Guests, Si; workers, no: our most delicate thinkers have a problem with hard work.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Rant

PRESIDENT BUSH'S immigration reform plan is garnering praise from many would-be immigrant workers and their would-be employers. But it has a substantial political downside for an important subset of opinion-makers, who are disproportionately likely to vote, donate, and otherwise shape the political landscape beyond their numbers. The problem is, Bush's plan is based on immigrants as guest workers.

It's not the "guest" part that bothers these voters. It's the "workers."

I was already familiar with this mindset from any number of party conversations and bar arguments, but a couple of recent magazine articles silently articulate this view in a particularly absurd way.

The more prominent is the cover story in the March Atlantic Monthly, cover-lined "Dispatches from The Nanny Wars." The piece is a long cri de coeur over how author Caitlin Flanagan's generation of professional women has betrayed the values of feminism--hell, the values of humanity--through a shameful vice: hiring women from the Third World to work as nannies.

Flanagan goes on for pages and pages of rueful head shaking over this crime, which apparently makes women the modern-day equivalents of the plantation class of doe Olde South. Never once does this very smart writer with many thousands of words to play with even offer a hint of an adumbration of a clue that it isn't an unequivocal moral wrong to give someone a job doing your domestic work. Flanagan merely assumes that the average Atlantic reader will surely see just how evil is the act of offering someone less well off than you compensation for labor.

It's certainly annoying to have to clean kitchens, mop bathrooms, wash endless loads of laundry, cope with mewling children, and confront the other rows that the modern nanny must hoe. But is it that controversial--in Flanagan's case, apparently literally unthinkable--to suggest that it might be a blessing for an average Central American woman to be doing those tasks in an upscale suburban home rather than, say, seamstressing in a poorly ventilated warehouse, working industrial food prep, or whatever she'd be doing if she stayed in Central America (a place she's already shown a demonstrated preference to escape from)?

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