“Guest worker programs are not, and have never been, intended as ‘paths to citizenship.’”
It is exceedingly rare that the Congressional Black Caucus considers standing in the way of Barack Obama’s historical legacy – whatever that might be, this term. However, Black lawmakers appear to be stiffening their opposition to proposals by the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” that would abandon the Diversity Lottery, which allocates permanent-resident visas to 55,000 immigrants per year, about half of them Africans. Republicans insisted that the lottery be dropped from the Senate version of immigration reform legislation in favor of a so-called merit-based system, but Congresspersons Yvette Clark and Hakeem Jeffries, both from Brooklyn, New York, call the proposal “a deal breaker” and “a red line for the CBC,” respectively. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, a “Gang of Eight” member who made sure that Irish immigrants get an additional 10,500 visas under the proposed new system, thinks he can bring the Black Caucus around to his way of thinking – and he’s probably right. When President Obama says his legacy is riding on a bill, any balking by the CBC is probably ephemeral.
For organized labor, guest worker programs have historically been immigration “deal breakers” – although the unions’ spines are as brittle as the CBC’s. Obama’s immigration vision is clearly aligned with agribusiness, which claims it cannot function without guaranteed importations of throwaway, non-citizen farm labor. Obama has lately been pretending he can’t hear or speak on the subject of guest workers – which means he’s actually aligned with the corporations.
Guest worker programs are not, and have never been, intended as “paths to citizenship” for the millions of undocumented workers and families who are already in the United States. Historically, they have been just the opposite: a means of obtaining inherently insecure, controlled labor flows for agribusiness; a labor pool that cannot possibly organize itself for long term bargaining power or act in solidarity with the “domestic” workforce. This is the corporate side of immigration “reform.”