Non-Immigrant Labor Policy in the United States

Abstract

The employment of foreign workers as a supplement to the available domestic labor force has been a recurrent public policy issue throughout much of the history of the United States. Under specified circumstances, nonimmigrant workers have been allowed legal access to the American labor market. They should not be confused with illegal immigrants who do not have such a pri vil ege. The legislative and the administrative actions that have authorized or permitted non-immigrant programs have generally been shrouded in controversy. The concerns have centered both upon the economic effects that non-immigrant workers have on working conditions for citizen workers and, also, on the special restrictions that are often imposed on the non-immigrants which would be considered both unfair and often illegal if applied to citizen workers.

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

“…These were the labor restrictions of a post‐slavery economy and society, where direct compulsion violated the Constitution and too much migrant movement threatened domestic workers' freedom. Overall, from 1917 to 1920, the Secretary of Labor, William B. Wilson, approved employer petitions for 76,802 Mexican migrant laborers to work in agriculture, railways, and mining in the Southwest, as well as a few thousand additional workers from the Bahamas for agricultural work in the Southeast and from Canada for lumbering in Maine (Briggs ).…”

“…The war emergency exception was annulled in all sectors except lumbering in 1922, that is, until the next conflict (Briggs ). Although agricultural interests, the railroads, and mines sought order and predictability in seasonal and segmented labor markets and repeatedly girded state actors to open the borders to temporary labor migrants again in the early 1940s, it was only after the US entered WWII that an inter‐executive agency committee composed of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Departments of State, Labor and Agriculture, as well as the newly established War Manpower Commission (WMC) met to draw up plans to bring in workers temporarily once again .…”

Coercion and Contract at the Margins: Deportable Labor and the Laws of Employment Termination Under US Capitalism (1942–2015)

“… 18 Deportable temporary labor status is thus connected to what we already know about modern states: that, beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, government administrations began to intervene more directly in the economy, including labor markets, in the name of economic and social “security.” Administrative regulatory decisions allowed for the entry of 76,802 migrants from Mexico, the Bahamas, and French Canada to work in agriculture, the railroads, and lumber in the name of emergency war production in the years 1917–1922 (Briggs 1983). …”