You can't let businessmen do that in a vacuum. They'll establish zero availability of U.S. workers by stipulating a Third World wage, or a compromise wage benchmarked to same, in order spuriously to claim that "no American workers" are available.
You can't implicitly let business control wages, or they'll reset wages to Calcutta levels, because they're greedy and don't want to pay people. My source for that statement? A former boss who came clean 30 years ago, because he knew he'd be getting rid of me in a couple of months anyway -- because I'd asked for the raise I'd been promised a year earlier!
Employers screw workers every chance they get. Adam Smith and Milton Friedman agree, you can't trust those guys for two milliseconds when there's money on the table.
If labor is weak, and when international labor is involved, the government as a whole has to exercise the syndical function, lest its people be beggared by international interests arbitraging and ripsawing regional labor markets, playing whole continents off against one another as a labor oligopsony.
Ping to my last.
And when employees have a chance to get better pay and/or benefits with another employer, as many did in the '90s, they'll very often "screw" their current employer by leaving. (I say this as one who was laid off a year ago simply because I had a great deal of seniority and the accompanying pay.)
You can't let businessmen do that in a vacuum. They'll establish zero availability of U.S. workers by stipulating a Third World wage, or a compromise wage benchmarked to same, in order spuriously to claim that "no American workers" are available.
Of course you can't do that in a vacuum. Such a street brawl would need to be done in Congress with C-Span covering it blow by blow.
Labor will start out by claiming that not a single Guest Worker is needed.
Businees will start out by claiming that we need to import all of Mexico and at least a third of China.
In the end, the results would be:
"Do we need Guest Worker cabbage pickers?"........Yes.
"Do we need Guest Worker auto workers in Detroit auto plants?".......Only in your dreams, General Motors.
"Do we need Guest Worker carpenters?"........That depends. In San Francisco we do because nobody there wants to mess up their manicures but, in Alabama, we definately don't.