recent NYT coverage of the administration's guestworker/immigration reform proposal

[Guest guest]

I thought that subscribers to these three listservs, plus those "undisclosed recipients" to whom I'm also sending this, might be interested in some of the NY Times recent coverage of the administration's proposal re guestworker legislation. Several articles and a couple of op-ed pieces are here. Tina Castañares

January 9, 2004OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

American Jobs but Not the American DreamBy DAVID ABRAHAM

resident Bush's immigration reform proposal, unveiled on Wednesday, is a classic guest worker program on the European model. As such, it may be doomed from the start: Europe's guest worker programs created as many problems as they solved, and to this day they remain unpopular.

Guest worker programs were widely used in Europe from the 1950's through the 1970's during a period of extreme labor shortages. Most of the several million Turks and Yugoslavs in Germany, for example, are there today because of Germany's substantial guest-worker program of that period. Lesser but substantial numbers of guest workers are also to be found among the Muslim populations of Central and Northern Europe.

Germany's guest worker program was ended more than two decades ago. Yet Germans still have not resolved the question of what to do with the millions of immigrants living in their midst. Although these immigrant workers get some benefits of citizenship — health care, for example, and unemployment insurance — they are not citizens. They are not allowed full membership in German society, yet neither are they forced to return home. It is virtually impossible to find anyone in Germany today who would favor re-establishment of its guest worker program.

The details of the program announced by President Bush have yet to be worked out. But its outlines are clear. At the invitation of employers, workers will be permitted to stay in the United States for a limited time without having to wait in its long immigration lines. They would also secure many of the benefits and protections of American-born workers.

The chief virtue of the program, as the president made clear, is that the guest workers would be allowed to move relatively freely between their country of citizenship — overwhelmingly Mexico — and the country in which they are "guests." Such movement could reduce the disturbing smuggling and illegal border crossings so common along America's frontiers.

But the drawbacks of guest worker programs far outweigh their advantages. To begin with, experience shows that guest workers are not good guests: they rarely want to leave. In Germany today there are more than two million people of Muslim Turkish origin, many of whose families came as guest workers four decades ago. Guest workers marry locals; they have children; they encourage their kin and friends to join them in the host country, legally or illegally.

After all, guest workers are not just labor, they are people. Where will these people live, and how will they be treated? Can we look forward to new urban ghettos or rural guest-worker "villages"? Fifty years after the civil rights movement, will we now have a new caste of subordinated foreign workers? Once the economic need for guest workers abates (assuming, in fact, that there is such a need) what happens to them?

It is true that America has more experience with assimilation than Europe. But that does not mean finding answers to these questions will be any less difficult.

And in some respects, the dangers of a guest worker program in the United States are graver than they were in Europe. Germany, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and other European host countries had and still have very strong labor unions. Those strong unions were able to make certain that guest workers were not used by employers to depress wages. By contrast, American labor unions are weak to nonexistent in most segments of the labor market.

In addition, President Bush has clearly expressed his intention to put employers in charge: guest workers will be selected by employers and will be able to remain in the United States only so long as they stay with the employer who brought them. This is a sure recipe not only for the exploitation of these "guests" but also for the depression of American wages generally, especially among those who can least afford it — many of them immigrants.

The United States has always been a "welcoming country," as the president said, "open to the talents and dreams of the world." But this plan is an abandonment of America's ideals, not an expression of them. It values immigrants' talents over their dreams. Instead of hope, it offers them simply a job.

Abraham, a visiting fellow in European history at Princeton, is a professor of immigration law at the University of Miami.

January 9, 2004

Plan May Lure More to Enter U.S. Illegally, Experts Say

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

hen President Reagan signed into law the last great shake-up in immigration policy, his goal was to stop the flow of illegal immigrants. The flow increased instead, and that may be the response to President Bush's guest worker plan, if Congress enacts it, various experts say.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 offered amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants already in the United States, or most of them. Having cleared the decks with this provision, the law sought to discourage future illegal entry by imposing penalties on employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants.

But foreigners saw in the 1986 act an invitation, not a deterrent, said Trejo, a labor economist and immigration expert at the University of Texas. "The biggest long-term impact of the 1986 law was the idea that maybe there will be periodic amnesties, and even if I come to the United States illegally, there is a good chance I'll be able to legalize my status while I am there," Mr. Trejo said.

The 1986 law offered green cards to illegal immigrants who had entered the country before 1982. Over the next four years, 2.7 million green cards went to illegal immigrants already in the country and in some cases to spouses and children still abroad, according to data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But the chief deterrents, employer penalties and stepped-up border patrol, failed to stem illegal immigration, and today illegal immigrants number 7 million or more, according to most estimates. By 1990, the proportion of foreign-born adults in the work force, legal and illegal, had risen to 9.3 percent from 7 percent in 1980 and by 2000, this group represented 12.3 percent of the nation's workers, the Labor Department reports.

The employer penalties were hard to enforce. Employers could be fined up to $10,000 for multiple offenses, and even imprisoned. But to avoid punishment, an employer needed only to check a job candidate's documents, not the authenticity of the documents. Soon, on the streets of Chicago, for example, a forged Social Security card could be purchased for less than $100.

