Would Perry distribute 10 or 20 million work permits in the middle of a recession here?
Would there be any limit to the number of workers?
Canada has an excellent guest worker program that we could emulate here.
Each year, companies submit their plans for guest workers. Those jobs are publicised, and current residents have the opportunity to request those jobs.
Then, the companies can fill the remaining jobs with guest workers. But they must provide, at employment, the means for the guest workers to go back to their own countries.
Canada tracks these workers to make sure they leave.
I think that would be a fine solution for our country. There ARE jobs most americans won’t do, and that foreign workers will do. We don’t any longer have a large supply of people who would be willing to migrate around the country and work in harsh conditions. But by setting up a program like Canada’s, anybody here who DID want that life would get priority.
But the KEY to a guest worker program has GOT to be tracking them and making sure they leave when their job is done. That’s where we get a lot of illegals, not crossing the border, but coming in legally, and then overstaying their work permits.
There are a lot of mexicans who have the right to cross our borders who don’t have the right to work here, and if we can’t stop them. It’s like how ANY american with a passport can drive down to Tijuana (sp?). But you can’t go down and get a job without a permit. The same is true the other way, and with Canada as well.
So no matter what you do with a fence, there’s a huge population of “legal crossing” people you can’t handle with a fence, you need the means to track people legally in the country to make sure they don’t overstay their legal periods or start working illegally.
How about 3 million “unskilled” labor permits good for 2-3 years. If they could only be obtained at Am. Embassies in their home countries, 2-3 times that many would go home hoping to get one.
We need a carrot/stick system in place to get most of them go home voluntarily to reduce the cost of removing them involuntarily.
There is already a farm labor permit process in place. Unfortunately it is totally gummed up with stupid PC policies and requirements. It’s easier to hire illegals with fake documents. Fix that (i.e. get the liberal meddling out of it) and half the problem is solved right there.