How does a Guest Worker program work? Badly.

[Rydz777]

Time Magazine (June 4, 2007) has an article, "What North Carolina's woes teach us about building an economy around temporary workers." Some key highlights:
- North Carolina imports more (legal guest)farm workers than any other state. "The system is collapsing from within," says the director of the N.C. Growers Association.
- Criminal gangs in Mexico prey on the guest worker recruiting program.
- U.S. Consulates in Mexico which must approve applicants are swamped and have outsourced their work.
- Scheduling snafus abound leaving crops rotting.
- The legal guest workers are jealous of illegal workers who can "move like a bird."
- A labor economist at the Univ. of California says that guest worker programs are too stiff to fit into the fluid U.S. economy.
- The whole system is bound in red tape and bureaucracy.
- "The anxieties" of the populist wing of the Democratic Party "are driven in part by the fact that the main area of expansion in the proposed bill would be for guest workers outside agriculture." "...a flood of guest workers would drive down salaries (in the service sector, construction, and factories) as they already have in farming."