The Political Economy of Immigration Reform: The Corporate Campaign for a U.S. Guest Worker Program

IN 1947, AFTER READING A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE about the crash of a plane carrying a group of Mexican contract workers back to the border, Woody Guthrie wrote a poem, later set to music by Martin Huffman. In haunting lyrics, he describes how the plane caught fire as it flew low over Los Gatos Canyon, near Coalinga at the edge of California's San Joaquin Valley. Observers below saw people and belongings flung out of the aircraft before it hit the ground, falling like leaves, Guthrie says. While the Coalinga Record carried the names of the pilot and Border Patrol agent on the flight, no record was kept of the workers' identity. They were all listed on the death certificates simply as "deportee." That became the name of the song.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,

Our work contract's out and we have to move on;

Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,

They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

Today, the word "illegal" is used to mean a person without immigration papers. But Guthrie used it in the sense of an earlie...

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