Mexico’s President Suggests Restarting Bracero-like Program

President of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – generally referred to by his initials, AMLO – recommended creating a brand new guestworker program that will permit migrant employees from Mexico and different Central American international locations to work in the US briefly. AMLO estimated that such a program may deliver 600,000 to 800,000 overseas employees to the US.

This proposal mirrors the Bracero program which existed from
1942 till Congress terminated it in 1964. This system allowed primarily Mexican
farmhands entry to job alternatives within the U.S. All through the course of the
program’s existence greater than 4.6 million
Mexican residents labored on American farms.

Not like the unique Bracero program, AMLO’s proposal may additionally embody employees outdoors of the agricultural sector, additional growing the variety of guestworkers coming into the US. Press Secretary Jen Psaki demurred when requested concerning the proposal within the White Home press briefing, stating that any sort of program resembling this is able to require congressional motion.

President Biden ought to reject this proposal out of hand. The U.S. already has quite a few guestworker packages that Mexican nationals can take part in, together with the H-2A agricultural and the H-2B nonagricultural visa packages. There is no such thing as a rapid want to exchange these, and definitely to not improve admissions in guestworkers classes. Any employees in a Bracero-style program, particularly if it included nonagricultural employees, would doubtless drive down the wages of low-income People, who’ve borne the brunt of the COVID-19 financial slowdown, with the unemployment price for the underside quartile of People standing at 23 %. That is hardly the time for added guestworker packages.

Former President Donald Trump and AMLO loved a superb
rapport with one another, and the U.S. relied on Mexico by way of the Migrant
Safety Protocols to assist cut back unlawful immigration to the US by
housing asylum-seeking aliens in Mexico whereas their immigration instances navigated
the American immigration court docket system. AMLO by no means broached a brand new guestworker
program with President Trump – not less than publicly – and it’s telling that he
feels he can deliver up such a proposal with Joe Biden, whose immigration imaginative and prescient
could be very completely different from Trump’s view.

Whereas that is unlikely to ever come to fruition, it’s little question alarming. Different proposals with comparable parameters – just like the Farm Workforce Modernization Act – do have assist in Congress and would accomplish a lot of the identical factor. FAIR opposed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act within the 116^th Congress and continues to oppose the thought of increasing agricultural guestworker packages or giving amnesty to farmworkers.