Details

Subject(s)

• Foreign workers—United States [Browse]
• Jamaica—Emigration and immigration [Browse]
• Foreign workers [Browse]
• Deportation [Browse]

Related name

• American Council of Learned Societies [Browse]

Series

• Politics and society in twentieth-century America [More in this series]
• ACLS Humanities E-Book. [More in this series]

Summary note

"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."--Publisher's website.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (p. [245]-322) and index.

Reproduction note

Electronic text and image data. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan, MPublishing, 2014. Includes both TIFF files and keyword searchable text. ([ACLS Humanities E-Book]) Mode of access: Intranet.

Contents

• Introduction
• Guestworkers of the world, unite! : you have nothing to lose but your passport, your visa, your immigration status
• Everything but a gun to their heads : the politics of labor scarcity and the birth of World War II guestworker programs
• "Stir it up" : Jamaican guestworkers in the promised land
• John Bull meets Jim Crow : Jamaican guestworkers in the wartime South
• The race to the bottom : making wartime temporary worker programs permanent and private
• A riotous success : guestworkers, "illegal immigrants, " and the promise of managed migration
• The worst job in the world : the Cuban Revolution, the war on poverty, and the secret rebellion in Florida's cane fields
• Takin' it to the courts : legal services, the UFW, and the battle for the worst jobs in the world
• "For all those bending years" : IRCA, the dog war, and the campaign for legal status
• All the world's a workplace : guestworkers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

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ACLS Humanities E-Book. URL: http://www.humanitiesebook.org

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