Hola, ‘amigo!’ As you may have heard, we Bush administration caballeros have been cookin’ up a muy caliente plan to help y’all become free, legal, Americans. Citizens, no less. Well, some of you. Not too many. But however you slice the jalepeno, it’s mucho fun. Let me explain.
See all you have to do to qualify is come forward, give us your vital informacione, and there you go - you’re a legal, temporary worker!
Well, your employer also has to come forward and prove that no American could be found to take your job. Which means that they’d probably have to confess that they’re an employer who pays less than minimum wage, and then probably have to start paying more, yes, true. But it could happen, si? Si! Keep hope alive!
Once you’re in the program, you get to start paying taxes! You’re participating in the system. Part of the American Experiencione. Your kids can go to school, you can have your own name on your mailbox, why, it’s almost like having a green card, si? Si!
Almost. You’ll be eligible for one of the 140,000 green cards we give out every year. We may even increase that number. That might not seem like a lot, given that lots of other folks are in line for ‘em, and there’s 8 million of you, but it’s better than nothing, si? Si!
Now, if for some reason you don’t get one of those carditos verdes, well, we might have to use the information you gave us, look you up, and escort you back to your nation of origin. Your homeland! Think of it - at worst, you get a free trip home, where you can go to your old casa and see your mamcitas and abuelas and whoever else you got there. You can’t lose, si? Si!
Some of you might also be a bit concerned that we in the Department of Labor are doing this in conjunctione with the Department of Homeland Security. Let me assure you that this is no problemo. We gringos just like to share information, that’s all. You’ll start to understand that once you take what may be the first step towards possibly getting to the traditional first step to potentially becoming a citizen.
So, what are you waiting for, amigo? Get going and salsa on down to your nearest centro de la registracione!
Regorditas,
Elaine L. Chao
Secretary of Labor
PS - If you like the sound of this and you have some latino amigos who really are citizens, tell them to vote for Senor Bush, si? Si!
Fanny Roborat
35 comments
tess
January 7, 2004 at 4:35 pm
1“hell, even if you’re not a citizen, we’ll figure out a way for you to vote! we can program those diebold machines any way we want!”
i’m suddenly remembering something a friend of mine used to say a lot –”mucho satano.” i’m not sure that it means what he thought it means.
Alan M.
January 7, 2004 at 5:22 pm
2Actually, Adam, I’m pretty sure the employer is only required to come forward and prove that no American could be found to take the job in an instance where a non-citizen gets a job offer from said employer. So that only applies to employers seeking non-citizen workers, not non-citizen workers seeking employers.
And I dunno…I’m not struck by as much a sense of evil with this move. I mean, sure it’s politicking to get more Latino voters to go GOP this November, but it does seem an improvement in immigration laws. Leastways, that’s my read on it.
Deborah
January 7, 2004 at 5:30 pm
3My take on this proposal: it will help large employers (like Walmart) more than immigrant workers. What better way to keep wages down than to have thousands and thousands of potential employees willing to work for minimum wage and no benefits waiting in the wings. Thinking of unionizing? Demanding higher pay? Think again, they’ll have plenty of Guest Workers who’ll take that job at a below living wage.
pat
January 7, 2004 at 5:38 pm
4Deborah’s got this absolutely right. Don’t forget that when Elaine Chao is not welcoming “Guest Workers” to undercut wages and benefits, she’s explaining to our wonderful employers how to make sure they don’t have to pay anyone anything extra under the new overtime laws.
Curtis
January 7, 2004 at 5:50 pm
5Deborah & Pat,
It seems that current illegal immigrants fare much worse than current legal Wal-Mart employees do, not that it’s a contest I would be eager to participate in. I’m with Alan M. here. I think it’s good policy, despite being a nakedly election-year proposal that may never actually come to pass.
adam
January 7, 2004 at 6:27 pm
6These are great comments.
Alan - your first point’s largely correct. Though keep in mind that “Illegal immigrants already in the United States can only apply for the temporary worker program if they already have a job.” That’s what I was getting at - these people’s employers would have to come forward, or else these employed workers would have to leave their jobs and seek out an employer who had.
That being the case, Deborah’s right, I think: Walmart can continue to recruit from eastern Europe, and that’ll benefit both Walmart AND wannabe Americans. But I can’t see this proposal helping the guy who stocks the shelves in the bodega down the street from me.
I don’t think the proposal’s evil, not at all. It just strikes me as a bit halfassed, policy-wise, which makes me think it’s more cosmetic and political than actually helpful to the 8 million undocumented workers it purports to benefit.
