Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

My erudite colleague David Abraham, himself a guest worker at Princeton this semester, has a great column at the top of the New York Times op-ed page today, American Jobs but Not the American Dream.

In it, he persuasively describes the Bush proposal as “a classic guest worker program on the European model” and then sets out all the ills that flow from adopting guest worker programs — “drawbacks [that] far outweigh their advantages.”

Among the problems — large foreign low-wage populations tend to create ghettos; once people set down roots, they don't want to go home; making residence depend on employment tends to create opportunities for exploitation by the employer; the US's lack of strong labor unions makes this problem likely to be even worse here than it was in European countries such as Germany that tried the guest worker concept.

And, as David so eloquently put it,

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.