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This chapter examines the new neoliberal phase of corporate restructuring, which is producing a new foreign workforce that will have even less power than undocumented workers today. The rise of guest worker programs is an integral component of a dramatic shift in the global division of labor, perpetuated through technological advances, which permits corporations to deskill many professional jobs and reduce the number of workers necessary to perform tasks, and relies increasingly on low-skilled labor. In this hostile environment, the working class and organized labor in the United States and throughout the world must search for a means to counter neoliberal reforms that only benefit corporations at the expense of workers everywhere. But unions must reject business as usual and new forms of labor organizations rooted in nonhierarchical structures must emerge to mobilize workers in the United States and throughout the world.

This chapter examines how skilled and semi-skilled guest worker programs contribute to the displacement of workers throughout the U.S. economy. In the future, as migrant labor programs are institutionalized through the World Trade Organization and are viewed as the latest formula for economic development, it is likely that this new commodification of labor will spread into a growing number of labor market sectors, including manufacturing and transportation. At the same time the chapter reveals that while corporate human resource executives view migrant laborers as docile and complacent, a growing number are resorting to collective action in the form of micro organizing, where small groups organize to address the specific problems they face.

Labor relations are a paramount consideration in crop agriculture, a labor-intensive industry that is dependent on land. The U.S. government has long regulated the supply of foreign farm labor on behalf of agribusiness, and that role became more critical as the industry restructured itself in the competitive neoliberal climate since the early 1990s. The H2A program, which permits quasi-private labor brokers to import Mexican “guest workers” for seasonal work on U.S. farms, expanded after 1990 into states in the mid-South, which was also experiencing new flows of undocumented immigrants. North Carolina emerged as the state importing the most H2A workers. This chapter draws on the case of the North Carolina Growers Association, the state's large H2A brokerage, to examine the relationship between the neoliberal state and guest workers during the 1990s. It shows that during the 1990s, the North Carolina H2A program morphed into a model of contractual labor relations that represented a case of “government by proxy,” not unlike other public-private partnerships formed in the neoliberal era. In this case, the state delegated responsibility for labor supply manipulation, control of workers, and regulatory oversight directly to private brokers who publicly represented and shared revenue streams with agribusiness growers.

This chapter shows how economic instruments can align the rights and obligations of employers and migrants to keep guest worker programs truer to their purpose. It further explains how to minimize the distortion and dependence that are inevitable in guest worker programs, how cooperation can ensure that the exodus of highly skilled migrants does not slow development in countries of origin, and how various policies can protect the rights of migrants. The chapter addresses an important question: “How can guest worker programs be managed so that the inequalities promoting migration narrow over time?” It also proposes that developed nations partially replenish the human capital they have attracted from developing countries by supporting and strengthening primary and secondary schooling systems in migrant countries of origin. For unskilled migrants, the chapter proposes taxes and subsidies to align the rights and duties of employers and migrants.

This chapter examines different views on how to resolve the so-called immigration crisis in the United States and offers a pragmatic and economically sound proposal for immigration reform, with particular emphasis on undocumented immigration. It argues that we need to end the hostile rhetoric aimed at undocumented immigrants and calls for an immigration policy based on reality rather than hateful attacks. It also discusses the three policy options that are commonly addressed in the context of comprehensive immigration reform: mass deportation, blanket amnesty, and a guest worker program. Finally, it explains what it calls the 2013 Kennedy-Bell Comprehensive Immigration Reform Law intended for current undocumented workers and which consists of five main components, including a guest worker program and a form of the DREAM Act.

This chapter renders the U.S. and Mexican governments’ investment in using competing conceptualizations of race and racial difference to recruit Mexican immigrant men of varying class backgrounds into the Bracero Program throughout the Mexican countryside. In anticipation of advancing the economic imperatives of local municipal Mexican governments, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated with each other to contract braceros who already had or could lend fellow Mexican immigrant men the financial resources to journey and labor in the United States without adequate wages or protections. Using the oral life histories of bracero families, this historical consideration of the influence of race captures the intensity of these families’ disenfranchisement at the hands of these governments and fellow Mexican immigrant men.

This epilogue addresses the Bracero Program’s far-reaching consequences, as well as efforts designed to document and learn from the experience of bracero families to render productive approaches toward acknowledging and confronting the enduring trauma of the program. By focusing on the resonance of the program and this family experience, this discussion of the spirit with which these families confronted being separated from each other for indefinite periods of time across the U.S.-Mexico border enhances our understanding of the rigors of bracero family life. Treating this family experience as a meaningful and invaluable history finally provides a discussion that does not underestimate the costs and consequences of the program and, in turn, binational guest-worker programs writ large.

Using the correspondence of U.S. government officials and Mexican immigrant children, women, and men of varying legal status, this chapter examines how censorship was used to maintain the separation of bracero families across the U.S.-Mexico border. This historical consideration of how the U.S. government’s censorship and obstruction of these families’ correspondence emerged as an underestimated and, in turn, effective border enforcement measure in support of the Bracero Program’s conditions and terms illustrates this government’s selective acknowledgment of bracero families. It also proves most revealing when striving to understand the deep-seated anxiety, restlessness, and silences of the program.

This chapter examines the extraordinary accountability placed on the shoulders of bracero families striving to secure a Bracero Program contract to work as “special immigrants” in the United States. Special immigrants were Mexican immigrant children, women, and men who worked tirelessly in support of management models that kept fellow braceros and their families isolated from U.S. society. Employed to maintain a social and physical distance and employment conditions and terms that would prevent braceros and their families from ever crossing paths with U.S. residents or citizens laboring in sectors that transcended agriculture, special immigrants were widely resented and often among the most alienated of immigrants in the United States and Mexico.