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)
“Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence in the possibility of certain knowledge.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Navajo men and boys have an odd way of showing their friendship. When two young men meet at the trading post, a “Sing”, or a dance they greet each other, inquire about the health of their respective families, then stand silently some ten or fifteen minutes while one feels the other’s arms, shoulders, and chest.”
—Administration in the State of Ariz, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)