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:
“If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“A worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“They had their fortunes to make, everything to gain and nothing to lose. They were schooled in and anxious for debates; forcible in argument; reckless and brilliant. For them it was but a short and natural step from swaying juries in courtroom battles over the ownership of land to swaying constituents in contests for office. For the lawyer, oratory was the escalator that could lift a political candidate to higher ground.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)