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.
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