Make a Green Card the Real Payoff for Guest Workers

Sometimes, leadership means acting on contradictory ideas at the same time. When President Bush visits Mexico last week, he will propose a comprehensive guest worker program, the largest since the braceros of 1942-64. Our new, pro-immigration president leads us toward a contradiction with huge political and economic consequences.

A pro-immigration, guest-worker program is an oxymoron, like a land mine on a safe highway. Our last large-scale guest worker program, the infamous “Operation Wetback,” enforced “temporary” visas by deporting a million people a year. Bush says he won’t do that. But can he avoid it?

The chief Senate sponsor of the new program, Phil Gramm (R-Texas), thinks a guest-worker program recognizes economic reality. “It is delusional,” he said on a recent trip to Mexico, “not to recognize that illegal aliens [from Mexico] already hold millions of jobs in the United States with the implicit permission of governments at every level, as well as companies and communities.”

Yet Gramm also said on the Senate floor in December that amnesty for illegal immigrants would pass “over my dead body.”

When it comes to immigration, many conservatives abandon their skeptical preference for a pricing mechanism over regulation. But what’s really delusional is to consider immigration in exclusively economic terms.

Some claim Americans don’t want to do certain jobs. What they mean is: not at these wages and working conditions. Pay me a major league baseball player’s salary, and I will pick strawberries. Wouldn’t you? The agriculture industry simply can’t meet our price. When manufacturing--including TV producers, machine tools and others--couldn’t pay U.S. wages, they left the country. Our economy prospered anyway, and those goods are cheaper now. If employers who now want guest workers can’t make a profit paying U.S. wages, the free market will take care of them--and us.

When the government supplies a work force, that’s a subsidy. When it is a less-skilled work force supplied at submarket wages, it’s a big subsidy. And if workers want something that can only be supplied by the government--like a green card--it hugely distorts the market, hiding the real costs.

Workers don’t choose to be illegal. Employers create illegal workers. If employers would (or could) pay for workers’ green cards, most illegal immigration would evaporate. Who wouldn’t rather have protections of law in a free market? Yet immigration policy is a rat’s nest of failed regulations.

Guest-worker advocates argue that the exploited illegal work force will be replaced by a protected temporary one. This contradicts history and common sense. If President Clinton didn’t fine employers for hiring illegal workers, Bush is not about to start. So a guest-worker program will accelerate illegal immigration. Limited to certain industries, temporary workers will illegally take higher pay in other fields.

The only way to keep temporary workers in legal jobs is to allow them to earn access to U.S. citizenship--American civics, not bogus Mexican economics.

Face the facts: Temporary workers are rarely “temporary” and never just “workers.” They are people with families building a better future. Bush should expect them to act like it.

When Bush proposes to Mexico President Vicente Fox that the U.S. and Mexico work this immigration thing out, they should resolve the contradiction of illegal Mexicans who should be legal Americans. Making them temporarily legal won’t work for either country.

The ultimate solution for illegal immigration from Mexico is economic development there. Fox’s bracero proposal goes the other way. He would export a significant part of Mexico’s work force, while importing a substantial part of their salaries in the form of health insurance and an investment fund to build the country’s economy. But Mexico sacrifices its economic development when its workers go north to build a future in Omaha instead of Oaxaca.

Trying to deduct from the wages of absent workers can’t build the Mexican economy. People vote with their feet. In 1997, the Binational Study, a joint research project between Mexican and U.S. experts, concluded that it is recruiting networks--that is, guys getting jobs for their brothers--that drives illegal immigration, not the lack of jobs in Mexico nor a shortage of workers in the U.S.

Nobody needs to explain to Bush how family ties into employment. Perhaps he will explain to President Fox how immigration can make working families into Americans.

If Bush proposes to Fox that the U.S. accept Mexican workers on temporary visas as part of a broader approach to immigration in which they, and millions of others, can choose to become legal permanent residents for many reasons--including family ties and steady employment--Fox will find this is not in contradiction to Mexico’s interests. He’ll simply understand why Bush is the president who said in his inaugural address that “immigrants make us more, not less, American.”