Sale!

No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Politics and Society in Modern America)

Amazon.com Price:  $22.18 (as of 23/04/2019 09:09 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations world wide, including the US, 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 that feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn’t settle, bring their families, or transform citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, as a substitute 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, in addition to 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 US to do one of the vital 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 in another country. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man’s land between nations, safe neither by their home government nor by the US. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little have an effect on 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.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Immigrants » No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Politics and Society in Modern America)

Recent Products