Guest Worker Programs and Immigration

This thesis takes a historical and comparative approach and examines three countries’ approaches to guest workers and each country’s respective immigration policy. The countries considered are all among the countries currently considering immigration reform. This thesis begins with an explanation of how a guest worker program is part of immigration policy and defines what a guest worker program looks like from the perspective of citizens within a country as well as the migrant who crosses borders for purposes of work. It then shifts to finer analyses of the Bracero program in the United States, the Gastarbeiter programs in Germany and the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) in Canada, to show how guest worker programs have been implemented thus far. These chapters’ accounts on immigration policy span the past seventy years.
The main metrics for assessing the programs are illegal immigration, adverse effect on citizens, economic improvement for the immigrants, and public opinion. These metrics are both used to measure how effective each program was on immigration policy and to understand what factors influenced the terms of that policy. Due to limitations in quantitative data, the focus is on descriptive analyses. This thesis concludes with a policy recommendation regarding a guest worker program based on the historical analyses. The conclusion of the study is that the theoretical model underlying a guest worker program has not worked in practice so significant revisions to the terms of a program would be necessary for it to be effective as immigration policy.