It’s a thorny problem, no doubt, but a real solution would go much, much further. Stricter enforcement of the minimum wage, some sort of amnesty for illegally-hiring employers, and - yes - amnesty for foreign undocumented workers who’ve lived and worked here in a law-abiding manner over a period of years, THAT would begin to change things.
tess
January 7, 2004 at 7:08 pm
7hmm, i could’ve sworn that a nytimes article pointed out that under the proposed legislation, it could force many workers into a sort of limbo since the waiting period for a greencard could be 10 or 20 years and their guest-worker status would expire before then, so they’d get deported.
either way, i’d say that it’s more a trojan horse than help.
Deborah
January 7, 2004 at 7:21 pm
8Bush’s proposal may not be all bad, some undocumented workers may have an easier life because of it…I just don’t trust the motives behind the proposal.
Does anyone know if the Guest Workers will be paying Social Security Payroll Taxes? And will they be eligible for Social Security benefits? I’d bet they get to pay in and not draw out.
tess
January 7, 2004 at 7:30 pm
9it may not be all bad, but does the bad outweigh the good? i really can’t say since i haven’t read the legislation (and knowing these people, 1000+ pages for the democrats to read 3 weeks before they vote on it), but i have my doubts it’ll significantly help many undocumented immigrants in view of the legislation passed thus far under congress.
Linkmeister
January 7, 2004 at 7:58 pm
10The one thing this is absolutely sure to do is flush out the Buchanan-lite nativists in the Republican party; I’ve heard a few on different NPR programs today already (yes, Tancredo, I’m talkin’ about you.)
craig
January 8, 2004 at 1:28 am
11I’m wondering if we’re not being too hard on the guy. (Feeling my own forehead to make sure that I’m not coming down with SARS or some other fever.) How would we have treated The Emancipation Proclamation? Lincoln freed only those slaves who were living in States that had ceded from the Union. Slaves in the remaining states were not officially freed with the Proclamation.
On the other hand, do “Guest Workers” count for the census? Is this a way for TX to garner more Congressional seats and electoral votes subsequent to the 2010 census?
amazilia2
January 8, 2004 at 10:54 am
12I think it’s a way to create a slave class. Every empire has its slaves. These people sound like they’ll be in a situation with no rights, no voice, and a constant threat of deportation if they make trouble now that they’re databased. I also have no doubt that they’ll be considered recruitable for the army as soon as exceptions are created for them. They become a perfect exploitable class of “citizens.”
Murray
January 8, 2004 at 11:36 am
13In order to be eligible you must have an employer to work for. If you loose your job, you have 45 days to get another before you are deported. The employer must certify that he is unable to get Americans to do the work.
So an employer says I need workers with 6 years experience to do roofing at $5.45/hr and no benefits. (About 1/3 the going rate) (Any Americans want this? Guess not.)Because the employer is in a high rent area all he needs to do is put up low cost housing for his workers. Because these workers will not have access to credit he can put up a company store and give them credit against future wages. (Does any of this sound familiar?). Slavery is such a harsh term, it has bad connotations. “Fully embraced guest workers” sounds so much better. The employer houses, feeds, and provides everything necessary, and because they are so generous there is no way that the guest workers will ever leave.
Bush said that making illegal immigrants legal would “honor our values”. Any one familiar with republican corporate tax policies knows that they have always rewarded illegal behavior
Bob
January 8, 2004 at 11:38 am
14It makes me feel feverish and weird just to say it, but I actually think Bush is trying to do something decent here.
Until Mexico digs itself out of the morass of poverty–and who knows if any of us will live to see that–the enormous difference in wealth between our countries will drive people across the border. We may as well try to own up to the reality, and give some legal recognition to the people who come here for work.
Whether execution lives up to intention is, of course, another matter, and certainly this administration has shown an ability to screw up just about anything. But I think we should keep an open mind.
And not to worry: there’s still a seemingly unlimited amount of mind-boggling Bush-related stupidity to complain about and lampoon.
John Isbell
January 8, 2004 at 12:45 pm
15Nothing beats the old sting in the tail. Nice.
