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

Introduction -- Guestworkers of the world, unite! : you have nothing to lose but your passport, your visa, your immigration status -- Every thing 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 : Jamaica n guestworkers in the wartime South -- The race to the bottom : making wartime temporary worker programs permanent and private -- A riotous su ccess : guestworkers, "illegal immigrants, " and the promise of managed migration -- The worst job in the world : the Cuban Revolution, the wa r on poverty, and the secret rebellion in Florida's cane fields -- Taki n' it to the courts : legal services, the UFW, and the battle for the w orst 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.

"From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nat ions around the world, including the United States, have turned to gues tworker 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 immigrant s. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their familie s, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of crea ting a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an es pecially vulnerable class of labor. Based on a vast array of sources fr om 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 seco nd oldest guestworker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has b rought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United State s to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farmwork for s ome of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, compani es that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaica n guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neit her by their home government nor by the United States. The workers comp lained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsui ts, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatria ted and replaced in a matter of hours. No Man's Land puts Jamaican gues tworkers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast -growing and perilous form of labor migration."--Publisher's website.

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