'Guest' worker wilderness

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Millions of people in Mexico need work. Americans have millions of jobs that we apparently won't do ourselves. Presto. The answer to illegal immigration is obviously a lawful guest-worker program.

That simple logic is behind various immigration reform bills under discussion before Congress. Most entail guest-worker provisions that bring set numbers of temporary workers in from Mexico, attached to particular employers who can "prove" they can't find Americans to work for them.

The problem is that we have unsuccessfully tried this approach before, from 1942 to 1964, with the so-called braceros -- the hired "arms" from Mexico.

Various programs to bring Mexican laborers across the border were initially small, supposedly temporary, and aimed only at alleviating wartime shortages of labor.

But some 4 million braceros later, the idea of guest workers had evolved into a huge labor exchange, delivering hardworking -- and very cheap -- farm workers to American employers, most of them large agribusiness concerns.

President Kennedy, under union pressure and shortly before his death, began to phase out the braceros. He worried that the system was "adversely affecting the wages, working conditions and employment opportunities of our own agricultural workers."

But when well-meaning legislators, conservative and liberal alike, now propose modern braceros for all sorts of hard-to-fill jobs, it is often with a weird sense of nostalgia.

Sometimes, though, the remedy is worse than the problem. Bringing back the braceros to work throughout the economy, and euphemistically calling them "guest workers," would be just such a case.

Growing up in the rural San Joaquin Valley in California in the early 1960s, I remember hardworking, but not happy, braceros. No one considered them "guests" at all, but rather more like helots -- a permanent class of serfs in the fields that the public neglected, the employer exploited and other workers resented.

To ensure that braceros went back home to Mexico after harvest, portions of their paychecks were often deposited with the Mexican government. Today thousands of aged and disabled farm workers are still in court trying to reclaim those stolen wages.