"The employer sanctions, introduced for the first time in that bill, were a joke," said Borjas, an economist and immigration expert at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

What helped to doom the Reagan approach in 1986 was the failure to create a legal avenue for unskilled immigrants to enter the United States and take low-wage jobs. Various visa programs brought in skilled workers, but not the unskilled, despite strong demand to fill openings at hotels and restaurants, in nursing homes and home health care, and in landscaping, child care, housekeeping and light manufacturing.

The plan proposed by President Bush on Wednesday would open such an avenue, said Theresa Brown, director of immigration policy for the United States Chamber of Commerce. "If I am a worker in Mexico and I want to come to the United States and there is a legal visa available for me to do that, why would I not choose that route," she said.

But would potential applicants in Mexico and in Central and South America, the sources of most illegal immigration, take this newly opened legal avenue, and apply to enter the United States as guest workers? That depends on the program's design as the Bush proposal works its way through Congress, Ms. Brown said.

But Mr. Borjas said he was doubtful that illegal immigration would be curtailed substantially. Some will shun registering because of the risk of deportation once their guest worker status expires, he said, and many others will feel compelled to come to the United States, job or no job.

"Being without work here is still far better for most people than being employed in Central America," Mr. Borjas said, adding, "There is nothing in this proposal that will prevent us from having to revisit the issue once again 10 years from now."

January 8, 2004NEWS ANALYSIS

Border Politics as Bush Woos 2 Key Groups With ProposalBy ELISABETH BUMILLER

ews Analysis WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — President Bush's sweeping proposal on Wednesday to give legal status to millions of illegal workers was a political document as well as an immigration policy and sought to re-establish his credentials as a compassionate conservative at the starting gate of an election year.

White House political advisers have long talked of the critical importance of Hispanics to Mr. Bush's re-election. But political analysts said that his latest proposal was also designed to appeal to a much larger political prize, suburban swing voters, who might see the plan as evidence of a gentler Republican Party.

"For a party that's trying to look more inclusive and welcoming, the proposal has broader thematics that show an openness to America's new immigrants," said Bill McInturff, a leading Republican pollster.

Mr. Bush's speech carefully hit the emotional notes about opening the United States' borders at a time when the administration has spent more energy securing them. "Many of you here today are Americans by choice, and you have followed in the paths of millions," the president told the crowd. Every generation of immigrants, he added, "has reaffirmed the wisdom of remaining open to the talents and dreams of the world."

Behind the poetic language, analysts said, lay a prosaic White House calculation: That it was more important to reach toward the political middle than to worry about placating Mr. Bush's conservative base. Many conservative Republicans called Mr. Bush's plan nothing more than amnesty for lawbreakers but moderate Republicans said the White House had enough political capital with the conservatives to make it worth risking their ire.

Certainly Mr. Bush's speech announcing the proposal, in the East Room of the White House, came with the kind of political noise not normally heard in the formal splendor of the executive mansion's state floor.

Hispanic leaders invited by the White House jammed the room, cheering and chanting. Secretary of State Colin L. , whose parents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, had a front-row seat.

The real political risk to the White House, moderate Republicans said, was whether the proposals would be as welcomed by Hispanics as Mr. Bush and his political advisers expected. Many Hispanic leaders quickly heaped criticism on an immigration plan that they said did not go far enough, and asserted that the White House was cynically chasing their votes with an empty plan that would do them no good in the end.

"The notion that there is a green card at the end of this process is an illusion, and that's the crux of the matter," said Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy organization. "The headlines today suggest that he's providing legal status. But the bottom line is when people learn the details of this proposal and what it does and doesn't do, it's likely to seem less appealing."

The White House left many details of the proposal vague, including a critical one at the heart of the plan. Under Mr. Bush's proposal, an illegal worker with a job in the United States could apply to be a three-year guest worker, a status that would provide full employee benefits, the ability to move freely in and out of the United States and the right to apply for a green card. In his speech, Mr. Bush said that an immigrant could renew participation in the guest worker program — but he did not say for how long, leaving it up for Congress to decide.

The tactic is one Mr. Bush has used before, most recently on the Medicare bill, which allows him, Democrats say, to take credit for proposing reforms while leaving Congress to work out the details.

For now, analysts of Hispanic voting trends said it was too early to tell how much the proposal would help Mr. Bush. His advisers have said the president needs 40 percent of the Hispanic vote to win. Mr. Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000, a significant showing for a Republican. For the past three years, the White House has been aggressively trying to encroach on a traditionally Democratic and rapidly growing voting group.

"The plan is still too vague to say how it will fare among Latino organizations and the Latino community," said A. , a political professor at the University of Arizona and the author of the book "Latino Politics in America." But at the least, Mr. said that it "puts the spotlight back on Bush and the Latinos" and gets Latinos re-engaged in a national conversation with the president and his policies.

But pollsters and political strategists said that Mr. Bush did not have to persuade every Hispanic voter of the value of his plan, and that just improving his standing on the margins could make a difference in the 2004 election.

Kohut, the director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, noted that Republicans have been gaining significant ground with Hispanic voters in the last decade, and that Mr. Bush's immigration proposals could exploit those gains. Pew surveys in Florida in the late 1990's, Mr. Kohut said, showed that 36 percent of Hispanic voters were Democrats while 24 percent were Republicans. But surveys in more recent years showed that 30 percent of Hispanic voters were Democrats while 32 percent were Republicans