The intention of the US guest worker program for agriculture, called the H-2A program, couldn’t have been stated more clearly than it was by agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue in a January 2020 speech to growers. He wanted, he said,

to separate immigration, which is people wanting to become citizens, [from] a temporary, legal guest-worker program . . . That’s what agriculture needs, and that’s what we want. It doesn’t offend people who are anti-immigrant because they don’t want more immigrant citizens here. We need people who can help US agriculture meet the production.

By separating the immigration of families, in which migrants become community members and eventually citizens, from the recruitment of migrants solely for their labor power, in which they work and then leave, Perdue was restating a goal of US immigration policy that has existed from its inception. In opposition to that goal, the civil rights movement among Mexican and Asian Americans proposed an alternative vision to guide our immigration policy, one that favored unifying families and strengthening immigrant communities, and forced Congress to enact a law in 1965 that enshrines that vision.