While Amy makes a compelling moral and economic argument for respecting the rights of undocumented workers in the United States, her article on TomPaine.com does not thoroughly connect this argument to the faults in the President?s guest worker proposal. The problem is that supporters of the guest worker program would argue that such a program would indeed bring illegal immigrants into the mainstream and provide them with legal protections, just as Amy suggests is necessary.

To see the faults in the proposed guest worker program, it is helpful to look back at the history of the last major guest worker program in the United States, the Bracero Program from 1942-64. The program actually did provide a quasi-effective framework to protect the rights of Mexican workers in the United States while it was in effect, but it still failed to curb illegal immigration and caused a mountain of problems when the guest worker terms expired.

I agree with Amy in that the guest worker proposed program is a bad idea and that workers rights need to be protected, but her article does not show how a guest worker program would fail to protect these rights.

You're right, Adam, my aim in the article isn't to go into an analysis of what's wrong with Bush's guest worker program. One reason is because the president hasn't actually laid out the details of his plan. At this point, he's leaving that to Congress. I do a more in-depth analysis of two different guest worker proposals currently before the U.S. Congress (McCain/Kennedy and Cornyn/Kyl) at the end of my report on immigration at http://www.drummajorinstitute.org/library/report.php?ID=21

I'd enjoy hearing what you think of that.