By Michelle Chen / In These Times
Laws come on heels of plan to improve small water systems
Workers with the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice and the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity demonstrate against "sub-human working and living conditions" at the contractor Signal International. (Photo courtesy of Jobs With Justice via Flickr)
When immigration comes up in Washington, politicians either politely ignore the issue or engage in lively debate on how best to punish and get rid of undocumented workers. Yet lawmakers give a strikingly warm embrace to certain types of immigrants. Those are the "legal" ones who enter with special visas under the pretext of having special skills or filling certain labor shortages--like Silicon Valley tech jobs or seasonal blueberry harvesting. So what makes one kind of immigrant valuable and another kind criminal?
So-called guestworker programs attest to the arbitrary politics of immigration that has generated a perfectly legal, global traffic in migrant labor. A new report by the advocacy group Global Workers Justice Alliance reveals how various federal visa programs funnel workers into special high-demand sectors, like amusement park staff or computer programmers. Like their "illegal" counterparts, these workers are inherently disempowered: they may be dependent on employers for legal status in the U.S., have their wages regularly stolen, or suffer sexual or physical abuse. Many lack the access to the health care and overtime pay that citizen workers often take for granted. As products of globalization, they're sometimes compelled to endure virtual indentured servitude to provide critical wage remittances to their families back home.
The economic logic is simple, according to the report: externalize the costs to those who can't afford to challenge authority.