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

"Cindy Hahamovitch does a really great job of showing us how the US guest worker programs fit within the larger history of global guest workers. She sheds light on how the needs of American agribusinesses for a mobile workforce impacted US immigration policy and had reverberations across the globe. Right. She starts by setting the scene with a history of guest workers across the globe. Then she moves us into the specific example of British West Indies guest workers in the US, who were primarily Jamaican. She highlights the racism these workers encountered and how policy makers used this workforce to meet agribusinesses’ need for labor without necessarily creating pathways to permanent residency for immigrants. She does a great job of showing us how Jamaican workers in the US contributed to our understandings of race, citizenship, and agricultural labor. This continues to ring true as growers continue to recruit Jamaican farmworkers in the present. Growers wanted the ability to control the mobility of these workers. Early Mexican guest workers could skip out on contracts and move into different employment. So, growers got good at making sure that these people didn’t have that mobility, that they couldn’t break the terms of their contracts and that they were easily deportable. Now we have H-2a workers whose mobility is controlled by their employers. Hahamovitch shows us how policy makers and growers designed the guest worker program to make these laborers exploitable."