"How Big Sugar made slaves out of guest workers"

The story of U.S. sugar cane farmers importing "guest" workers has some not-unexpected parallels to current attempts to create such a program:

By the 1930s, Big Sugar had a labor problem, and so it turned where Big Business often turns: Big Government. The New Deal operated as corporate welfare in many ways, but nowhere did it serve the exploitative purposes of big business as thoroughly as in the sugarcane fields of south Florida. Most objectionable—and most relevant to today’s policy debates—was how FDR and Big Sugar teamed up to use open borders and guest-worker programs to subvert the free market...

But FDR's plan was not just about opening the borders to these workers. Under FDR’s BWI program, the federal government became an active partner with the sugar growers. Historian David McCally writes, "Between 1943 and 1947, the United States government played a direct role in negotiating employment contracts for offshore laborers and paid the cost of round-trip transportation for all workers between their homes and the United States."

In the current case, a federal bureaucracy will presumably spring up to "match willing workers with willing employers."

... Wilkinson writes that a sugar boss in the field who thought one cutter was working too slowly could "check him out" - send him back to his barracks with no wages for the day. If one worker was checked out three times in one season, the sugar farmer would send him back to his home country. If this was before the midpoint of the cane-cutting season, the worker himself was obligated, by the terms of his contract, to pay his roundtrip fare.

This advantage to the farmers of hiring temporary foreign workers was no accident. It was deliberate. In 1940, one grower wrote to the U.S. Department of Agriculture that if Washington were to help them find labor, the Bahamas would be a far better source than either the U.S. or its territory Puerto Rico. "The vast difference between the Bahama Island labor and domestic, including Puerto Rican," wrote the farmer, "is that labor transported from the Bahama Islands can be deported and sent home, if it does not work, which cannot be done in the instance of labor from domestic United States or Puerto Rico."

Immigration · Tue, 06/06/2006 - 02:37 · · Importance: 1