American workers should recognize that we are better off helping immigrants become citizens and organize into unions that will increase their pay, improve their lives and integrate them into the community.
A Mexican, or Guatemalan, or Somalian, or Kosovar, or Irishman, for that matter, might be drawn to the United States by the prospect of a $5.15-an-hour job, but they won't want to stay at the minimum wage once they get their green card. That is why businesses want a new "guest worker" program, which would import hundreds of thousands of workers every year for jobs US citizens supposedly won't take.
Bush's "guest worker" program is a form of indentured servitude that makes the worker beholden to his or her boss. It is merely an updated form of the old "bracero" program that provided low-wage Mexican laborers, mainly for field work, and was abused from the 1940s through 1964.
The "guest worker" program undercuts the pressure for higher wages and it violates market principles that the Right supposedly holds sacred. If a boss can't find legal residents to do jobs at $5.15 an hour, but instead has to import people from a third-world economy to do those jobs -- hello! -- that is a pretty good indicator that the minimum wage is woefully outdated.
Nathan Newman of the Progressive Legislative Action Network notes that states can act to strengthen undocumented workers' legal rights, as California did in 2002 with a law that affirms that labor protections are available to any employee "regardless of immigration status." New York's highest court in February ruled that undocumented workers injured at work retain the right to sue for compensation.
As undocumented aliens find it harder to get work, most likely would return to their home countries. That would leave a hole in the workforce to be filled by legal residents who would demand more pay for the same job.
Higher wages would mean higher prices at restaurants, higher construction costs, higher food prices and so on. Farmers would be pressed to find hands who would work at wages that would not price local produce out of line with foreign competitors. So be careful what you wish for.
(From The Progressive Populist at http://www.populist.com)