Personally, I think we need a system like Jozef’s for Jose. As it is, the reality is that industries that employ Jose (hospitality, agriculture, construction) enjoy an unfair subsidy that the rest of us pay in a a completely off-the-books manner.
Another reality is that Jose is doing a lot of jobs that only Jose is willing to do. Seriously, picking lettuce, harvesting citrus, washing dishes, that is some nasty-ass back-breaking work which I doubt very many Joes are willing to do. On the other hand, there probably are a lot of “Jose” jobs that Joes *are* willing to do.
So just as there’s an H1-B visa program for Jozef, we need to have some sort of an unskilled H1-B program for all the Joses. Rather than this ridiculous wink-and-a-nod situation we have now where we pretend to care about illegal immigration (but really we don’t) it seems like it would make a lot more sense to create a legal framework for guest workers like Jose. Get all this stuff on the books, with really Draconion sanctions for employers who don’t follow the rules.
If we did that 1) we’d actually know who was here, and 2) we could actually make determinations about who, after X number of years of working and paying taxes, gets a green card and eventually citizenship.
