Modified limited “guest worker” hangout

In discussing last year’s version of the Comprehensive National Suicide Act, this website consistently put the term “temporary guest workers” in scare quotes, since the bill made it clear that the “temporary guest workers” could virtually automatically acquire legal permanent residence. The authors of this year’s version of the Act, evidently tired of all those scare quotes at VFR, put a provision in the bill saying that the guest workers had to go home for one year after two years in the USA, with the same cycle repeatable once, like in a washing machine. In other words, they would be real guest workers, because they would ultimately have to go home and stay there. But as Mark Krikorian makes clear at the Corner, the guest worker provisions are still a fraud, because no matter what the law says many guest workers will end up staying permanently, and guest worker programs also trigger increased legal and illegal immigration. However, he continues, even if the guest worker program were not a fraud, it would still be bad for America:

Phyllis Schlafly has written that “Inviting foreigners to come to America as guest workers is equivalent to sending the message: You people are only fit to do menial jobs that Americans think they are too good to do,” and has approvingly cited Theodore Roosevelt’s warning that “Never under any condition should this nation look at an immigrant as primarily a labor unit.”

Unfortunately only two Republican senators, Vitter and Coburn, voted last week to kill the guestworker provisions. Krikorian concludes:

When a contemptible racket like the Southern Poverty Law Center has a better understanding of a public-policy issue than Republican senators, we’re in trouble. The Left might actually end up saving Republicans from themselves, especially if the guestworker programs provide enough Democratic senators a liberal rationale to oppose the bill. We’d better hope so.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 31, 2007 01:26 AM | Send