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In A December 2006 editorial, Gov. Perry wrote: "I would rather know who is crossing our border legally to work instead of not knowing who is crossing our border illegally to work. A guest worker program that provides foreign workers with an ID removes the incentive for millions of people to illegally enter our country. It also adds those workers to our tax base, generates revenue for needed social services and it can be done without providing citizenship."

I would like to believe that a "guest worker program" does not lead to citizenship, but I am not convinced. Many millions are here illegally because of expired visas. Guest workers sire anchor babies.

And even assuming we can trust Perry's intentions, the larger the pool of potential amnesty candidates, the greater the danger of importing 10s of millions of leftist voters. Let's say Perry was POTUS 8 years, accumulating guest workers the whole time, with no amnesty. Think those programs are going away? No, they will still be here, and you can bet the leftists (and perhaps RINOs too) will keep trying to "bring them out of the shadows" and make them all voters.

And we have over 9% unemployment, probably double that in reality!

If Perry had mentioned some of those little problems I mentioned, I might have more confidence he and his brain trust had even thought about them.

Palin's approach is similar, and perhaps worse, because her program itself could lead to "a path to citizenship" and voting (it's really unclear). On O'Reilly in 2010 she proposed registering and providing work for illegals, as long as they "follow the steps" in her program.

Canada has a great guest worker system, although it’s a little bit too “central-planning”. Each year every employer files with the government requesting the number of workers they need for seasonal labor. Those jobs are advertised in Canada, to see if there are citizens/residents who want them. Meanwhile, foreigners register with the program, and then workers are obtained through the program by the employers.

As part of the initial employment, the foreign workers are provided with transportation back to their country at the end of the employment period, and they are tracked to make sure they have gone.

I believe we need seasonal employees for farms. There may be some americans willing to do the work, but we aren’t a nation of people who are willing to travel around from town to town and state to state living in quarters and picking crops in the sun every day. But it should be easy to get the migrants back out of the country, because the work is seasonal.

Our biggest flaw in that regard is that we do a lousy job of tracking down people with expired visas.

Now, the technical skills immigration policy seems to have broken, as we have lots of skilled technical people who aren’t getting jobs while we bring in laborers from other countries for positions that could be long-term. Again though, I’m not sure if we could fill those jobs, but we need to do a better job of ensuring that we don’t have residents before we bring in foreigners.

I’m not for reducing the number of legal immigrants. I don’t think the legal immigration is killing us, it’s the huge number of illegal immigrants added on top of the legel immigrants. I do think we need to be more selective on who we let immigrate.