Title 42 and the Guest Worker Program

At midnight yesterday, Title 42, the “Remain in Mexico” provision instituted during President Trump’s presidency, came to an end and now it’s predicted that 10,000 illegals per day will cross our border. Many of which will be released into the country without a court date for adjudication of their asylum claims.

The Biden administration says it is working to get the situation under control. That’s like saying “I’m hoping to get pregnant” when you’re already six months into a pregnancy. It’s not as if the Biden administration didn’t have a full two years to figure this out.

“Why can’t we come up with a guest worker program?” I asked my husband. His response was “We had this conversation twenty years ago, I clearly remember sitting on the deck and talking about this”.

We need workers and these people say they are coming here to seek work. Very few actually want to live in the United States, leaving behind friends, family and community; instead they want to earn, send money back home and return home at some point. Of course there are those that are fleeing their countries to find asylum and live what they believe to be the American Dream, but they’re not the majority.

Further, a guest worker program would provide order, remove the risk to the immigrant posed by illegal coyote trafficking and ensure that those workers earn a fair wage. Further, it would increase tax receipts to federal, state and local governments by reducing if not eliminating people being paid “off the books.”

Continuing on with the current chaos seems to have an intentional character of lowering wages, avoiding employer paid obligations to include contributions to Social Security and Medicare as well as the requirement for employer paid health care.

It’s always cheaper for the employer to pay under the table.

A guest worker program would also enable communities to anticipate housing needs, leading to more order and less tent cities or people sleeping on the street. It would increase the trust between law enforcement and the foreign worker population. As is, many of these workers are subject to high rates of crime because the criminals know the illegal is reluctant to get law enforcement involved for fear of deportation.

It would also affect the ability of Border Patrol and law enforcement to tackle the horrendous problem of drug trafficking. Not a small thing as we are losing more Americans each year to drug overdoses than were lost in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. In 2022 alone, we lost 110,000 to overdoses, with many of those not knowing that their favorite recreational drug was laced with Fentanyl.

In addition to drug trafficking, our country is plagued by human trafficking of women and girls. It was recently reported that an eight year old girl had over sixty-seven samples of DNA found inside of her, meaning she had been raped by sixty-seven different men on her journey to the border.

President Obama sought a robust guest worker program ten years ago, but yet we still have a system that is cumbersome and sloppy. My sister and her family run multiple food trucks at carnivals from Washington to California. They have relied on the H2-B Visa program to get the workers for their food trucks. The worker and employer pay thousands for that Visa. They benefit employers who are having a hard time finding people to work as well as the worker who benefits by a legal status.

As of two days ago, my sister reported to me that their H-2 Visa holders were stuck in Monterrey, Mexico and not being allowed to enter the U.S. All parties did everything exactly according to law, but they are stuck while nearly eighty-four thousand people entered the United State illegally in the last week.

That’s not a functional guest worker program. That’s a travesty for both the guest workers and their anxious employers.

There are suspicions that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce only feigns the political will to fully implement a guest worker program because in reality it’s a lot cheaper for their members to look the other way in order to avoid employer tax and health care obligations. Many articles have been written on the topic.

I don’t know the veracity of that claim, but I would think if the full force of the Chamber and Unions would come together to advocate for the program, it would satisfy both sides of the Aisle and it would get done. Until then, we have chaos at the border, women and girls being sexually exploited by the thousands, law enforcement being overwhelmed and workers risking their lives because we aren’t smart enough to come up with an orderly system to solve this decade’s old problem.

Shame on our political leaders.