found to have workers that were not citizens or registered foreign laborers would be heavily fined and possibly dropped or suspended from the guest worker program.

Workers would not be eligible to bring their families at first but if they maintained employment for a subscribed period of time they could gain the right to bring immediate family into the country.  If they became unemployed they would have a limited amount of time to find another job or they would have to return to their homeland and apply to return when a job becomes available. Workers who have continually met the requirements for working in this country and proving they could be responsible citizens would become eligible for citizenship.

The United States does need workers, but an unlimited supply of workers crossing in, mostly through our southern border, lowers wages and erodes our standard of living. A capitalist economy can not function properly with the availability of an infinite workforce but neither can it function well without an adequate supply of workers. A well regulated guest worker program could not only solve the U.S.’s illegal immigration problem but also be a boom to our economy as well as the hard working non citizens who are searching for a better way of life.

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