Anne
January 8, 2004 at 1:52 pm
16I’ve wrecked (!) my brain trying to devise a solution to the need for manual labor–cheap or not. If Mexico were to succeed in “digging itself out of the morass of poverty,” who would fill those jobs? On the one hand, we have self-help gurus telling us to find the jobs that fulfill us emotionally, along with an educational system that values only white-collar jobs, and on the other hand we have a real need for field and factory workers. Those jobs are unlikely to be any US citizen’s dream if there are other choices. If only the desperate will take them, don’t we need to keep people desperate by denying them benefits and legal status? In an ideal world, where everyone is well educated and has choices, who will work in the fields? I know, I know, Mao had an idea. Any others?
tess
January 8, 2004 at 2:50 pm
17as someone who’s worked as a substitute teacher for 3 whole days and lived through the more mediocre CA public schools, i can honestly say that we will NOT have any problems filling factory and manual labor jobs. we just need to value them enough to pay these people living wages again. the only problem that i can see right now is that we have grown to expect everything to be cheap and plentiful so we’ve depressed wages (thank you fast food and walmart!) to the point where we need people who’re poorer than our census-counted poorest to work these sorts of jobs — or teenagers.
as a teacher of mine once said about teaching, “you have to accept that most of your students will not grow up to be doctors or lawyers”
Chicory
January 8, 2004 at 3:26 pm
18My cynical self feels that Bush just did this so all of his Republican cronies could keep their maids and still make the Hispanic voters think he is on their side- sort of, maybe, kind of……
Alan M.
January 8, 2004 at 5:46 pm
19Anne: Who would fill the factory and field worker jobs? Why, that’s why God created robots!
Anonymous
January 8, 2004 at 5:59 pm
20All right folks…if you don’t like this plan, what’s a better one? I don’t know about you, but where I live (in CA) I see illegals working very hard every day. They get taken advantage of, but have no redress. I’d like to see them have some working rights.
Maybe not perfect, but–and I can’t believe I’m writing this–Bush seems to be moving the in the right direction.
Will-o'-the-Wisp
January 8, 2004 at 7:35 pm
21Strangely enough, (in response to those who said we don’t value manual labor enough) what I have heard is that it’s Europe that has the manual labor problem, while the US has more of a technical-jobs shortage, so we have to import scientists, etc., from India, China, and Russia. I guess one doesn’t exclude the other–it’s just that all Americans want to be doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and whatever else pays at the moment, and anything that pays less goes out the window.
dave
January 8, 2004 at 11:16 pm
22Murray, I can take you to a neighborhood in Phoenix where what you describe has been going on for at least the last four years…
Having run landscape businesses in four states, I can assure you that finding manual labor isn’t a challenge, it’s finding it cheaply. If you look in any of the landscape trade magazines now you’ll see huge ads for various H2B companies that are basically brokers for Latino laborers with visas. I think one ad even extolls the fact that they’ll work hard, show up regularly, and work for wages below the local labor market, and they’ll shuttle them anywhere in the country. While this may help small business owners’ margins in the short term, in the long term it’ll depress the wages in the landscape and construction industry to the point where the pay is as bad in Wisconsin as it is here in the border states. While I support a lot of guest worker programs and helped a good friend get permanent resident status (not easy for an illegal Mexican in Arizona), I just have a bad vibe from ANY program Bush endorses that affects labor.
Deborah
January 8, 2004 at 11:20 pm
23When you ask “Who will do the manual labor you?” also need to ask “Who can live on the pay offered?”.
I think many people would not mind manual labor (some of us have lives outside of work and our egos are not tied to our paychecks…not me, but some of us) But one has to meet certain responibilities but do these jobs allow one to do so?
Do you want to have children? How is minimum wage going to allow a parent to stay home or cover day care? Do you want health insurance? Better not work in the fields. Want more than that tiny social security check in retirement? I don’t think too many janitors have pension plans.
So, as a society, do we want to pay the people in the “bottom” tier of jobs enough to live on? Or do we want to find a pool of people, such as undocumented workers, who’ll be happy with the scraps and then go home?
Deborah
littlebit
January 9, 2004 at 12:28 am
24I think that we as a country are not ready to empower this or any other minority population. Good grief, we still call them “them”, and make (sometimes politically necessary) but nonetheless divisive distinctions. We could scoot over and give up some better lands to native tribes. We could come clean on Guadalupe Hidalgo, let go of Texas–that would be dramatic.
Whether this proposal is a strategically timely but inevitably impotent gesture or an eventual certainty, I suspect that, for the foreseeable future, our migrant friends will continue to live in emotional, legal, financial, and sometimes literal borderlands limbo.
Keanu Reeves (no, really)
January 9, 2004 at 2:06 am
25Of course, if you disrespect your new American boss in any way, real or imagined, or if you look even once at his daughter, or if you ask for a 3-cent raise, or if you don’t work your ass off as hard as the Puerto Ricans he could have hired instead, or if you use the word “union” in any context, or if you show up 20 seconds late for work just once, or if you object to the boss getting freebies from your wife then it’s back to the old country for you.
This proposal gives all the power and leverage in the world to the employer. And Lord knows that they can be trusted with that power and leverage.
It’s all about cheap labor with Republicans, have you noticed?
