James Hankins proposes a guest worker program that would address a half-century of shortcomings in American mass immigration policy. In its rare combination of hardheadedness and empathy, his argument calls to mind Victor Davis Hanson’s 2003 memoir/essay Mexifornia. Hankins is writing neither for economists nor for international lawyers, but for people who actually live in America and wish to do right by their neighbors, including the most recently arrived among them. This is going to be difficult.
We should be clear what Hankins means by “guest worker.” Aren’t illegal immigrants guest workers already? They are guests, after a fashion, and they do work. The expression “guest worker” means something different. Though the specifics can vary from country to country, the term means someone who is in the country where he works on sufferance. A guest worker has the right to work, but not necessarily the right to stay or become a citizen. Guest worker is an intermediate category between citizen and foreigner.
Hankins argues that elaborating such a special status for people would fix a few aspects of the present system that are especially unfair and perverse. By definition, illegal migrants do not belong here legally, but after long residence they may well belong here, and only here, culturally. What is more, their American-born children belong here unambiguously.