One article on the circumstances of why someone would travel thousands of miles across numerous borders for a job and the second on why the "guest worker" program is analogous to being indentured servitude. Click the headers for the entire articles. And lastly, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

Between a rock ...

By age 18, Kelvin already had tried twice, unsuccessfully, to cross into the United States after traveling hundreds of miles from his home in Honduras. The first time, he said, he was beaten and his backpack taken by thieves.

“Mi,” who was robbed while riding atop a train on his way to the United States, lived for five years in Texas before being deported because his work permit expired.

Both Kelvin and Mi laughed when asked if they could support themselves on the salary offered by the vast maquiladora (maquila) network of factories stretching throughout Central America.

“I worked two jobs in Texas, at the 7–Eleven and the Stop & Go,” Mi said. “I could make more money working two jobs in Texas than I can at the maquila.” Yet work in the maquilas is the best most Central American countries have to offer.

And despite the risks, both intended to keep trying to get into the United States, crossing the guarded borders of two nations until they succeeded—or were killed.

I met Mi and Kelvin several years ago at the Casa del Migrante, a temporary shelter for deported migrants on the Guatemalan-Mexican border. Just south of the Suchiate River in Tecun Uman, the shelter is run by the Scalabrini Order of Roman Catholic priests whose mission is providing shelters for the migrants among us. The labor-human rights trip was sponsored through STITCH, a network of U.S. women unionists and activists seeking to build connections between Central American and U.S. women organizing for economic justice.

Filing in for lunch in a sweltering, dark room where fat flies were the first to feast on the bowls of rice, meat and greenish bread, dozens of migrants took their places, saying grace before they ate. They shared their stories and their hopes.

Across the room, a man from El Salvador described how he had migrated to the United States and earned enough money to come back and build a house—which was destroyed in a hurricane. With nothing left in El Salvador, he was trying to return to the United States to start the process all over again.

While the debate over who can enter the United States roils the nation, the priests at Casa del Migrante know that no matter how onerous the bureaucratic loops to citizenship or how high the borders erected along the Rio Grande, people seeking to support themselves and their families will continue to risk everything to—in a word—survive.

Maquilas—the system of factories where workers assemble garments for multinational firms like Liz Claiborne—were supposed to provide a place for impoverished workers to step into the global economy as well-paid participants. Instead, workers often face sweatshop conditions and universally long hours and low pay. Working 12 hours a day, six days a week, many throughout Mexico and Central America can only afford to live in cardboard and aluminum homes with no electricity or running water.

Many of the maquilas throughout Central America are owned by Korean or Taiwanese firms, whose Latino employees assemble clothes and other goods for exports to the United States and other western nations.

Corporate globalization hasn’t succeeded in enabling millions of workers throughout the world to support their families. But it has succeeded in tying together national economies—and that means if workers are treated unfairly in one country, it’s a problem for all nations. These connections are especially clear in recent so-called free trade agreements.

... and a hard place

Close to Slavery
Guestworker Programs in the United States

In his 2007 State of the Union Address, President Bush called for legislation creating a "legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis." Doing so, the president said, would mean "they won't have to try to sneak in." Such a program has been central to Bush's past immigration reform proposals. Similarly, recent congressional proposals have included provisions that would bring potentially millions of new "guest" workers to the United States.

What Bush did not say was that the United States already has a guestworker program for unskilled laborers — one that is largely hidden from view because the workers are typically socially and geographically isolated. Before we expand this system in the name of immigration reform, we should carefully examine how it operates.

Under the current system, called the H-2 program, employers brought about 121,000 guestworkers into the United States in 2005 — approximately 32,000 for agricultural work and another 89,000 for jobs in forestry, seafood processing, landscaping, construction and other non-agricultural industries.

These workers, though, are not treated like "guests." Rather, they are systematically exploited and abused. Unlike U.S. citizens, guestworkers do not enjoy the most fundamental protection of a competitive labor market — the ability to change jobs if they are mistreated. Instead, they are bound to the employers who "import" them. If guestworkers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation.

Federal law and U.S. Department of Labor regulations provide some basic protections to H-2 guestworkers — but they exist mainly on paper. Government enforcement of their rights is almost non-existent. Private attorneys typically won't take up their cause.

Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guestworkers are:

• routinely cheated out of wages;

• forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs;

• held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents;

• forced to live in squalid conditions; and,

• denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel recently put it this way: "This guestworker program's the closest thing I've ever seen to slavery."

You can build all the walls to try to keep these people out that you want but it's not going to work because as long as these people are going to be exploited by their own countries and multi-national corporations they will keep coming

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

By Emma Lazarus