Cindy Hahamovitch's important and impressive book No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor took ten years to complete, time which is amply repaid in scrupulous scholarship and work investigating the phenomenon of H2 guestworkers in the United States, with a particular focus on Jamaican guestworkers. In her thorough examination of this element of the United States' labour history, Hahamovitch incorporates a diverse set of materials, including one-to-one interviews with former guestworkers, legal records and letters, yet all sources are presented in a lively and engaging manner that should appeal to historians and the general reader alike.

Hahamovitch explains that, since it began in 1931, US Sugar had relied on African American labourers, who were in effect imprisoned on the farms – unable to leave and policed by fierce camp managers wielding guns. Runaways routinely were rounded up by the sheriff and beaten. Eventually, the FBI was called in to investigate US Sugar's labour policies and, in 1943, Caribbean recruitment for guestworkers began, with a view to replacing the African American workers. Initially, both men and women were permitted to join the scheme, but Hahamovitch notes that, when several of the Bahamian women who arrived during the early days of the system became pregnant, the threat of their deportation led to a spate of hasty abortions, and women were quickly denied participation in the scheme. Indian Caribbean people were at the start also excluded from the guestworker scheme because, since 1924, US immigration had refused to permit any Asian workers from entering the country, regardless of their country of birth.

Overall, though, there was an important difference in the malleability of African American and Caribbean workers: unlike the African American labourers, Caribbean migrants were continually under threat of deportation. This fact led to their exploitation and labour in especially unforgiving conditions, particularly those unlucky enough to work for US Sugar. Situated in Florida in recently reclaimed Everglades, these workers toiled in especially harsh conditions, surrounded by alligators, snakes and biting insects. The benefits of the H2 programme to the US are made clear by Hahamovitch: the country gained a cheap, temporary workforce that was largely compliant because it laboured under constant intimidation, in the guise of deportation. As she explains, “Unlike immigrants who stay, settle, and in some countries naturalize, vote, and qualify for social services, guestworkers exist in a no man's land between nations; they provide labor to host societies but often fall outside the protections of those societies' labor laws” (2). Despite the threat of deportation, however, there were still sometimes protests and uprisings against working conditions. In fact, some measures were taken from the beginning of the scheme in order to try to minimize discontent arising from racial segregation. The British colonial secretary, Oliver Stanley, initially ruled that Jamaicans should be sent only to farms in the North, as they would be unused to the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South. Bajans should be sent South, as – in his opinion – they were already used to a system of racial segregation.

Those labourers who were sent home to the Caribbean were quickly replaced by a new batch of workers eager for the chance to seek their fortune in the US. No prior experience or qualifications were necessary, and the scheme was extremely popular for those seeking a way out of the poverty of the Caribbean.

There are clearly comparisons to be made between the harsh conditions facing the guestworkers and the past of slavery, though Hahamovitch is careful to outline the differences between the systems, too. The guestworkers had chosen to undertake the work (though were often misled about their compensation and the nature of the task), and they were paid for their labour.

As both Henrice Altink and Sarah Senk observe in the following reviews, whilst this book is impressively thorough in its interrogation of the US context for such labour, the Caribbean region feels somewhat neglected by comparison. The effects on Jamaica of this labour migration, for example, would be an interesting addition to the study. As Altinck comments, greater attention to the framing of this particular moment of labour history (perhaps with reference to Jamaica's past of slavery and indenture) would have made this work stronger still, though also undoubtedly longer, and at over three hundred pages in length, this is not a short book.

Overall, this work is thorough, arresting and an important addition to the history of labour and migration in the United States. As Hahamovitch is keen to point out, the guestworker phenomenon is not a problem that has gone away; she cites, for example, the popularity of the “maid trade” today, and notes, “Guestworkers, whose numbers are now enormous, are more easily exploited than ever before” (2). This book traces one aspect of this phenomenon during the twentieth century, but speaks in a timely manner about the ongoing and routine exploitation of guestworkers around the world.

I grew up in the 1970s in a small town in the Netherlands centred on a large jute factory that employed many Turkish gastarbeiders. Cindy Hahamovitch's No Man's Land has allowed me to see these guestworkers as part of a larger and global history of guestwork. The book focusses on the American H2 guestworker programme, which emerged out of the Caribbean guestworker scheme that was set up in 1942 as a wartime measure and is still in force today. The programme was initially only used in agriculture but from 1986 onwards also began to apply to other areas, such as hotels. The book is particularly concerned with Jamaican H2 workers, as for more than forty years they constituted the bulk of the H2 workers, and also with the Florida cane industry because it was the largest employer of H2 workers.

