Word: guest
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...least until recently. Almost miraculously, a bipartisan compromise bill that has survived early challenges has emerged from the Senate. Though tremendously complex, at its heart the bill has several key features: a path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants currently in the country, the improvement of border security, a guest worker program, and a point system that will give skilled workers higher priority in receiving a green card. Although there has been some debate as to the exact formula used, the innovative idea of a system that gives greater weight to skill is a step in the right direction...
...populist wing of the Democratic Party made two vigorous attacks on the guest-worker provision in the Senate bill, succeeding in cutting in half the annual allotment of workers. The anxieties of these Democrats are driven in part by the fact that the main area of expansion in the proposed bill would be for guest workers outside agriculture--in the service sector, in construction, in factories. By law, any guest-worker position has to be offered to Americans first, but the fear is that a flood of guest workers would drive down salaries in those industries, as they already have...
...truth about whether these workers really endanger traditional American jobs is a bit more complicated, though. For many factories, guest workers can do little more than delay the inevitable shutdown that comes from dying demand or global competition. In the quiet shore town of Oriental, N.C., for instance, the Garland Fulcher Seafood Co. turned to guest workers after locals stopped applying for jobs as pickers, who are given the cruelly repetitive task of prying blue-crab meat out of the shell. But the company is now out of the crab-picking business altogether: not even a guest-worker program could...
Garland Fulcher's experience proves guest-worker programs don't necessarily keep Mexicans from settling here illegally. More than 10% of the company's 2006 workforce took off to live in the U.S. without returning home to Mexico. "If you want to talk about illegals," says Michelle Noevere, who worked in Garland Fulcher's front office last year, "there's the border, and then there's this foot in the door called a guest-worker program...
...country isn't ready to take those steps, here's an apostasy being whispered by some economists: get rid of large-scale agriculture altogether. England did it and is content to buy the bulk of its food from foreign producers. Less food security, perhaps, but also less need for guest workers. It's a difficult discussion in the U.S., a country that has become addicted to cheap labor. But one thing is certain in North Carolina: the immigration solution of the future isn't even working today...