It is ironic that the sinister policy of replacing American citizen workers with foreign indentured servants is being promoted by the leadership of the Republican Party, which was founded in the 1850s by reformers like Abraham Lincoln, who championed free citizen labor. The United States fought a Civil War to replace two rival labor systems on American soil with a single system of free wage labor by citizens with equal rights.

In the generations that followed, Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt continued the fight by seeking to outlaw coolie labor from Asia, the use of prison gangs by industry, and other forms of unfree labor that undercut the wages and the rights of American workers.

It is no coincidence, however, that Gramm and DeLay -- the strongest champions of the guest-worker program -- come from the Deep South, the region of the country where wealthy, ruthless elites have been most hostile to the interests of ordinary working people in both the 19th and 20th centuries. The disturbing plan of today's Southern Republicans to create new plantations, manned by Mexican guest workers rather than black slaves, is more Southern than Republican.

Today as in the past it is unfair to force struggling American workers to compete on American soil with foreign workers lacking benefits and civil rights and tied to a single employer -- just as it was wrong to force free American workers in the past to compete with African slave labor and Asian coolie labor.

Say No to Guest-workers by Michael Lind - senior fellow at the New America Foundation, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit public policy institute, and author of Up From Conservatism, and The Radical Middle http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/SayNoToGuest-workers.html

The Guest Worker supported by the Democrat Liberals like Kennedy, Southern Dixiecrats like Phil Gramm and Tom DeLay, and Corporate pimps like McCain is virtually an indentured servant program. It's un-American. If America needs workers, then they should come in as applicants for American citizenship. Or we should import cheap foreign products. But importing a virtual underclass of unassimilated slave labor is unacceptable.