Workers Opting For Canada

Suaste, 27, his brothers, Alejandro, 30, and Eusebio, 25, and more than a dozen other men from Guanajuato are heading to Quebec - not with the help of ruthless, pricey smugglers known as coyotes, but on airplanes with assigned seating and iced drinks. The men will join more than 13,000 other Mexicans in Canada as part of a guest worker program for agricultural workers. Proposals for a guest worker program have drawn fierce opposition in the United States, but proponents say the Canada program offers some big advantages: workers are treated better, and they return home at the end of their assigned stay. "This program is about meeting supply and demand," said Miguel Gutiérrez Tinoco of Mexico´s Foreign Relations Secretariat, which helps oversee the program with Canada. In 32 years, Tinoco said, "I know of no one who has violated the agreement and stayed behind. ... We can do the same thing at a larger scale with the United States." Others disagree, saying it is unrealistic to view the Canada-Mexico agricultural program as a possible model because of vastly different situations. While the Canadian agricultural worker program takes in a few thousand workers a year, the United States has as many as 6 million Mexican illegal immigrants. "We´re a nation of immigrants, not a nation of guest workers," he said. In Ottawa, Mario Rondeau, Canada´s acting director of the foreign worker program, called it "a considerable success." "It´s hard in the summertime, it´s difficult to find Canadians to do these jobs," Rondeau said. "The program has been a success." In Canada, workers are provided with housing and transportation. Employers pay for the plane ticket and then deduct some of those costs from the employee´s paycheck. The workers return home at the end of the harvest season with a letter from their employer either inviting them to return next season or not. Officials say 75 percent to 80 percent of workers do return. "We´re not scared of hard work," Alejandro said. "We just want some respect for the sweat of our work." http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/miami/17812.html [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on April 17, 2006]

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