Hahamovitch discusses the H2 programme chronologically and places it within both a global history of guestwork and a history of American migration, comparing the H2 programme, for instance, to postwar European guestworker schemes on the one hand and the Bracero programme – an American guestworker programme for Mexicans that was in place from 1942 until 1964 – on the other. Although the H2 programme is one of the smaller guestworker programmes, it deserves scholarly attention because it is the oldest in American history and was and still is seen by many Americans as an antidote to illegal migration and as a means to improve the wages and conditions of all farmworkers. By examining the conditions under which the Jamaican guestworkers laboured and the changes in the H2 programme over time, Hahamovitch not only disproves these two claims but also answers an important question: where does the status of guestworkers lie on the spectrum of slavery to freedom? She argues that for the Jamaican guestworkers, as for many other guestworkers across time and place, “slavery and freedom” were always “simultaneous conditions” (234); that is, the Jamaican cane cutters returned again and again, even though they knew that the working conditions in the Florida cane industry were not that dissimilar to those experienced by their enslaved and emancipated ancestors because the wages that they could earn in the US were not available at home and made a real difference to their lives and to those of their families.

No Man's Land is an impressive book not only in terms of its geographical and temporal scope but also in terms of the amount of research that has gone into it. It is based on a vast range of government publications and manuscripts located in archives and libraries in the US, Jamaica and the UK; court testimonies; newspapers and periodicals; and also letters from and interviews with former H2 workers. From these sources, Hahamovitch constructs a picture of Jamaican cane cutters as men who did not always passively accept their poor working conditions and low pay but whose militancy was tempered by the threat of deportation. Contrary to their counterparts in postwar Europe, American unions did little to improve the lot of H2 workers for two reasons: first, because the workers themselves lacked power, and second, because the unions regarded the H2 programme as a threat rather than as a means to improve the livelihoods of domestic farmworkers. By the late 1960s, however, the Jamaican cane cutters found an ally in the Florida branch of Legal Services, a privately funded legal office, and later also in the Farmworker Justice Fund. These organizations contested the deportation of Jamaican cane cutters and also tried at least to improve, if not to end, the H2 programme.

But while Legal Services and the Farmworker Justice Fund won many suits and exposed the poor conditions under which H2 workers laboured, they did not succeed in ending the programme. Hahamovitch argues that the main reason why the H2 programme has continued up to today is the power of “Big Agriculture,” which is concerned to keep labour costs low. This comes most clearly to the fore in her discussion of the Special Agricultural Workers' (SAW) programme, which allowed for the legalization of alien agricultural workers who had worked for at least ninety days between 1 May 1985 and 1 May 1986. Sugar growers challenged the applicability of this scheme to H2 workers because they feared that cane cutters with legal status (i.e. who had permanent residency) would not cut cane, and they did so by using the loophole of the language of the law. The Special Agricultural Workers' programme referred to “field work related to planting, cultural practices, cultivating, growing and harvesting of fruits and vegetables of every kind and other perishable commodities as defined in regulations by the Secretary of Agriculture” (207). As the sugar growers had a ringer in the Department of Agriculture, it is not surprising that it concluded that “sugar was the only crop in the country that wasn't a fruit, a vegetable, or perishable” but a “grass” (214). The Farmworker Justice Fund made various attempts to challenge the department's definition of sugar but without success, so that Jamaican cane cutters, many of whom had been coming to the US for more than twenty years, were unable to get legal status.

It is not only in her discussion of the SAW programme that Hahamovitch shows the complicity of the American state in upholding the H2 programme. She also demonstrates that federal officials who had to look after the rights of guestworkers were “sporadically attentive at best, craven and corrupt at worst” (240), and that various attempts to amend the H2 programme were defeated because many senators were key supporters of “Big Sugar.” And Hahamovitch also shows that the Jamaican state played into the hands of “Big Sugar.” In 1976, for instance, it bestowed an important honorary title on Fred Sikes, vice president of the US Sugar company, because it realized that at a time of economic crisis the H2 programme was a major source of income for many Jamaicans and that it was therefore important to appease American sugar growers.

While I admire Hahamovitch's approach to discussing the H2 programme as part of both a global history of guestwork and a history of American migration, it does mean that the book often loses focus on the Jamaican guestworkers. The first half sheds considerable light on their working experiences but in the second half they appear not only less frequently – being overshadowed by other categories of migrant – but also less as workers and more as deportees or subjects of litigation. As a Caribbeanist, I would have liked Hahamovitch to place the H2 programme more firmly within a larger history of semi- or unfree labour in Jamaica which includes not only slavery but also the wage-rent system of the immediate post-emancipation period, indentured servitude and the work that Jamaican migrants performed in the prewar period in Panama and on plantations owned by the United Fruit Company in Central America. And I also would have liked more context to support the claim that the H2 programme was and continues to be important to the livelihoods of many Jamaicans. Jamaica has undergone many political, economic and social changes since the H2 programme was initiated, such as independence, the decline of the sugar industry, the growth of the service industry and the expansion of the educational system. By not addressing, or by insufficiently addressing, these changes (e.g. the Jamaican sugar industry receives only three brief mentions), Hahamovitch does not make it easy for readers to understand why Jamaican men returned again and again to Florida to cut cane.

