OVERHAULING THE US LABOR FORCE

WHILE IT IS EASY TO THINK THAT LABOR PROBLEMS WILL BE SOLVED BY TOSSING OUT ILLEGALS, THERE ARE A NUMBER OF OTHER ISSUES TO CONTEND WITH.

The United States faces a structural contradiction in its labor market. Employers in agriculture, food processing, hospitality, elder care, and logistics report chronic labor shortages, yet millions of able-bodied citizens remain outside the workforce. Welfare cliffs make new earnings financially irrational, while housing subsidies and state-level benefit structures trap people in geographic areas with poor labor demand. The result is a bifurcated labor system in which foreign workers are highly mobile and domestic workers are immobilized by the welfare state.

At the same time, the country relies heavily on illegal labor. This suppresses wages for citizens, erodes respect for immigration law, and enriches the shadow intermediaries who broker illegal labor supply. Legal guest-worker programs exist, but H-2A/H-2B have evolved into a perverse equilibrium: compliance is more expensive than hiring domestic labor, while illegal circumvention is cheaper and seldom penalized. Large firms can absorb compliance costs; mid-sized and small operators cannot. State governments, responsible for economic output and employment, quietly tolerate informal labor markets to preserve key industries. Federal regulators maintain the fiction of control. Between the two, labor brokers, contractors, and informal networks extract rents. What Washington calls policy functions in practice as an evasion equilibrium.

A coherent Trump-era framework requires replacing this evasion equilibrium with a contractual labor compact anchored in three principles: citizens first, contracts over informality, and temporary means temporary. The goal is not to eliminate guest workers, but to govern them — and to give citizens a fair opportunity to fill jobs before foreign labor is imported.

Citizens First means that no guest worker should displace a citizen willing and able to perform the job at a fair wage. To operationalize this, the federal government would establish a national labor-matching platform. Employers petitioning for guest workers must first advertise domestically at sectoral median wages or higher and offer equivalent benefits to citizen applicants. The platform would match job demand with citizens, including those exiting welfare. Guest workers would be authorized only after demonstrated domestic shortage.

To make citizens first real rather than rhetorical, the guest-worker compact requires a domestic counterpart: a Work Transition & Mobility Guarantee. Welfare benefits should taper gradually for those entering work rather than falling off a cliff, and housing subsidies should convert into portable transition vouchers for citizens relocating to job-rich states. This breaks the geographic imprisonment of the underclass and restores labor mobility. A federal–state compact structure would allow states to opt in; those that do not cannot claim federal exemptions for labor shortages.

The second pillar, Contracts Over Informality, requires replacing illegal employment and semi-legal shadow networks with standardized, enforceable labor contracts. A unified guest-worker framework would organize labor visas into three tracks: seasonal agriculture (GW-A), seasonal non-agricultural (GW-S), and multi-year shortage sectors (GW-M) such as elder care, specialized trades, or manufacturing. Seasonal tracks would prohibit dependents to preserve temporariness; the multi-year track would allow conditional dependents only under verified income, housing, and health insurance standards. None of the tracks would provide a path to citizenship; however, compliant workers would receive re-entry privileges and renewals based on labor demand. Temporary work would remain labor, not silent immigration.

Contracts would specify wage floors, hours, housing or stipends where appropriate, workers’ compensation, and health insurance for illness and injury. Employers would be subject to wage audits, safety inspections, and random compliance checks. Enforcement would run through a new Guest Worker Authority (GWA) integrating DHS, DOL, and state labor agencies. The goal is not bureaucratic density but integrated accountability: employers that violate labor or immigration rules face restitution, fines, and debarment; labor brokers face licensing, bonding, and joint liability; and workers face penalties for overstay or unauthorized employment.

The third pillar, Temporary Means Temporary, requires exit discipline. Temporary migration systems fail when the exit phase is ungoverned. To solve this, a small percentage of wages would be held in bonded accounts and released only after biometric exit confirmation. Employers in seasonal sectors would be responsible for return travel. Compliant workers would receive priority for future seasons. Crucially, temporary visas would not convert into de facto permanent stays through overstays or humanitarian claims.

Bilateral labor agreements with sending states would formalize recruitment, data-sharing, pre-screening, and return. These agreements align incentives: sending states gain remittances and reputational stability; the United States gains predictability and lawfulness; and workers gain enforceable rights rather than dependence on brokers. Remittances would remain untaxed but routed through traceable financial rails to support anti-trafficking and anti-money-laundering objectives.

A missing actor in most U.S. immigration debates is the shadow intermediary sector: labor contractors, recruiters, compliance mills, and NGOs that profit from the disordered status quo. These actors perform functions ranging from lawful recruitment to rent-seeking paperwork brokering to outright trafficking facilitation. The labor compact treats them as market actors subject to licensing, bonding, joint liability, inspection, and blacklisting. This approach is not moralistic; it reflects the institutional reality that much of the abuse and illegality in the U.S. labor market occurs in the broker layer rather than at the employer–worker interface.

Finally, the compact resolves a longstanding federal–state contradiction. States bear the economic consequences of federal labor mandates. When federal rules make legal compliance prohibitively expensive, states protect output by tolerating illegal or informal labor channels. The compact replaces this tacit non-enforcement federalism with explicit coordination. Under federal–state compacts, states opting in receive transition funding for welfare mobility, labor-matching integration, and enforcement support; in exchange, they commit to uniform rules. Preemption ensures that guest-worker policy is not nullified by state-level evasion.

The political coalition for such a reform is broader than its opponents assume. Citizens gain mobility, dignity, and wage protection; employers gain legal labor and predictability; sending states gain structured remittance flows; and immigration hawks gain real enforcement. The losers are the actors who profit from illegality: shadow intermediaries, labor brokers, and political rent extractors.

In sum, the United States does not lack workers; it lacks coherence. Illegal labor, welfare immobility, overregulated legal channels, and fragmented enforcement form a single system. A labor compact that unifies these elements would restore sovereignty, revalue citizenship, and reintroduce disciplined temporariness into migration. It would replace drift with contract and evasion with governance.