George Borjas tells it like it is

Professor Borjas, an economics chair at Harvard, echoes my exact concerns over the new immigration bill at fellow economist Dani Rodrik's weblog:

Can you really guarantee that the guest workers will in fact be temporary workers? How are you going to get them to go back? Have you thought about how the U.S. judicial system will react to a lawsuit brought about by someone who doesn't want to get into the plane ride home? What's to prevent them from becoming illegal immigrants in the end? Think of the German experience. As a very wise person once said about that experience: "we wanted workers and we got people instead." [JR's note: Germany took in over 200,000 Turks as "guest workers" in the 60s and 70s. Almost all stayed, and now there are over 2 million in the country] Guest workers tend to get sick, tend to get married, procreate, etc., and all of these inevitable life events open up entitlements in the U.S. system that cannot be ignored--some of which are very costly. So your guest worker idea is, to a significant extent, a permanent immigration increase being sold as a temporary inflow. Now, you and I can debate over whether such an increase is desirable ... But the debate must be conducted in a transparent and honest way: this is not really about temporary workers at all, it's really about permanent immigration. And, again, because it is people we are importing--not just workers in a widget factory--there are non-economic issues that cannot be ignored (culture, language, security, etc.) unless you are proposing that the guest workers be packed away in some warehouse from the day they arrive until the day they are shipped back home.

Bonus - Steve Sailer writes:

Watching C-SPAN, it appears that Ted Kennedy is functioning as the MC of the Senate proceedings, a lot like he did with the 1965 immigration bill and the 1990 diversity visa bill, neither of which turned out to function at all like Senator Ted told his fellow Senators they would. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice ... ah, to hell with it ...