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  • No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor by Cindy Hahamovitch
  • Joey Fink
Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011)

Immigrants perform laborious, low wage, and often dirty and dangerous work. They are vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and harassment, regardless of their status. Their labour is crucial yet undervalued, necessary but often invisible. Historian Cindy Hahamovitch’s examination of guestworker programs in the United States, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, offers a thoroughly researched critique of a labour supply system “in which the world’s wealthy nations import foreigners to do their hardest, dirtiest, and often their most intimate work.” (235) No Man’s Land recently won three prestigious awards in the categories of labour history, the history of race relations in the US, and social and/or intellectual American history. The awards bear mentioning not only as testament to the rigorous research and evocative writing, but also to the impressive scope of this book. In No Man’s Land, Hahamovitch examines the global forces that pushed and pulled agricultural workers around the world and exposes the historical actors in the US (powerful agricultural employers and influential farmers’ association lobbyists) who determined their fate. She provides a moving social history of the experiences of Jamaican men in Florida’s sugarcane fields, and reveals how race, ethnicity, poverty, and migrant status shaped the guestworker program in the United States into “a system of oscillating indentured servitude.” (239)

Hahamovitch offers a global history of more than one hundred years of guest-worker programs. The first phase of these programs began in the late 19th century in Prussia and South Africa as state-brokered compromises between employers’ needs and nativists’ anxieties. In South African mining camps, for example, white South Africans wanted cheap labour but not non-white neighbours. “Guestworker” was a wildly inappropriate name for these programs where labourers were never treated as guests. Foreign workers were segregated in “reserves” and deported after their contracts expired. In this example, we see the earliest versions of the guestworker programs that would take shape in America and Europe after World War II and in the wealthy nations of the Middle East and Pacific Rim in the last quarter of the 20th century. Guestworkers are allowed to work in their host countries, but they cannot bring their families, use the social services provided by the state, or vote. They live in a “no man’s land” between freedom and slavery, where they are neither welcomed nor encouraged to stay in their host countries. Guestworkers enter into contracts voluntarily, yes, but protesting working conditions or even questioning wages can lead to deportation. Quitting means immediate deportation, some -times forfeiting wages already earned, leaving one to wonder what kind of choices guestworkers are really free to make. After World War II, the guestworker programs in Europe developed along a very different track from those in the United States. This was partly due to European labour unions that advocated on behalf of guestworkers. The key difference, though, [End Page 285] was that in Europe, the power to deport rests in the hand of the government. In the United States, employers wrested that power from the state after World War II. This control over guestworkers makes the United States’ program a particularly relevant case study for understanding the implications of the global phenomenon of deportable labour in the 20th century.

The earliest form of the guestworker program in the United States took shape during World War I, when fears of labour shortages prompted the federal government to allow “temporary admission” to migrant labourers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and Canada, but the global Great Depression ended these programs. World War II opened up the second phase of guestworker programs, as Germany and Japan reopened borders for wartime labour (but quickly turned those programs into conscription in labour camps). In the United States, the federal government instituted a guest-worker program reluctantly, in response to pressure from growers primarily in the southeastern states. Here...

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