Monograph presenting a survey of management attitudes toward the employment of irregular migrants and the need for a migrant worker programme in respect of the agricultural sector, Hotel industry and the electronics industry in the USA - considers the need for guest workers in view of migration policy and short term labour demand, and concludes with disagreement as regards lower labour costs of undocumented workers. Diagrams, photographs and references.
"Cutting through the usual hyperbole that surrounds the immigration debate, Orrenius and Zavodny have produced a lucid and an insightful discussion of U.S. policy options that should be required reading for anyone interested in how the nation could design more effective mechanisms to manage our borders."-Gordon H. Hanson director, Center on Pacific Economies, and professor of economics, University of CaliforniaûSan Diego --
From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, 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 who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead 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, as well as 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 United States to do some of the 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 abroad. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact 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.
Why have ninety million workers around the globe left their homes for employment in other countries? What can be done to ensure that international labor migration is a force for global betterment? This groundbreaking book presents the most comprehensive analysis of the causes and effects of labor migration available, and it recommends sensible, sustainable migration policies that are fair to migrants and to the countries that open their doors to them. The authors survey recent trends in international migration for employment and demonstrate that the flow of authorized and illegal workers over borders presents a formidable challenge in countries and regions throughout the world. They note that not all migration is from undeveloped to developed countries and discuss the murky relations between immigration policies and politics. The book concludes with specific recommendations for justly managing the world’s growing migrant workforce.
The introductory chapter of this volume on immigration into the United States is entitled "Overview: A Time of Reform and Reappraisal" (D. Simcox), and it introduces the topics of reform, legal and illegal immigration, the effect of immigration on the labor market and social welfare, and immigration enforcement methods that are discussed in the other 15 articles. The articles include: "Network Recruitment and Labor Displacement" (P. Martin); "Seeking Common Ground for Blacks and Immigrants" (J. J. Jackson); "Hispanic Americans: The Debased Coin of Citizenship" (R. Estrada); "Ellis Island: The Building of a Heritage" (E. Sevareid); "Immigration and the National Interest" (O. Graham, Jr.); "A Kind of Discordant Harmony: Issues in Assimilation" (G. Bikales and G. Imhoff);"Immigration, Population Change, and California's Future" (L. Bouvier); "Mexicans: California's Newest Immigrants" (The Urban Institute); "Immigration in the Golden State: The Tarnished Dream" (R. Marshall); "Mexico's Dilemma: Finding a Million Jobs a Year" (D. Simcox); "Employer Sanctions in Europe: Deterrence without Discrimination" (M. Miller); "Europe's Lessons for America" (M. R. Lovell, Jr.); "Principles vs. Expediency in U.S. Immigration Policy" (L. Fuchs); "The U.S. Refugee Industry: Doing Well by Doing Good" (B. Zall); and "How Many Americans?" (L. Grant). The appendix contains a summary of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
