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.
See also my comment about Palin's "allow you to work" comment on O'Reilly in 2010. LINK
I think Palin's idea to convert illegals to guest workers after they "register" is wrong.
Working in IT, for a company that does a lot of outsourcing no less, I get to see the good and the bad of the tech skills immigration policy. It’s largely a separate debate from the illegal immigrant issue, because for the most part, the folks coming over here on H-1Bs are productive and keep their noses clean, and do provide value. The question with them is more, should we be bringing them over here to allow companies to save money when there’s domestic tech workers watching their unemployment run out? There’s no easy answer.
I am pessimistic that we have the political will to pull off mass deportation of illegals, even though we really should try. It could get very ugly. We do need Arizona-style or Alabama-style tough interior enforcement, PLUS a fully-build and strongly-manned border fence, PLUS heavy restrictions on the ability of illegals to gain any government aid. That’s just the bare minimum we should be talking about IMO. Until we get millions of the illegals that are here to self-deport, or throw them out if it comes to that, we can’t even talk about “path to citizenship” or any sort of work program. First we get the problem down to a manageable size, then we can talk about next steps. But the first step must, now and always, be border security and deterring illegals from trying entry, or staying if they get here.
}:-)4