What an America First Guest Worker Program Could Look Like

For liberals, mass immigration is a punishment; a patriotic alternative would make foreigners pay to work while Americans reclaim prosperity and peace at home.

Liberals view mass immigration as a terror weapon to be used against the recalcitrant native population. Before Trump, this was the unstated but obvious purpose of American border policy. Even now it is, today, the de facto immigration policy of every other western country on earth.

This liberal view can be summarized quickly: White people are fundamentally racist. They are settlers, colonialists, and imperialists. The wealth they have is stolen. The reason third world countries are poor is because of the evils of Whiteness. Mass migration is a means of settling these differences, of granting the benighted brown people of the earth access to the capital that was taken from them unjustly by the evil White man. 

Our politicians will not always say this out loud, but they virtually all believe it in their heart. Mass migration is not meant to improve the lives of the people but to punish them for their sins. Immigration policy is meant to benefit immigrants; it is not intended to benefit the founding or native stock of the nation. 

The supposed economic benefits of immigration in our current system are vastly overstated. Immigrants who come here both legally and illegally get access to schools, health care (ER rooms functionally cannot turn anyone away), police protection, and American courts of law. Many of these foreigners do not pay taxes because they work in all-cash businesses. A huge percentage of illegal immigrants get access to welfare payments because they have fake documents. 

Lawyers and tax professionals in immigrant communities specialize in acquiring government benefits for their clients. In California’s Central Valley there are signs all along Highway 99 from Bakersfield to Fresno promising potential customers, in Spanish, to get them the Earned Income Tax Credit and associated goodies. 

This is to say nothing of immigrant crime, which is vastly underreported. Without Mexicans in America there would be no Mexican gangs. The cost of drug trafficking, DUIs, and gang violence from migrants and their children is incalculable. 

Put simply, our current immigration policy is a mess. We need mass deportations. We need to dramatically reduce the number of green card holders and new naturalizations. America is not better off by making a bunch of Somalis, Afghans, Guatemalans, and Chinese new American citizens. This policy does not benefit our social order. In fact, our new polyglot nation has seen a dramatic decrease in personal liberty and economic vitality as more and more incompatible foreigners pour into our country from all over the world.

But let us dream for a moment. Let us imagine that we succeed. Imagine that we do deport the foreign hordes, secure the border, and re-establish law and order in our communities. Imagine for a moment that the fentanyl dealers are gone, the streets are clean, and America is substantially more cohesive and happier than it is now. What then?

In a world where America First is accepted as a watchword, what would our immigration policy look like? By working out this hypothetical, we will be more clearly able to see just how ruinous our current policies are. There is a world in which foreigners, instead of suckling at the American taxpayer tit, are, by a vast margin, net contributors to our national life. In this hypothetical, foreigners really would make America better for Americans. 

There are, for instance, real benefits from access to a larger labor pool. Labor is an input into production like any other. Access to foreign markets and foreign goods and therefore foreign labor makes Americans’ materially wealthier by increasing the number of goods available for purchase. The Founders, for instance, considered access to foreign trade to be part of the natural rights of all men. Cheap goods are, all other things being equal, better than expensive goods.  

But cheap goods are not better than sovereignty. It is dangerous and deeply unwise to trade short term material prosperity for long term political instability. Making endless numbers of foreigners into citizens creates that instability by eroding the basic understanding of justice that animates the regime. There is, however, another way. 

The United States could have the best of both worlds by utilizing a guest worker program to bring in foreigners to work but not to become citizens. These workers could be tariffed (or taxed) at the same rate as foreign goods. Done right, the revenue from these guest workers and foreign goods could be enough to almost entirely eliminate the income tax on American workers. 

Let’s look at some back of the paper math. In 2024, the United States collected some $2.4 trillion in income taxes from the American people. 

There are 50 million immigrants in America. Their average household income is $75,000 a year. In 2024, we also imported $4.1 trillion worth of goods and services. 

Let us imagine that the United States imposed a 50% across the board tariff on all goods and services from abroad, including income made by foreigners in the United States. Assuming some inelasticity of demand, we can expect imports and immigrant wages to fall by about a third.

This means we would bring in about $2.7 trillion in goods and $1.3 trillion in tariffs. Meanwhile, if we imagine that 30 million foreign workers would willingly choose to come to America to work under this regime (very plausible) at, on average a salary of $50,000 a year (2/3 the current total) a 50% tax rate would bring in $750 billion. 

In other words, the total revenue of a blanket 50% across the board tariff on all foreign goods and income could plausibly yield more than $2 trillion in annual revenue, enough money to effectively eliminate the income tax for Americans. 

Imagine simply not having to do your taxes. Imagine living in the world that virtually all Americans lived in prior to 1913. 

In this scenario, a free market guest worker program would allow companies to hire foreigners and bring them to America as long as they were willing to pay the 50% income tariff to do so. This tax regime would automatically grant a huge leg up to American workers. Because Americans would not come with such a tax, these foreigners would have to either be substantially more efficient than American laborers or they would have to do jobs that Americans quite literally were not willing to do because they could make so much more money doing something else. 

In this framework, every foreign worker in America would be a symbol of our liberation from income taxation and the government surveillance that comes with it. Corporations that constantly whine about a lack of available labor could have as much of it as they like… as long as they are willing to pay into our common treasury to get it. 

For these guest worker visas, corporations would have to put up a bond in the case of bad behavior by one of their foreign workers. Employers would bear the cost of migrant crime. They would be incentivized to ensure that they only hired foreigners who could be trusted to follow the law. 

In this framework, foreign guest workers would not have any pathway to citizenship. Their role in American life would be to work—voluntarily—for money to send back to their home country. Once their term of stay in the United States they would go back. Any kind of political agitation by these foreign workers would be immediately met with deportation. Their job would be to work quietly, better their economic situation and ours, contribute to the American treasury in the process, and then return to their country of origin. 

If we decide to allow women and children to accompany foreign workers under this system, they would have to pay for all government services out of pocket. Want to put your foreign child into our public-school systems? You need to pay tuition. You want to use our hospitals? You need to pay full price. 

Today, America is a sheep-shearing operation designed to rip off the native population. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We could set things up so that foreigners pay instead for the privilege of access to our world-leading economy, legal system, and national cohesion. 

Right now, the United States has sky-high income taxes and low tariffs. We can and should reverse that trend: high tariffs and low (or non-existent) income taxes. 

Foreign workers should be just that: workers. They should not be here to grift, get welfare, commit crimes, or agitate for foreign causes. 

Simply articulating what an America First guest worker program could look like reveals just how broken our current system is. Foreigners today are allowed license to absolutely run wild in our country. They receive all the rights of citizenship and additional privileges (due to DEI) that are denied to the native population. 

This is obscene. Americans should have privileges that foreigners don’t. The greatest privilege we could offer Americans is protection of their rights and liberties that they do not have to pay for out of pocket. We can build a healthy social order and make foreigners pay for it. 

This is simply a thought experiment. We are a long way off from even beginning to see this become a reality. In truth, perhaps allowing foreigners, especially from the third world, to work in America is too great a danger to our common good. Maybe a guest worker program as such, under any circumstances, is a bad idea.

My point is simply to show what could be possible, to show what an immigration policy motivated by patriotism instead of treason could look like. Americans deserve to live in a peaceful, wealthy country. They deserve to have life be good. 

They deserve a new golden age. We can deliver. All it takes is a little imagination, a lot of willpower, and the iron sternness to see the battle through to the day of glory.