In 1624, Jane Dickenson petitioned the governor of Virginia for relief from bondage. Four years earlier, her husband had signed a contract of indenture to pay for his immigration from England; it obliged him to labor for a man named Nicholas Hide for a period of seven years.

Before the indenture was up, however, Jane’s husband was killed in the Second Anglo-Powhatan War, and she was taken captive by the Pamunkey Indians. Held for 10 months, she was finally ransomed for two pounds of beads by one of the Virginia Company’s grandees. Jane now found herself bound to labor “with a towefold Chaine,” one “for her late husband’s obligation,” the other “for her ransome.” Seeking her own release, Jane testified that her indentured service “differeth not from her slavery [with] the Indians.”

Stories similar to Jane’s abounded in the colony, where labor for growing cash crops was perpetually scarce and turning a profit required keeping tight control over immigrant workers. English law provided indentured servants some avenues for redress, but local Virginian courts—like the one Jane appealed to—were run by their employers. Masters traded laborers and disciplined them with impunity, all with the law’s support. Just a year after Jane filed her petition, the English ship captain Thomas Weston refused to carry more servants to Virginia because they were sold there “like horses.”

It’s a lesson as old as European settlement of the present-day United States: Treating migrant workers as property for the benefit of others leads to terrible consequences. But judging from a recent immigration-reform proposal, the country hasn’t entirely learned that lesson. In a Politico piece originally titled, “What If You Could Get Your Own Immigrant?”—a headline that provoked such anger it was quickly changed—Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School, and Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft Research New England, described a plan that amounts to reintroducing a form of bonded immigrant labor to the United States. Their idea, in essence, is to give every American citizen the right to “sponsor” an immigrant, put that person to work, and then take a portion of his or her wages.

If these two scholars at elite institutions were aware of their plan’s historical precedent, they gave no indication of it. But it’s clear from American history that such a proposal would be a disaster not only for immigrants, but for American democracy. Once set in motion, any policy that creates conditions for exploitative labor practices is likely only to encourage more exploitation. ...