With 7 million U.S. workers unemployed, why do employers clamor that they need to import foreign workers to work in low-wage jobs as dishwashers, hotel maids, crab pickers and landscape laborers? The answer is simple, according to Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):
 
There isn’t a shortage of workers willing to do these jobs. There’s a shortage of employers willing to pay a decent wage.
 
In a recent op-ed column in Newsday, Eisenbrey points out that at a time when hundreds of thousands of families are facing foreclosures on their homes and wages are stagnant, corporate interests and their allies in Congress on both sides of the aisle are pushing to expand the number of foreign guest workers.
 
That would be bad news for low-wage workers in this country, whether immigrant or native-born, Eisenbrey says, because it would bring in more workers willing to accept low wages and less likely to join unions or otherwise seek to fulfill their workplace rights.
 

Current law caps the number of guest workers allowed to enter the country each year at 66,000 under the H-2B visa program, if employers fail to find qualified U.S. workers. But the law is rigged, Eisenbrey says.  
 

For example, employers only are required to advertise for workers for four months before the jobs become vacant. In the past 10 years, the number of  H-2B visas have grown from 20,000 to 130,000. If Congress lifts the cap and allows all the foreign workers who used H-2B visas in the past three years to re-enter, potentially more than 200,000 visas could be issues. Employers want to bring in more guest workers to keep wages low, he says, because almost all H-2B employers pay less than a living wage. Eisenbrey says EPI examined wages and unemployment in the seven occupations with the most H-2B workers, which include hotel and restaurant workers. In these occupations, unemployment was higher and had risen faster since 2000 than the national average, while wages were lower and had risen more slowly than the national average.
 
The AFL-CIO backs strong protections for immigrant workers’ freedoms and rights and opposes expansion of current guest worker programs. Last June, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka told a Capitol Hill press conference that Congress should place workers’ rights at the forefront of any immigration reform plan and pass a broad legalization program, free of new temporary guest worker programs. Said Trumka: 
 
The current system is unworkable. It has become a blueprint for exploitation of all workers, both U.S. and foreign-born. As long as this broken system persists, all workers will suffer because employers will be able to turn to a ready pool of exploitable workers to drive down wages, benefits, health and safety protections and other workplace standards for all workers. 
 
Guest workers are easily exploited, Trumka says, because they typically are deeply in debt by the time they arrive in the United States, where the companies that hire them often charge additional fees for boarding, food and expenses. The workers say the recruiters and the employer threaten, coerce and defraude them into paying additional money and altered contracts, which they force the workers to accept under threat of losing their passports and visas. A study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, relates that it is not unusual for guest workers to pay huge fees to obtain a seasonal guest worker position.
 
Just last month, more than 70 Indian guest workers rallied at the White House gates to demand fundamental changes in the nation’s guest worker program. They also demanded a congressional investigation of their former employer, Signal International, a marine construction company they say held them in modern-day forced labor in its Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard.