I'm sorry, but if you scratch the surface of most rhetoric about "illegal immigrants," the racism does enter into it -- because in the US, the problem is mostly framed with reference to Mexico, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of people here illegally from other places, and I never hear people worrying about white people sneaking in from Canada.

The anger and fear about illegal immigration in the US is attached almost entirely to people of color, even if the label itself is the same regardless of race. And that makes it such a hot political issue that I don't really want to get into it any further with anyone. (However, there was a good in-depth nonpartisan look at the topic in a recent, maybe current, issue of "Mental Floss.")

I stand by my definition of "migrant worker." I think it jibes with the current Wikipedia statement on the topic, more or less (that the seasonal component may be there as well and the worker in question may not necessarily be a foreign national). Of course, we all know how easy Wikipedia is to game, so who knows if it'll say the same thing in twelve hours? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_worker

"A migrant worker is someone who regularly works away from home, if they even have a home. Although the United Nations' {use of} this term overlaps with 'foreign worker', the use of the term within the United States is more specific. In the United States, the term is most commonly used to describe low-wage workers performing manual labor in the agriculture field. Today in Europe and the United States these are often immigrants who are not working on valid work visas. {....} The term migrant worker sometimes may be used to describe any worker who moves from one seasonal job to another. This use is generally confined to lower-wage fields, perhaps because the term has been indelibly linked with low-wage farmworkers and illegal immigrants.{....}In America's history, starting at the end of the American Civil War, hobos were the migrant workers who performed much of this agricultural work, using freight railroads as their means of transportation to new jobs. During the collapse of capitalism in the Great Depression, so-called Okies who fled the dust bowl were a significant source of temporary farm labor.{....}It is also used currently for workers from China's impoverished west who go to work in the more prosperous east."

The UN defines "migrant worker" in terms of foreign nationals, but the US has not signed on to that definition; furthermore, that definition is not historically accurate for the US, though it may have currency. *shrug*

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