Ron Desantis for President 2024

Worker visas, as the exist today, are a better situation than being here illegally, however:

• The supply of work visas is far, far outstripped by demand. This functionally creates a black market, where people would happily do things the legal way, but don't have access to it. I lived in Honduras in 03-06, and knew people who wanted to get visas to come to the US legally, but the process was intentionally obtuse and inaccessible. People wanting to come and stay in America needed to be married, own land (in Honduras, very very few people own land), or have 10,000 USD equivalent in the bank (lmao), pick two. People in Honduras who have land or 10,000 USD in the bank aren't going to give up upper class life where they're at to come struggle in the US, so the immigration rules functionally boiled down to: "no." As we all know, it's a truism that bans don't work, and they haven't here. So, with no legal option realistically available, people go about it using other means. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is by design, but I can't prove it.

• Work visas also encourage exploitation because the employer can functionally revoke it by firing the visa holder. This creates massive leverage for the employer, and encourages the work visa holder to subject themselves to all manner of abuse. Additionally, it's a huge gamble for someone on a work visa to try and change jobs for that same reason. Imagine that you lost your citizenship if you lost your job, can you imagine what kind of a screwed up power dynamic that would create between you and your employer?

• IIRC, they don't offer a path to citizenship. This one's a little murkier, but the point is that it's harder to build community and support among your peers when your presence is all but guaranteed to be impermanent. Even if you wanted to argue that work visas should strictly be about work, building social networks is a hugely important part of creating real value and opportunities later on. People without support networks or some kind of community ties tend to have worse outcomes across the board, and in this case we're replacing human networks with the business that's hired them. Again, it's not hard to imagine how that could be a situation that lends itself to exploitation.

So, work visas are better than illegal immigration. However, they still need a lot of work to not be terrible, and it's not always as simple as "just get a work visa!"