"Guest worker programs are a bad idea and harm all workers," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement released the day after the Senate Judiciary Committee cleared an immigration bill. "They cast workers into a perennial second-class status, and unfairly put their fates into their employers' hands....Guest worker programs "encourage employers to turn good jobs into temporary jobs at reduced wages and diminished working conditions and contribute to the growing class of workers laboring in poverty," he said." AFL-CIO chief criticizes guest worker plans AP March 2006

It's not surprising that AFL-CIO---the last vestige of industrial labor in the United States--- is opposed to the Senate's guest worker program. Throughout American history Free Labor has opposed the importation of any sort of "captive" labor, whether as indentured servants, African slaves, 19th-Century Chinese coolies, or Mexicans in the Bracero program. So it's not surprising that the Senate's "Guest Worker Program" strikes so many workers as contradictory to everything they were led to believe America stands for.  

The problem with guest-worker programs is that they subvert the virtues of the founding fathers by promoting a master-servant social divide. The talk of "jobs Americans won't do" is a sentiment that is plainly racist. The attitude that certain jobs are considered to be beneath the dignity of an American is the kind of perspective that one might expect in a feudal society like Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, or India with it's cultural tradition of a caste system. But certainly not the America which proclaims that "all men are created equal"!  

President Bush with his obsession with cheap labor and open export markets is modern reincarnation of the Southern Dixiecrat. So Bush's support of globalization and "Guest Worker Programs" is certainly expected of someone "born with a silver spoon in his mouth".

What I can't figure out is why a Northeastern Liberal Democrat like Senator Edward Kennedy would cooperate with the Chamber of Commerce in supporting a bill whose purpose is to undermine the economic security of American Labor. I'm even more surprised that a Midwestern Republican like Senator would support something so utterly contradictory to the social values of the midwestern family farmer.