Immigration: Abuse of the Guest Worker System

I’ll talk more extensively about immigration in a future post as part of my Rebuilding the Republican Party series. But today I want to talk about one aspect of it -- the H1 guest worker program. This is a program that makes a lot of sense and which we should support for a variety of reasons. But it’s being abused by big business, and that needs to stop.

The H1 program allows various industries to import workers under a temporary guest worker visa to handle jobs where there aren’t enough Americans willing or able to do those jobs. In practice, this program was aimed at Mexican farm labor. And, as a concept this makes a ton of sense. Here are the benefits:

1. American companies get the labor they need to do jobs that Americans simply won’t do. Farming is a perfect example because this is the kind of work that few Americans are willing to do anymore. The labor is back-breaking, the pay is poor, the hours are long, and few Americans live anywhere near where these farms are located.

2. To attract Americans to these farms would likely (not certainly, but likely) cost so much in wages that it would dramatically increase the price of food, particularly healthy foods like fruit and produce, to the point that it would become a hardship on American consumers and American health.

3. This protects American jobs as these farms would most likely have been forced out of business by lower cost producers in Mexico. This means that all of the associated industry that supplies these farms and moves their goods to market would disappear from our economy.

4. This program stabilizes the relationship between the United States and Mexico. By letting millions of Mexicans work legally in the United States, the chance of conflict between the two neighbors decreases dramatically -- unlike the situation where millions of Mexicans sneak across the border to work illegally, which generates tensions on both sides of the border.

5. This program allows the United States to keep track of these people, who apparently would have come here any ways and worked illegally. It also allows us to impose taxes, which can be used to pay for the social services these guest workers use while in the United States, and to limit the size of the “gray economy” -- which reduces crime.

6. It reduces illegal immigration. When we started cracking down on the border, it was discovered that our illegal immigration problem actually got worse. The reason was that when it was easier to cross the border, these workers would come to the United States to work during the growing season and would then return home. With the border “sealed,” the risk increased dramatically that these people could not get back into the United States the next growing season. Thus, they stayed here instead. . . and they snuck their families across the border. Apparently, whole villages in Mexico emptied out for this very reason.

7. This stabilizes an important neighbor by letting these workers move freely back and forth. Not only does this slowly improve the standard of living in Mexico, but these people are not dependent on criminal gangs to get them across the border.

These are significant benefits. They add to our economy, our security, and they improve the neighborhood. No Americans lose their jobs, consumers benefit, and an industry continues to survive in the United States that would otherwise vanish -- an industry that is relevant to our national security. So long as it is clear that this worker program is not a way to circumvent the immigration system, and so long as it is clear that anyone with a criminal record will be deported immediately and will be denied future permits, this system makes tremendous sense.

Sounds good so far.

But the program isn’t limited to farm labor. Indeed, any industry can apply for these permits. And that’s where the problems are arising. This program is meant to be only for jobs that Americans can’t or simply won’t fill. But several industries are instead using it as a way to get cheap labor.

For example, in 2007, at a time when most of the rust belt was already out of work, the industry that makes barges that travel the great lakes made an application under the H1 program to bring in large numbers of Vietnamese welders to Buffalo on the claim that they couldn’t find American welders to do these jobs. These jobs paid $90,000 according to the application. Are we really to believe that in the rust belt, there are no American welders who could handle this job or be trained to handle this job who would be willing to move to Buffalo for that kind of money?

Then I heard about the most shocking application. In 2007, investment bankers and market analysts roamed New York City, living high off very fat bonuses. By 2008, hundreds of thousands of these same people had been laid off in the financial crisis that sparked the Great Recession. But then the stock market turned around and each of the companies that laid off was suddenly looking to add more people. Enter the H1 application. That’s right. The financial/banking industry made an application for H1 permits on the basis that there simply weren’t enough bankers and analysts in the country to fill the jobs they needed. . . despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of them had just been laid off and remain unemployed. That’s bull.

This was a total abuse of the application process. These companies wanted to import cheaper workers from places like India with the idea that they could improve their profits by cutting their employee costs. Rather than hiring more expensive Americans, they simply wanted to import cheaper foreigners. This is not what the H1 process is about. It’s not about depressing American wages or helping companies improve their profitably. It’s about filling jobs that are necessary to the American economy but which the employers simply can’t fill with American workers or where American workers can’t be found at wages that allow the industry to survive. It’s not meant as a means for finding cheaper labor.

This is the type of behavior that exploits a valuable American program, that is abusive to American workers, that allows connected businesses to shift part of their costs onto taxpayers, and that generally reflects poorly upon free trade. Conservatives should not stand for this, nor should they support it.

So the next time you hear a lobbyist-connected politician of either party mention the H1 program, ask them to which jobs they think this program should apply.