No Man's Land

Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-0-691-10268-9
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 350 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 482 g

Reihe: Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America

From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker 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, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker 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 guestworker 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 farmwork for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guestworkers 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 guestworkers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hahamovitch, Cindy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Guestworkers of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Passport, Your Visa, Your Immigration Status 12

Chapter Two: Everything but a Gun to Their Heads: The Politics of Labor Scarcity and the Birth of World War II Guestworker Programs 22

Chapter Three:"Stir It Up": Jamaican Guestworkers in the Promised Land 50

Chapter Four: John Bull Meets Jim Crow: Jamaican Guestworkers in the Wartime South 67

Chapter Five: The Race to the Bottom: Making Wartime Temporary Worker Programs Permanent and Private 86

Chapter Six: A Riotous Success: Guestworkers, "Illegal Immigrants," and the Promise of Managed Migration 110

Chapter Seven: The Worst Job in the World: The Cuban Revolution, the War on Poverty, and the Secret Rebellion in Florida?s Cane Fields 135

Chapter Eight: Takin? It to the Courts: Legal Services, the UFW, and the Battle for the Worst Jobs in the World 172

Chapter Nine: "For All Those Bending Years": IRCA, the Dog War, and the Campaign for Legal Status 202

Chapter Ten: All the World?s a Workplace: Guestworkers at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century 227

Conclusion 236

Notes 245

Bibliography 295

Index 323

Über Autor(innen)

Hahamovitch, Cindy
Cindy Hahamovitch is professor of history at the College of William & Mary. She is the author of "The Fruits of Their Labor".