Bibliograph

No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, Cindy Hahamovitch

Type

Label

No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, Cindy Hahamovitch

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor

Medium

electronic resource

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Responsibility statement

Cindy Hahamovitch

Series statement

Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America

Sub title

Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor

Summary

From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guest worker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guest workers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guest worker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor. Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, as well as interviews, No Man's Land tells the history of the American "H2" program, the world's second oldest guest worker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United States to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farm work for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guest workers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatriated and replaced in a matter of hours. No Man's Land puts Jamaican guest workers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration

Target audience

adult

Classification