Be Our Guest!(The Talk of the Town)(welcoming immigrants)

Give the Senate some credit: in shaping the current immigration-reform bill, it has come up with one idea that almost everybody hates. That's the plan to create a new class of "guest workers"--immigrants who would be allowed to work in the U.S. for three two-year stretches, at most, provided that they return home for a year after each visit. Conservatives dislike the plan because they believe that the guest workers won't return home after their visas expire. Liberals dislike it because they believe the program will depress American wages and trap guest workers in a state of serfdom. The only vocal supporters of the provision are businesses that rely heavily on immigrant labor, and they're presumably just looking out for themselves.

History appears to give credence to the plan's opponents. Think about Germany's Gastarbeiter problem. Beginning in the early nineteen-sixties, Germany admitted immigrants from Turkey on short-term work visas. Many of these workers, instead of returning home, put down permanent roots, despite having no obvious way of becoming citizens. They were neither deported nor assimilated, and today they're a sizable minority in many cities and, in some sense, a society unto themselves.

In the U.S., the guest-worker experience has often been one of abuse and mistreatment, most notably during the infamous bracero program. It was started during the Second World War as a way of bringing in a small number of experienced farmworkers to harvest crops in California. But farm owners quickly came to rely on imported labor, and in time more than four hundred thousand braceros a year were crossing the border, only to end up being used as strikebreakers, forced to live in grim migrant camps, and paid less than they'd been promised.

Given this record, and the broader concerns about the effects of illegal immigration, the hostility to the new plan is understandable. It's also misguided. However imperfect, the guest-worker program is better than any politically viable alternative. Opponents of immigration sometimes imply that adding workers to a workforce automatically brings wages down. But immigrants tend to work in different industries than native workers, and have different skills, and so they often end up complementing native workers, rather than competing with them. That can make native workers more productive and therefore better off. (In construction, for instance, the work of carpenters and masons, who are often immigrants, can create a need for crane operators and foremen, who tend to be native-born.) According to a recent study by the economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, between 1990 and 2004 immigration actually boosted the wages of most American workers; its only negative effect was a small one, on the wages of workers without a high-school diploma. And if by increasing the number of legal guest workers we reduced the number of undocumented workers, the economy would benefit even more.