The US refuses to admit it has always had an addiction to cheap labor so it entices desperate people to come over with the implicit assumption that if they keep their head down and are otherwise law-abiding it'll "look the other way." Some of them, after years of living on the outskirts of town, commuting 1.5 hours each day to back-breaking minimum wage jobs, and years without seeing their families, are able to scrounge up enough money to pay a lawyer thousands to help them get normalized. Only now they're being spawn-camped at court hearings too.
If the US were more self-aware and honest it would expand existing guest worker programs and create new pathways for temp labor to work without obtaining citizenship the way Singapore and Middle Eastern countries do. They seem cruel but at least each side of the equation knows what it's getting and they can even visit home every year! But Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."
The only reason we don't reform our work visa programs for cheap labor is because business owners do NOT want to have to pay these people minimum wage, pay taxes on them, or pay to insure them (workman's comp and similar). That's it. That's all there is to it.
As soon as you institute such a program businesses could get sued for illegal labor conditions, abuses of employees, sexual abuse of employees, violations of contract law, and more. Their expenses for imported labor would probably triple.
Would such businesses close as a result? Maybe a handful would but the real impact would be a huge drop in profits—also known as a greater share of profits going to workers.
> Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."
FWIW, I bet the part of the population saying that is also the part opposed to the current immigration enforcement, namely liberals.
If the US were more self-aware and honest it would expand existing guest worker programs and create new pathways for temp labor to work without obtaining citizenship the way Singapore and Middle Eastern countries do. They seem cruel but at least each side of the equation knows what it's getting and they can even visit home every year! But Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."