"Temporary" Workers:

A reader writes:

This whole guest worker thing is bad no matter how you look at it. If the guest worker is tied to the job or employer, then you have at best a worker almost totally under the employer's thumb, sort of an indentured servant. Chances are you are going to see employers advancing these workers money to come to the US etc and they will end up "working it off" kind of like a drug-addicted prostitute who never seems to be able to pay back her pimp, who got her addicted in the first place.

If the guest worker can self-apply (if that's the correct phrase), then you run the risk of agricultural jobs becoming the portal job for everybody. Until the growers get cracking on mechanization, there will be a need for low level agriculture workers. What's to keep a worker from coming to the US as an AgWorker, working a short while, and then moving on to another job? (There that Runaway rate again!)

In the 1986 amnesty, they were expecting 400,000 applications for the SAW (Special Agricultural Workers) but got 1.8 million - plus lots of fraud. My favorite example was the Indian motel owner who worked the required 90 days (I think it was 90), went back to his motel with papers and never worked agriculture again. What's to keep any type of worker in the world from low skilled to highly skilled from doing this? As long as you can physically do the work, put in your time, get your papers, and then go work whatever you are qualified to do regardless of its impact on US workers

Another reader calls attention to more about Motty Orian, the farm laborer procurer who introduced Thai workers to the Yakima Valley. Then, after he lost his license to practice in Washington, he got back in business by signing a deal with the practically moribund United Farm Workers union to import H-2A guest workers from Mexico, not Asia.

Motty would rather use Thais, I suspect, since they are a better, harder-working and more docile workforce with no big ethnic group and agencies and NGO's in the USA to support them. Once the Senate bill goes into effect, he can dump the Mexicans, bring back Thais and not have to deal with UFW lawsuits challenging the visas he gets.

Another points out that the Rogues Gallery of Motty Orian with GOP poobahs like Pres. Bush looks a little Photoshopped:

Of the photos of Mordechai Orian with politicians, http://www.gmpusa.com/gallery.php , the two showing him with J.C. Watts and Tom Reynolds appear to be exactly identical shots of him, with just the person he's "with" (and the lighting on his face) changed. The one showing him with Reynolds seems computer-edited to put the two together in the same photo (look where their two suit jackets come together -- there isn't a natural demarcation); maybe the one showing him with Watts is too.

And another says:

This is the same stunt Henry Clay Frick used to pull his Pittsburgh steel mills. When one group wised up he'd fire them and import another.

Parapundit has come up with a modest proposal for squashing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that's definitely in the spirit of the Senate's Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act.

Another reader notes:

There is another implication of the legalization of the Mexicans who have taken the law into their own hands by moving here that I have hardly ever seen discussed. Under current civil rights laws, as interpreted by our courts, an imbalance between the ethnic composition of an employers' workforce and the community where it is employed is prima facie evidence of discriminatory hiring practices that, in effect, places the burden of proof on employers when the lawsuit starts. Suddenly, not having enough newly-minted "temporary guest workers" on your payroll is legal problem of huge proportions. And that's just the tip of our nation's "affirmative action" iceberg.

Recall that a major force within the Democratic Party is that group we euphemistically call "trial lawyers." The reform movement is, inter alia, a jobs program for both left-wing plaintiffs' attorneys, and the defense attorneys the employers will be forced to retain.

One writes:

Isn't the solution to the immigration issue obvious? Have *Mexico* set up a guestworker program. They already have a free-trade treaty with the United States. The only reason they haven't been able to capture more of the textile trade, for instance, is that this is work that Mexicans won't do. So bring in Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Chinese and Vietnamese guestworkers (all countries with per-capita GDPs below Mexico's on a purchasing-power-parity basis) to work in *Mexican* sweatshops. The negative externalities to American citizens would be virtually nil, and the externalities to Mexican citizens would be substantially less than for a guestworker in America because Mexican public services are pathetic; the Chinese guestworkers would probably have to set up their own schools and hospitals at their own expense. Finally, in order to avoid being demographically transformed into an Asian country, Mexico would have to drop their current policy of exporting people and invite those emigrants northward who have not laid down deep roots in the United States to come home to Mexico, thereby solving our own illegal immigration problem. We even have a precedent: this is how Jordan is taking advantage of their free-trade treaty with the United States, as you yourself reported.

Relapsed Catholic says in The Trouble with Amnesty and Guest Worker Programs:

Most illegals don't want to become American citizens. They want to be "Mexicans with benefits."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer