
H-2B program to nearly double, grant most temporary guest visas since 2007 - petethomas
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/06/trump-administration-nearly-doubles-h-b-guest-visa-program-which-brings-many-mexican-workers/
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jimz
This is generally something that's a good idea in the broad sense, as in with
our level of unemployment, lowering birth rates, and generally overly
restrictive immigration policies with no practical way of giving employment-
based routes to permanent residency for those performing jobs that doesn't
require a degree. However, this is ultimately still a half-assed measure that
fails to address anything close to the root of the problem and I can't imagine
this making enough of a difference in incentive structures to really matter.

"Guest workers" was effectively the de facto system of how ostensibly
undocumented immigrant workers operated in America prior to the militarization
of the border from the 70s to the 80s that effectively removed the option of
having laborers who would work in America but reside in Mexico with their
families during the winter, which is a major cause of why this whole "illegal
immigrants moving to America crisis" even exists. So under this current
regime, part of that idea is restored, because, frankly, the old model was
fairly effective.

However, this kills one of the most necessary elements of, well, capitalism,
which is that the workers would need some measure of bargaining power in terms
of wages. The current scheme takes away that by tying one's ability to reside
and work in a country to a particular employer, which turns into a somewhat
more charitable version of indentured servitude. Why are these workers paid
less than American workers? Because they can't negotiate for higher wages
without getting booted. So it's fixing a problem that's self-inflicted except
effectively turning it into quasi-indentured-servitude, as the H2 program
comes with a long history of reported abuses, which surely only represents a
minority of actual abuses.

And you can't adjust status to anything permanent in the end, so it may even
be worse than indentured servitude.

Coming from Trump, as well, I wouldn't believe a single thing he says
regardless so this could all just be a mirage anyway, but ultimately the
reforms needed needs to actually work on a level that liberalizes a lot of the
restrictions that have no benefits and are in fact holdovers from far more
explicitly racist policies of old (there's still a chapter in the US Code
specifically titled "Exclusion of the Chinese" for crissakes). Without that,
all these stopgaps are just putting bandaids on gunshot wounds.

