Three countries that relied on low-skilled immigrant workers during good times – Japan, Spain, and the Czech Republic – have recently introduced voluntary return programs programs, popularly known as "pay-to-go" programs, in an effort to reduce the number of unemployed immigrants.
The programs established in 2008-2009 generally provide unemployed legal migrants with stipends that cover the cost of a one-way plane ticket "home." Some programs also offer migrants a lump-sum payment.
More here.
Sailer’s been arguing for the US to do this for a while now.
And let the flames begin!
It’s a lot cheaper to be unemployed back home with your family in Latin America than unemployed alone in America, so it’s better for all concerned.
From the Los Angeles Daily News:
Too broke to buy a ticket home, Valley’s immigrant day laborers just hang on
by Tony Castro
They are down and out in the United States and homesick for Guatemala. And El Salvador. And Honduras. And Mexico.
And they would go back without even an American penny in their pocket if only they had enough to get home.
They are the discouraged and disillusioned Central American and Mexican day laborers who, in a sign of how hard times are in this economy, find themselves so broke they can’t send much, if any, money back to loved ones they haven’t seen for years.
“We have lost our reason for being here,” laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas – and wishes he could leave sooner….
A glance at Ochoa’s and Perez’s decline in earnings over the past year underscores how far their dream has fallen.
For months, both have been averaging one day of work a week, earning from $60 to $80 a day. They used to work up to seven days a week at that rate.
“We didn’t realize how good it was until it was gone,” said Perez.
“In Guatemala, I could live with my family at my parents’ house,” Ochoa said.
“I would find some kind of work. I might not make much more a week there than I do here working only one day a week. But I would be home. I wouldn’t be a stranger in another country.”
But now Guatemalan day laborers wishing to go home face the task of saving $400 or more for the airfare to return home.
“If you’re from Guatemala and you want to go home, it has to be by plane,” said Ochoa. “We’re not trying to be picky. But it’s not a trip that can be done safely by bus.”
Turning themselves into U.S. immigration authorities for speedy deportation is no easy answer. Illegal immigrants often languish for months as prisoners in detention centers. When they are deported, they may end up hundreds of miles from their home towns, families and friends.
Perez suggested a novel solution for how immigrant day laborers could return to their homelands even quicker.
“If those people and groups who are crusading to get immigrants out of the United States would offer the air fare for us to go home, we would,” he said, making direct reference to members of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project.
The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.
“It’s not like there’s any great love there,” said Perez. “If you’re Guatemalan, Salvadoran or Honduran, you want to fly home.
“If we’re going to go home, we want to make sure we get there alive.”
japan imported significant amounts of foreign labor?
Alex’s headline to this post, “Give them your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” reveals, once again, how much of the elite conventional wisdom on immigration is based on sheer low-brow Statue-of-Liberty sentimentalism.
If our government did this they would hand out round trip tickets.
@Bill: Sailer is *not* an academic.
@Steve:
Are you serious, or are you bored?
“Sounds like a way to create a revolving door of immigrants wanting to return home. What an incredibly stupid policy.”
No, the kicker is that in return for a flight home, a gift certificate at the local Wal-Mart in Oaxaca and whatever else you want to toss-in, we get fingerprints and retinal scans. If these illegal aliens are ever found in the U.S. again illegally, it’s two years in prison.
It’s fair and it’s efficient, so, of course, it’s barely even being talked about in the U.S.
And what about the deportee’s brother, sister, father, son, etc.?
As for the penalty, retinal scans, etc., well I suspect that be as about as efficient and effective as the drug war is.
Ugh, such complications! So much easier to just give up and accept our demographic/fiscal fate then to have to think our way through such insurmountable obstacles. What’s on the CW tonight?
@ babar
there are now even schools taught in portugues in japan, which is a famously monolithic (even xenophobic) country. tokyo has the largest carnival outside of brazil
What to stop them from illegally crossing the border once again? The government would simply be paying the Hispanics a trip to see their families back home. After a few months they would try to get back.
I think it may work fairly well in Europe, but certainly not in the U.S. if the government don’t solve the Mexican border problem first.
Perhaps this can backfire and end up turning into an incentive for them to come, too. They might think “if things don’t work out there, I’ll still get a free ticket home and some money.” You never know.
“well I suspect that be as about as efficient and effective as the drug war is.”
We are pretty efficient at putting people in prison. And it’s a free lunch because the police state is already here! Never waste a pre-existing evil as I always say.
I don’t know about Sailer, but I endorsed a combination of expanding the guest-worker program (without any “pathway to citizenship” other than for Canadian-style merit-based immigrants) while cracking down on illegal immigration here. One big part of my plan is to have an American entity “vouch” for guest-workers so we have somebody to blame if they overstay or otherwise misbehave.
Mexican-Americans, on average of course, are problem citizens in two very key areas – very high high-school dropout rates and very high illegitimacy rates. So it’s rather foolish for the U.S. to look at south-of-the-border as a source for new citizens – unless you feel a permanent and growing underclass is just the ticket to a rosy future.
Oh, but I forgot, the only alternative is a police state, so never mind, there’s nothing we can do about it.
You’ll notice that the people who actually know a lot about the immigration issue tend to have much less politically correct opinions about immigration than people who are more ignorant about the topic. For example, among economists, George Borjas vs. Alex Tabarrok.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 9:12:36 PM
Common Steve, it is so unfair.
On one hand you have a Mensch, George Borjas. On another hand you have … who that was again?
Mick,
You’re responding to poster Seward, who likely is just another dishonest liberal (is there any other kind?) and isn’t meant to be taken seriously, he’s just trying to preen for his ideological allies. However, if he does want to experience the West’s likely demographic fate, he needn’t go so far as the Middle East. Any large American city should do the trick.
US: Is that jp.dk Jyllands-Posten? I wonder whether the returnees receive an A3-size Mo caricature as a parting gift…
US: I am aware that JP is a big newspaper, but I was puzzled by the fact that I could not find the full name in the header of the site when I visited it.
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