Can a Guest Worker Program Work?

Thursday, May. 24, 2007 By NATHAN THORNBURGH/VASS

Here, in a retrofitted hangar in the heart of tobacco country, is an early glimpse of what life could be like if the recent Senate compromise on immigration passes. Two busloads of tobacco workers, fresh from the Mexican state of Nayarít, are met and ministered to by a cadre of social and health workers, a federal agent from the Department of Labor, even a union organizer. In all, they spend almost four hours filling out paperwork, watching movies about how to avoid pesticide sickness and getting a set of no-nonsense rules (if you fight, you're fired; don't use the fire extinguisher to cool your beer) from the North Carolina Growers Association, the organization that brought them from Mexico. They are then driven to farms scattered across the state, where they will spend the summer months picking tobacco before heading back to Mexico.