Cindy Hahamovitch's important new book interprets the history of US–Caribbean guest-worker programs in a global context. Starting in the late nineteenth century, guest-workers have inhabited a “no man's land” between nation-states and between freedom and slavery, the book argues, and their deportability has consistently led state elites and employers to recruit them. By comparing the H2 temporary labour program with other guest-work arrangements, and particularly with the Bracero program between the US and Mexico, Hahmovitch successfully, and often brilliantly, spotlights the inner workings of guest-work even as she diagnoses its worldwide scope.
No Man's Land suggests that early attempts to import temporary foreign labourers emerged in the late nineteenth century, as conflict grew between employers seeking labour surpluses and nationalists who advocated exclusionary immigration controls. The latter particularly targeted transnational debt migrants who arrived bound to debt or contracts, and whom white elites saw as dangerously slavish and destined to lower the working standards for native-born citizen-workers. From South Africa to Australia and Prussia, this “first phase” of temporary worker programs allowed industrialists and agriculturalists to employ temporarily contracted working men, pay less than minimum wage, maintain racial segregation, and demand workers’ expulsion at the end of the contract period, particularly for non-whites.
Xenophobia spurred by the Great Depression led nation-states like the United States to abruptly expel many thousands of such labourers in the 1930s, when businesses took advantage of gluts in domestic labour markets. In the southern US state of Florida, Hahamovitch shows, growers chose each day's workforce amongst the job-hungry labourers gathered at the morning “roundup”, and truckers who drove the fortunate few to the fields brought helpers to fend off the remaining men and women, some of whom clung to the trucks’ doors (p. 25). Farmworkers like these gained little from the groundbreaking social welfare policies of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s.
As the wartime economy after 1939 created new job opportunities elsewhere, though, workers quickly opted to forgo the fields, and it took federal intervention to bring them back. Expertly using government documents from Great Britain and Jamaica and the papers of US federal agencies like the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Farm Security Administration, chapters 2 through 4 dramatically interpret the rise, fall, and legacy of the “Farmworkers’ New Deal”, a war-era program whose labour and housing regulations made the it “the first guestworker scheme in the world designed to protect foreign workers and elevate the condition of native-born workers” [italics in original] (p. 46).
Their gains were short-lived, however. Vegetable and sugar cane growers like Luther L. Chandler, outraged that federal labour camps seemed to encourage African-American labour stoppages and dissent, zealously sought deportable foreign workers to replace native-born blacks, even if the terms of the federally regulated Emergency Farm Labour Importation Program would grant the new labourers their own advocates and generous contracts (p. 65). After the war, Chandler and others succeeded in reorganizing the program and its labour protections so they would “wither on the vine”. By threatening to offer US jobs to other Caribbean workers, the grower-friendly War Food Administration secured British officials’ consent to allow Jamaican workers to toil in the brutal sugar cane fields of the Jim Crow South, and the stage was set for a new batch of guest-work programs. While the “roundup” of the Depression era was a roadside affair, the post-war version took place on an increasingly international stage. It pitted poor Caribbean countries against each other in a “race to the bottom” to secure low-waged, temporary agricultural work in the US.
In what Hahamovitch dubs the “second phase” of guest-worker programs, war mobilization and recovery led countries like the US, Germany, and Japan to import millions of workers, and variations of the programs lived on until public criticism, recession, and the international oil crisis led to their demise in the early 1970s. Unlike in Europe, where legal protections and unions led guest-workers’ labour conditions to improve after World War II, conditions for those in the US mostly deteriorated. While government officials maintained the power to deport in Europe, growers captured it for themselves in the US by using a loophole in the highly restrictive 1917 Immigration Act.
As sugar producers joined together to share the few costs of labour importation they did not pass on to workers in the late 1940s and 1950s, private labour camps, complete with their West Indian H2 workforces, increasingly resembled the plantations of the nineteenth century South. Unlike Florida's sugar cane cutters, Mexican braceros in the west worked under the protection of federal guest-work regulations, though lack of enforcement led many workers to flee their farms and seek out jobs as unauthorized immigrant workers elsewhere. Guest-work schemes, in fact, often produce, rather than prevent, the growth of unauthorized populations, Hahamovitch argues. However, state elites have often used the programmes as “symbolic alternative[s] to unmanaged migration” to appease the conflicting demands of employers and immigration restrictionists (p. 226).
As deplorable working conditions, newly emergent farm-worker unions, and liberal officials helped provoke public outcry about the treatment of guest-workers in the US in the late 1950s and 1960s, and mechanization and “Green Revolution” farming techniques reduced the demand for farm workers in general, governments in the US and elsewhere dismantled their post-war guest-worker programmes. In Florida, however, the impact of the Cuban Revolution and US President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty collided “like two weather systems”, as Hahamovitch evocatively suggests. As the storms cleared and the US trade embargo prohibited the import of Cuban sugar, Florida suddenly became its own “sugar kingdom” where a new generation of Cuban exiles and sugar barons reigned and H2 labour importation survived. Despite the efforts of the United Farm Workers and legal aid services, cutting sugar cane continued to be what the US Secretary of Labour called “the worst job in the world” (p. 136). Using oral history interviews, government records, the papers of a Jamaican migration official, and those of the United Farm Workers’ Florida Division, Hahamovitch shows how sugar companies accepted the 30 per cent injury rate and frequent work stoppages as normal costs of doing business, and could rely on local police for free backing, as in the New Year's Day strike of 1968.
The bulk of the book focuses on the years between the early 1930s and the early 1990s, and Hahamovitch's perceptive, incisive, and wonderfully staged epics of profit-seeking and worker resistance continue as she discusses the fate of the H2 programmes in the late twentieth century. Cane cutters’ hopes for amnesty amidst the immigration reforms and legal struggles of the 1980s, she shows, hinged partly on whether the United States Department of Agriculture would define sugar cane as a perishable fruit or vegetable. It chose neither, and H2 workers became the only immigrant farm-workers not granted amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The book's concluding chapter briefly discusses the IRCA-produced H2-B programme as part of a global “maid trade” that first took shape in the 1970s. Though these “third phase” programmes dwarf those of prior generations and continue to bring millions of men and women to the US, the Middle East, and Asia, they still feature “pageant[s] of state power” that stigmatize and expel guest-workers, even as they constantly recycle them with new ones (p. 229).
Recent texts on labour migrants arriving on the US mainland from places like the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico suggest that social capital, patron–client networks, and historically changing notions of personal and political transformation help explain how and why migrants entered the US workforce in the twentieth century. Hahamovitch's account of how these and other categories intersected with Jamaican poverty, however, sometimes lacks the historical dynamism of the rest of book, particularly given the dramatic changes in Jamaica in this period. More fully exploring how poor Jamaican men secured scarce recruitment cards, or how social mobilization and the aspirations of decolonization and the Caribbean Left shaped the men's work and migration may help answer a question that the author herself admits remains unclear: “[w]hy workers toughed it out at some times and rebelled at others” (p. 164).
Despite this, the book is a masterful labour history of guest-work in Florida in a valuably global framework. No Man's Land is a must-read for those interested in the labour politics of immigration and agriculture. It's also certain to be a valuable reference for those interested in West Indian labour immigration, US foreign relations in the Americas, and the political architecture of labour and immigration more generally. Hahamovitch's contribution sets a lofty standard for future historians of guest-work programmes.
