"No Man's Land": Hahamovitch on U.S. guestworkers
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They exist on the periphery, neither slave nor free. Apple pickers, crab pickers, tobacco pickers,
they follow the harvests, toiling often in unseemly conditions for precious
dollars they cannot earn in their native lands. They are America’s H2
guestworkers. They do the “dirty” jobs, the “most dangerous” work, while living
in what W&M Professor of History Cindy Hahamovitch calls “No Man’s Land.”
Her recent book, No
Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers and the Global History of Deportable Labor,
chronicles the global labor movement while looking specifically at the U.S. H2 program,
the second-oldest guestworker program in the world. Created in 1942 to manage
agricultural workers, mostly from Jamaica, who would supplement the domestic
labor force during World War II, it began with international fanfare and what
Hahamovitch termed “liberal-minded oversight.” Participants, restricted to
service north of the Mason-Dixon line by agreement between U.S. and British colonial officials, were treated as war heroes.
“They were greeted with marching bands,” Hahamovitch said. ”They
were given the keys to New York. They were taken to churches by the local
farmers' daughters.” Although isolated problems were encountered, the workers
had their own liaison officers and federal officials charged with looking after
their interests.
At the same time growers in the South, led by Floridian
sugarcane producers, applied pressure to have H2 workers assigned to their
states. Within months, that occurred.
“When these workers arrived in Florida, they were met by
officials of the sugarcane companies who are more accustomed to working with
convicts, so the sugarcane managers met them with blackjacks and guns,” Hahamovitch
said.
As the program was perpetuated during successive decades,
the Southern method of dealing with workers became the model, Hahamovitch
explained. That occurred, in part, because oversight of the program was shifted
from the labor friendly Farm Security Administration to the industry-friendly U.S.
Department of Agriculture. Growers quickly latched onto the obvious advantages
of hiring guestworkers over domestic workers. They could not strike. They could not quit and
walk down the street to take another job. If they created trouble, their employers
simply could have them deported.
In her book, Hahamovitch traces subsequent developments in
the plight of agricultural workers, including their attempts to organize, their
relationships with U.S. labor unions and what she calls their “symbiosis” with
illegal immigrants: As guestworkers found conditions intolerable, they did walk
away, swelling the ranks of the undocumented work force. She also addresses
instances in which growers pitted guestworkers from one country against those
of other countries, as well as against domestic laborers, in successful efforts
to keep wages low. “It resulted in a race to the bottom, where groups competed for a limited number of jobs and conditions remained very poor; they remain very poor ’til this day,” Hahamovitch said.
“When I started the book, I thought that these workers were
somewhere on a spectrum between slavery and freedom,” she said. “By the end of
the book, I concluded that for these people slavery and freedom were two sides
of the same coin: that they essentially were volunteering to bind themselves
for a period of time. They were agents. They were making decisions. But really,
for rural Jamaicans, there were very few choices. This was their only source of
cash. People competed to do it although they recognized they often were cheated
and mistreated.”
As U.S. politicians consider expanding guestworker programs
in light of recently implemented E-Verify laws that punish employers who hire
“illegal immigrants,” Hahamovitch worries that abuses will increase. She is not convinced that federal promises of oversight “hold much weight.” They are too easily abandoned when confronted with
pressures from industry. She sees little hope for improvements as long as
growers determine who will be deported. Likewise, she is concerned about U.S.
policies that close the routes to citizenship for these workers. She suggests that such routes be opened.
“We have to think bigger,” Hahamovitch said. “We can’t have
our cake and eat it, too. We can’t have foreign workers and refuse to integrate
them into our society ... .
We had that world before: we called it Jim Crow. I think the expansion of
guestworker programs runs the risk of creating a new kind of apartheid in the
United States.”
