Why a guest worker program will not work!

Temporary workers are anything but temporary!


TheTownCrier
Feb. 7, 2006

President Bush has changed his words from "guest worker" to "temporary worker" in recent days. It's still amnesty no matter how he parses it. Case in point, seventy thousand Hondurans and 3,600 Nicaraguans and 222,000 Salvadorans.

Lou Dobbs reported last night , "hundreds of thousands of Central Americans have been allowed to stay and work in this country on a temporary basis and because of the crisis conditions in their country. Now, after years of extension, that temporary status may be running out. Most of these so-called temporary workers have no intention of returning home.

When Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, President Bill Clinton granted something called temporary protective status, allowing more than 100,000 people to stay here another 18 months without risk of deportation.

Eight years and five extensions later, a majority of those with temporary status remain. Seventy thousand Hondurans and 3,600 Nicaraguans are still here, with the right to work. And 222,000 Salvadorans are still here, temporarily working, five years after two earthquakes devastated El Salvador.

But even if their status expires, there's little chance they will be deported, since Immigration and Customs Enforcement's stated focus is national security and violent criminals. It raises questions about just how workable any so-called guest or temporary worker program can be."

A government spokesman states that no decision has been made yet whether to grant another extension on these temporary permits.

Christine Romans reports, " They will revert back to their prior status; in many cases, it was illegal. These people were here illegally in the first place. There was a natural disaster in their home country. They got temporary protective status. Now they've had children, they've been in this country for several years. Some of them have been here for decades. Becomes very, very difficult to remove them, unless, for some reason, major criminal, national security threat. That's when they would be removed. Even all this fear and this talk about, oh, a lot of people are going to be deported, no one really thinks they will be.

You've got almost a half a million people over the past decade who have been here on a temporary basis working, and 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent of these different nationalities have never left. So it shows perhaps that temporary workers are anything but temporary. They're human beings who come here for a life, start a family. There's no intention to leave."

The president's pet project, a massive guest worker program with six-year temporary cards, will be overseen by an agency already strapped with an alphabet soup of temporary worker plans, already impossible to enforce.

In fact, the new director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, Emilio Gonzalez, during his Senate confirmation process said, quote, "I don't think the system's -- in fact, I know the systems that exists right now wouldn't be able to handle it."

Full Dobbs transcript found here: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0602/06/ldt.01.html
aired 2/6/06