While guaranteed labor rights on paper, however, guest workers depend on the continuation of a job to remain in the country. Employers therefore not only have the power to fire workers who organize or protest bad conditions, but in effect to deport them as well.
Beneath a humanitarian cover, business gets what it wants - workers at lower wages with fewer rights...
Twenty years ago, most unions wrote off immigrant workers. In 1986, the AFL-CIO supported employer sanctions. But today unions are rethinking that attitude and as a result, the political alliances that limited the possibility for immigration reform have changed. Amnesty for the country's 9-11 million undocumented immigrants, which was off the radar screen in Washington just a few years ago, is now a realistic goal.
"Most unions today are at least trying to organize," explains Hotel Employees Union President John Wilhelm. "And no matter the industry, they run into immigrant workers. That's what brought home the failure of the AFL-CIO's old immigration policy."
In 2005, the percentage of U.S. workers belonging to unions dropped from 13.5 percent to 13.3 percent, and fell to 9 percent in the private sector. For the overall percentage to stay constant, unions have to organize 400,000 workers a year; to increase by 1 percent, they have to organize twice that number, a rate not achieved since the 1940s.
Over the last decade, immigrant workers have proven key to labor's resurgence. "Every period of significant growth in the labor movement was fueled by organizing activity among immigrant workers," Wilhelm says. "We're a labor movement of immigrants and we always have been."
Reflecting this new attitude, unions are proposing an alternative to a new bracero program. "We're putting forward a comprehensive agenda, including legalization, repeal of employer sanctions, and workplace protections regardless of 

legal status," says Service Employees Union Vice-president Eliseo Medina. The new president of the Laborers Union, Terence O'Sullivan calls for opposition to contract labor, and for increasing the ability of immigrants to reunite their families in the U.S.
Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez has introduced a bill taking the first step - expanding legalization opportunities for immigrants who arrived before this year.
From the opposite end of Congress, Senator Phil Gramm, a recent convert (like Jesse Helms) to the bracero cause, is introducing a bill to permit recruiting guest workers for a year's labor, so long as they have no right to stay. At the same time, he proposes increased enforcement of employer sanctions to force workers into the program, making the undocumented even more vulnerable, their labor cheaper and their conditions worse...
The choice is not over what will or will not stop people from coming across the border, but over their status in the U.S. It's the age-old American dilemma: bondage whether as slaves, indentured servants or braceros) or freedom (even if that still leaves workers with the need to organize and fight to improve conditions).
Behind the debate lies a fundamental question: Is the purpose of immigration law to supply labor to industry on terms it finds acceptable, or is its purpose to protect the rights and welfare of immigrants themselves?
There is another framework for dealing with migration, other than contract labor and death on the border. The UN's International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families supports the right of family reunification, establishes equality of treatment with citizens of the host country, and prohibits collective deportation. Both sending and receiving countries are