Guest Worker Program

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.

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