Josh Scholar
January 9, 2004 at 3:12 am
26Details always matter - I’m not sure I believe you about the limited number of green cards under the proposed system (I’m not sure a 3 year permit will be the same as a green card).
My first though when I heard about this was that the administration, getting worried about terrorism, plans to really work on closing the borders, but realizes that this means that they have to find a way to legalize a significant number of the undocumented workers so that those people don’t bog down a system prioritized for terrorism, so that businesses don’t complain that they can’t get cheap workers and so Republicans don’t lose the hispanic vote.
Murray
January 9, 2004 at 11:37 am
27As far as I am concerned Bush’s proposals always need to do two primary things.
1. Help with election.
2. Help wealthy corporate owners, (friends and contributors).
If they should also somewhat help others, so be it.
Our immigration system is full of hypocrisy, racism, and xenophobia.
Who should have a greater right to live here? My wife who can trace her ancestry literally back to the Mayflower, or my son-in-law a Saudi citizen? They each contribute a great deal to this country. My son-in-law, even though he has been married to my daughter for 10 years and has 2 children, is still having trouble getting American citizenship. Is the US better for keeping people like him out? Not as far as I and my family are concerned.
The Bush proposal favors the corporate owners, (what a surprise); it places them in a position of almost ultimate power.
I believe in free trade. I believe that buying things from other countries helps the poor workers there. I also believe that we can set our rules to protect them and our own workers. If we make our import laws include certain environmental, safety, and health care provisions for foreign workers, it will raise their standards and help allow us to pay a living wage for our own workers who currently have a hard time competing with $2.00 a day workers.
When the factories that our corporate owners have built overseas with the money that they got from the latest tax giveaway, need to pay decent wages, it will make them think twice before sending American jobs overseas, it will also raise pay for these workers and reduce the pressure to move to the US for higher wages.
When the overwhelming economic pressure to work here is reduced the immigration problems will also recede. The price will be a higher cost for a lot of products. I think a reasonable trade. At that point we can open our doors and welcome those who have the initiative to leave everything and move here. Just as my ancestors and son-in-law did.
Susie
January 9, 2004 at 12:14 pm
28Shoot, I thought it was hilarious.
& I think the “si? SI!” gives it poetry.
Susie
January 9, 2004 at 12:15 pm
29I meant I just thought it was hilarious.
See, I’m not much of a thinker, me.
Chicory
January 9, 2004 at 1:59 pm
30The whole thing goes back to the lousy immigration policy of the Native Americans, si? Si!
susie
January 9, 2004 at 5:15 pm
31OK, I honestly don’t even know what I thought I meant by adding “just”
AS IN: Just ignore me!
I’ll be going now.
(hands in pockets, walking calmly, looking to the sky, whistle, whistle, whistle)
Mr_Grant
January 9, 2004 at 7:37 pm
32Many jobs require workers to operate a vehicle. Is Dubya going to allow our new guest trabajadors to have driver’s licenses? Because if he is, I know a certain governor of Colliefournia who’s gonna be pissed.
Habba
January 9, 2004 at 10:36 pm
33The thing that frightens me more than the Bush clan is the fact that I NEED the work ethic “they” have.
Does anyone else employ illegal immigrants? I do and have counted on “them” for near on fifteen years as I found it got more and more difficult to find a US citizen with a like work ethic that would do the jobs required.
Yes I pay them well, think of “them” as family, couldn’t run a business without “them”, and don’t ask “them” to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, (which is not physically possible).
When we as a country face issues the likes of this I think it’s time we look in our own back yard.
Habba
Sara J
January 10, 2004 at 2:40 pm
34Let’s see, you can come here if you’ve already got a job (or you can stay if your boss will acknowledge you), you can pay into SSI but not collect any retirement benefits, you can work but you can’t have an actual green card, and if you somehow lose your job (say, by getting injured while digging a ditch) you can’t stay here because you’re a drag on the economy.
I just have one question: what ever happened to no taxation without representation? Okay, I know I’m being unrealistic here. But all this does is enable big US companies to set up formerly illegal immigrant workers as cheap labor to threaten other workers into taking raw deals on wages, health benefits, etc. We’re just bringing the global race to the bottom into the US. Yeah, a few migrants will have it easier for a few years. But they’ll still always be subject to summary deportation, and they’ll still never get to become citizens. At best, they’ll be permanent residents, non-voting, second-class un-Americans. Which most of them already are.
Paris Granville
January 14, 2004 at 3:32 pm
35Everyone assumes that those involved in this program would be low wage workers. But in my husband’s field - Statistics - There seem to by absolutely NO Americans applying for jobs. He works essentially with Asians, and he is Belgian. I would imagine this to be the case in other science and math fields.