The Guest Worker Program is a program that has been proposed many times, including by U.S. President George W. Bush's administration, as a way to permit U.S. employers to sponsor non-U.S. citizens as laborers for approximately three years, to be deported afterwards if they have not yet obtained a green card.
Over 1,000,000 guest workers reside in the U.S. The largest program, the H-1B visa, has 650,000 workers in the U.S., and the second-largest, the L-1 visa, has 350,000. Many other United States visas exist for guest workers as well, including the H-2A visa, which allows farmers to bring in an unlimited number of agricultural guest workers.
The United States ran a Mexican guest-worker program in the period 1942–1964, known as the Bracero Program.
An article in The New Republic criticized a guest worker program by equating the visiting workers to second-class citizens who would never be able to gain citizenship and would have fewer residential rights than American citizens.
Famous quotes containing the words guest, worker and/or program:
“But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my
water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“... a worker was seldom so much annoyed by what he got as by what he got in relation to his fellow workers.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The story is told of a man who, seeing one of the thoroughbred stables for the first time, suddenly removed his hat and said in awed tones, “My Lord! The cathedral of the horse.””
—For the State of Kentucky, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)