Unsurprisingly, President Trump has followed in the path of other right-wing populist governments, facilitating the expansion of an immigrant work force after running on an anti-immigration platform. He has not only aligned with the tech bros on skilled worker guest visas but also maintained the absolute legal limit on non-skilled guest worker visas ordered by former president Joe Biden in December, adding nearly 65,000 non-skilled worker guest visas for 2025, in contrast to other executive orders Trump rescinded. These developments took me back to my early days as journalist in small town America, where I got to know and report on the reality of guest workers.
At first glance, the expansion of these visas seems to ameliorate the chaos and confusion at the US border by providing safe, legal pathways for migrant workers, particularly those who come from Mexico and other Latin American countries. But those in the US rarely consider the underlying injustices of guest worker programs from a foreign worker’s perspective.
I met Dismas Morales in Driggs, Idaho, in 2013 and he offered me a glimpse into the joy and sorrow of the life of a career guest worker. Back then, I was a reporter for the Teton Valley News, a small-town paper based in Driggs. We covered Teton County, Idaho, which runs along the west side of the Teton Mountains. The three small towns and the spaces in between them had potato and barley farms interspersed with golf courses and a couple of resorts that had been built in the 1990s and early 2000s. Near the entrance to Yellowstone National Park and some of the best skiing in and in the country, the county had exploded in the previous thirty years as a “lifestyle community” for outdoor sports and mountain life lovers. It sat across the mountains from Jackson, Wyoming, where the likes of Kanye West and Harrison Ford owned ranches. Mitt Romney held a fundraiser in town for his 2012 presidential campaign. These were towns where the trailer parks sat just blocks from the member’s only resort. Most of those living in the trailer parks were immigrants from Mexico, including guest workers who spent half the year working landscaping jobs.
When I met Dismas Morales in Driggs, in 2013, the Mexican had already spent half of his life as a seasonal worker in Teton Valley, and he was only 32 years old. Every April since he had finished his basic education in La Napolera, a small town in the state of Michoacan, Mexico, he had made the journey north to work as a crew member for a large landscaping company.
I visited Morales at work during my reporting (immigration and Hispanic issues were one of my beats) and saw how integral he was to this company and his fellow crew members, whose crews counted about half foreign workers. The owner of the company had attended Morales’s wedding. However, Morales’s wife and children couldn’t even spend a weekend visiting their father in Idaho during his six-month absence. While, for better or for worse, America seems to rely on foreign workers like Morales, our country’s immigration policy is hell-bent on preventing them from immigrating, at least legally.
On a reporting trip to Mexico, I visited Morales’s family. He and wife Lourdes Rodriguez were childhood friends. After they finished school, they both left their rural hometown for work. She, like many Mexican women, went to Mexico City and found a job as a housekeeper. He, like many Mexican men including his own father, went to the US. Their courtship took place over telephone calls and visits back home. He asked her to marry him over the phone while he was still in Idaho.
“We have what we have because he works in the United States,” Lourdes told me at the time. “Later I realized I wasn’t even thinking about what would happen later on. That he would leave and I would miss him, that we would have kids and it would get harder.”
Morales had been able to build a comfortable two-story home, and they had a small farm with a cow and rabbits and corn fields. She drove their kids into the bigger town nearby every day for school to ensure they got the best education available. Dismas was able to bring a laptop home from the US, the first computer in the family.
“They’ll learn and they´ll teach me,” Lourdes told me about their kids using the new technology.
The difficult part is Dismas constantly coming and going. They miss him when he leaves, and just when they have thoroughly adjusted to his absence, he returns. And again, no sooner has time convinced them his presence is assured than he leaves again.
They had hoped perhaps it wouldn’t have to be that way, but Lourdes and the children cannot even visit Dismas for a week’s vacation. To enter the US legally, even as tourists, all Mexicans must obtain a visa. They cannot enter on a simple passport the way Americans go to Cancun on vacation. The year Dismas and Lourdes married, they had hoped Lourdes would be able to get a visa to spend some time with her new husband in Idaho. But in fact, the system is designed to prevent people like them from entering the US. So, while Dismas got his guest worker visa, Lourdes’s spouse visa request was denied, and he had to leave her behind in Mexico City, crying. They never tried for another visa, not wanting to set themselves up for more disappointment. Obviously, many families decide to stay together, jump the border, and remain in the US illegally.
I will skip a long deviation into capitalism, economic empires, foreign policy, trade policy, global inequality, and the long list of ways rich countries have contributed to setting in motion the current migration dynamic. Instead, let me simply point out that institutionalizing the use of foreign workers en mass in the form of tens of thousands of guest work visas supposes there are masses of disenfranchised people ready to leave not only their local communities but even their countries and continents simply to have a job. That these people should need to migrate to find work that can support their family is unjust, but on top of that, most of these guest workers are prohibited from full membership, essentially ever, in the communities they work in, live peacefully in, and pay taxes in (almost every jurisdiction in the US has a sales tax), because the US immigration system is designed to prevent the vast majority of those same guest workers from actually immigrating. As another example from this Idaho town, I knew a farmer who had tried for years to legalize the residency of his farm manager, a man from Mexico with a wife and three children, but it had proven impossible. His children at least benefited from DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).
As I said at the beginning of this, the irony is that though politicians like Trump have swept into office on anti-immigration platforms, none of them has put a stop to economic immigration. Poland and Hungary offer excellent examples. Victor Orban has made a political career out of demonizing immigrants and refugees, and he pledged last year that the 500,000 foreign workers needed to run the electric car industry he enticed foreign investors to set up in Hungary would not result in ghettos. I’m sceptical, particularly considering the difficulty of learning Hungarian and the animosity toward immigrants he has stirred up.
Poles, in principle, are no more interested in turning their country into a melting pot than Hungarians. They like Poland, well, very Polish. Nevertheless, their country’s integration into capitalistic Europe has resulted in record numbers of immigration, and at an ever-increasing rate, even under the right-wing Law and Justice party that stood staunchly against accepting refugees from Syria and other parts of Africa. Poles then voted that party out in the last election because, as one commentator noted, it ultimately proved no more capable than the prior administration of fundamentally correcting the imbalances it had been elected to address.
Minimally, right-wing anti-immigration parties should have the humility to admit that reversing the current migratory trends will not be so easy. What has been destroyed in the Global South from Senegal to Syria to El Salvador, sending people migrating, is not so easily rebuilt. But more to the point, they have no intention of shutting down The Machine, to use Paul Kingsnorth’s word, and it turns out to be very difficult to only have the perceived advantages of global industrial capitalism while off-shoring the costs. As Trump demands Ukraine hand over its precious mineral resources to the US, we will still confront the moral and practical dilemma of why the US can extract Ukraine’s raw minerals for our national benefit but put up a wall to keep Ukrainians from enjoying the wealth built with their natural resources. Additionally, if, as Vice President J.D. Vance told global leaders at a recent AI conference in Paris, the US plans to dominate the rest of the world in AI, brain-draining other countries of their talent and tech workforce through skilled guest worker programs is a helpful policy, even if done at the expense of American workers.
We have been in an age of mass migration ever since the age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution. It should surprise no one that as it continues, deepening into the Fourth Industrial Revolution of AI and expanding into every corner of the world through the phenomenon we call development, migration continues on a parallel track. The only way for countries committed to The Machine to stop migration will be an expansion of the cruel forces we have already been using for a long time—deportations, sharp and high fences, and armed patrolmen.
Image Via: Flickr
