Questions surround guest worker concept
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Questions surround guest worker concept
Eunice Moscoso - Cox Washington Bureau
Sunday, August 6, 2006
Washington --- Before Germany began a guest worker program to import foreign labor, few Turks lived in Germany. Three decades after the program ended, they number 2.5 million.
Entering under the temporary program, they never left. Yet many remain on the margins of German society, living in ethnic enclaves where unemployment, poverty and youth crime rates are high.
Some advocates for tougher American immigration restrictions fear the same thing could happen in the United States if a large temporary worker program --- as proposed by President Bush --- is approved by Congress.
In Germany, laws restricted Turkish guest workers and their German-born children from obtaining citizenship, so many bought property in Turkey and kept strong ties to their homeland. When the laws were changed in 2000 and the Turks were give the chance to obtain German citizenship, most chose not to.
Human nature cited
John Keeley, a spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington that advocates stricter immigration controls, said the German experience is a cautionary tale.
"Guest workers are generally Third World workers coming into the First World," Keeley said. It is against human nature to expect those workers to "voluntarily pack their bags and return to their conditions of despair back home," he said.
Immigrant advocates contend that the problems in Germany arose because the Turks were long denied citizenship and treated as a separate class, something the United States should avoid by including a path to permanent residency for foreign workers in any temporary worker plan.
"You hear a lot of Americans complain about today's generation of immigrants not wanting to assimilate and fully embrace being American, but if you don't provide opportunities for people to do that, then you can't really complain," said Michele Wucker, an immigration expert and author of the book, "Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right."
Moving carefully
President Bush has said a guest worker plan would create an orderly immigration process that allows border enforcement agents to focus on stopping drug traffickers and possible terrorists.
The administration, however, treads carefully on the issue because of strong opposition from conservatives to any measure that provides work visas for illegal immigrants.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last week urged Congress to pass "comprehensive reform," but also announced that 25 prosecutors were being deployed to cities along the Mexican border, mostly to handle immigration offenses.
Philip Martin, a professor of agriculture at the University of California, Davis who has studied guest worker programs around the world, said that in most cases, some of the temporary workers never return to their home countries.
In addition, he said that such programs tend to snowball.
When the German guest worker program started in 1961, Germany had to recruit Turkish workers. When the program ended in 1973, there were more than 1 million Turks on a waiting list, said Martin, who testified before Congress last month.
Martin also said countries become addicted to the money guest workers send back home, and therefore have a vested interest in expanding and perpetuating guest worker arrangements.
"It's a lot easier to start these programs than it is to stop them," he said.
Despite questions, many countries, including Australia, are considering new or expanded temporary worker programs.
In the United States, the Senate passed an immigration bill earlier this year that includes a guest worker plan. Authored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the bill would allow up to 200,000 additional temporary workers annually, doubling the number already permitted under smaller temporary worker programs for farm workers, computer programmers and other fields. The workers could apply for legal permanent residence after four years.
The bill would also provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
But the House passed a significantly different immigration bill in December that concentrates on border security.
