ICONOCLAST
By BLAST BY SETH BARNES
What does the term “guest worker” mean to you? Given the flurry of recent protests, rallies, and walkouts in response to the pending immigration debate in Congress, I’m sure most folks are familiar with this little piece of verbiage. As euphemisms go, it’s right up there with “climate change” and “tax relief.” These clever tweaks on the language expertly take the most contentious, divisive issues and scrub them clean. Tax relief? Who could be against alleviating a radical, bloated tithe imposed on all of us by wasteful state and local governments? Climate change? Obviously, that’s the natural, inevitable process of global temperature escalation.
Guest worker? Sounds like a prep school student on a two-week jaunt to Belize to build mud huts in an effort to pad the old college application.
Of course, the “guest workers” at the center of this political maelstrom are anything but boarding school students, and I can’t imagine any of the illegal immigrant “guests” making their way into the country receive a formal invitation requiring an RSVP.
Save the date: Aug. 1 to Sept. 30. Join us in oppressively sunny, dusty Bakersfield, Calif., as we harvest a stupefying crop of carrots, artichokes, etc. Subhuman work conditions and cut-rate, off-the-books pay guaranteed. Please reserve dilapidated hovel in unregulated rooming complex ASAP.
The phrase “guest worker” was coined by the powers that be to push their particular illegal immigration agenda. They believe the federal government should establish a complex registration program to track and monitor the nonresident workers who are sorely needed to fill out the menial, demanding, low-paying jobs on the lower rungs of our socioeconomic ladder. At some undetermined point in time, these people will head back to their native lands, a job well done. I’m guessing the guest worker database will place an automated call politely thanking them along with a final reminder to please leave the country.
For those of you who break into spasms of laughter when you see the words “complex” and “federal government” in the same sentence, I’m with you. Perhaps I’m just a brutal cynic without a patriotic bone in my body, but I’m of the mind that the effectiveness of regulating bodies is inversely proportional to the complexity, size, and importance of the task at hand. Realistically, outside of a full-throttle U.S. Army deployment, shock and awe style, against the people who clip our hedges and refill our water glasses on an everyday basis, I think it’s safe to say that illegal immigration is here to stay.
Does that mean that we should throw our hands up in the air and ignore the problem because it’s a complicated? No. Does it mean we should be slightly realistic when approaching said problem? Heck yes.
As for specific solutions, I’ll continue to leave that to the policy gurus who have made shrewd, tactically brilliant suggestions such as building a titanium-reinforced fence across every solitary inch of the U.S. border — patrolled 24/7 by Special Forces troops naturally — or providing universal health care, citizenship, and elevated wages to any lad or lass who strolls into the country.
I’m just the lazy columnist who swoops in to comment on a particular topic in a breezy, offhand manner, so I’d really like to leave this heavy lifting to the bozos in Washington D.C. and state legislatures across the land. They sincerely believe they’re going to change the way of the world with a few panel discussions, and who am I to deny them? All I’m campaigning for is that we cease calling illegal immigrants “guest workers.” And at this point it should be clear that I’m not driven by any agenda other than my fervent desire that acorn-brained local news anchors stop uttering the phrase with gravity on a nightly basis.
What should we replace “guest workers” with? I’d suggest something neutral like “immigrant workers.” Don’t like it? Have another idea you’d like to add to the public sphere?
Be my guest. (Seth Barnes)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 30, 2006. Read the original PDF.