But context on the American side of this particular labour history is also lacking, such as the economic changes that explain why “Big Agriculture” has been and still is so concerned to hold on to the H2 programme. I found the lack of context especially problematic in the second half of the book, where Hahamovitch has let herself be guided more by her sources than by research questions. These chapters, which consist of very detailed discussions of court cases, are hard going as they are packed with numerous acronyms, dates and names. What Hahamovitch has failed to do here, and to a lesser extent also in the first half of the book, is to move from description to explanation. In fact, none of the ten chapters ends with a conclusion that reviews the main themes and issues addressed. And while Hahamovitch makes some interesting observations about citizenship, race relations and capitalism, she shies away from spelling out what the story of Jamaican guestworkers tells us about these big themes and issues in American history and how it therefore adds to or perhaps revises existing scholarship.

While the book's lack of engagement with the historiography may alienate many historians, it does make it attractive to scholars from other disciplines, in particular political science and migration studies, and also to lay readers. The human-interest element that Hahamovitch provides in the form of quotes from interviews with H2 workers and letters they sent home, and also her own observations about meetings with Jamaican and other guestworkers, equally make this book interesting to a wide audience. And this, along with its broad scope and meticulous research, helps to explain why it has already won three distinguished prizes (the Philip Taft Labor History Award and the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Award and James A. Rawley Prize).

But although the book suffers, in my opinion, from too much description and too little analysis, it does succeed in conveying some uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that in Jamaica and other parts of the world guestworker programmes have served and still serve as a substitute for or a supplement to foreign aid. In 2006, for instance, labour migrants sent home about $300 billion; that is, “nearly three times the world's foreign aid budgets combined” (235). And it also makes readers question whether these programmes should continue, and if so in what form. Hahamovitch rules out reform of the American guestworker schemes because of a weak trade union movement and the power of “Big Agriculture” and proposes instead that unskilled and low-wage labour should receive priority on the immigration preference list because, without a path to legalization, guestworkers “lack the political power necessary to enforce their basic rights” (242).

The first Obama administration tried to protect the rights of guestworkers by revising the rules for the H2 programme. Shortly after his election victory, the President announced that he would introduce a new immigration bill. Considering the debate about migration in the presidential election it is unlikely, however, that this bill will embrace Hahamovitch's proposal to move unskilled labour up the migration preference list. As many Americans continue to see guestwork as an antidote to “the evil” of illegal immigration, it will instead be more a matter of if than of when the US will abolish the H2 guestworker programme.

No Man's Land is an impressive comparative project that shifts seamlessly between broad and telescopic focus on the transnational figure of the guestworker, “a quintessentially modern form of international migrant” (2) whose systematic exploitation testifies to the latent survival of an indentured labor system reminiscent of the one that replaced slavery in the nineteenth century. Hahamovitch's main thesis is that deportability is the single most important factor in the control employers and governments were able to exercise over these individuals, control that was eventually consolidated by private companies attempting to undermine local workers' efforts to improve working conditions. One of the many strengths of the book is Hahamovitch's simultaneous attention to specificity, to the particular conditions that enabled and perpetuated guestworker schemes in various nations over several decades, and to the broad-spectrum homogeneity of these programs. (By this I mean the repetition of the same products worldwide, and the pervasiveness of single industries, like sugar, across nations and regions.) Hahamovitch's attention to transnational flows of people and products (and people as products), including her attention to American history through its interactions with its neighboring nations, underscores the ways in which modern American culture and commerce was constituted from the outside and, ultimately, offers a way of envisioning the region in terms of its incorporation of the very things it tries to exclude.

Tracing the history of Jamaican guestworkers in the USA, Hahamovitch integrates the parallel stories of the Mexican Bracero program, the Cuban Revolution and the transition in global sugar production, and twentieth-century American immigration and labor history, among other things. The main focus, however, is the development of the H2 program, whose prehistory as a wartime agricultural guestworker program belies the primary goal of “undermining both domestic and foreign workers' militancy” (68). This story, which features first-hand testimonies from former participants in the mid-century Jamaican guestworker program, is set against a broader narrative about the paradoxes of capitalism's development. At the end of the nineteenth century, Hahamovitch points out, capitalism engenders mobility by way of new transportation technologies and networks. Mobility enables immigration; the immigration industry, with its new modes of documentation and classification, systematizes and produces nationalism; immigration stimulates anti-immigrant sentiment; which in turn discursively constitutes the nation and the citizen. Early twentieth-century guestworker programs across the world emerge from these contradictions, from a newly formed dialectic of self and other, insider and outsider, and from the tension between emergent xenophobia and the urge to maximize wartime production.

Through this transnational narrative, Hahamovitch highlights an important paradox in Caribbean and postcolonial studies: No Man's Land emphasizes the migratory flows that undermine any sense of the nation-state as impermeable and homogeneous, while at the same time it depicts the ways in which twentieth-century history reinscribed colonial-era frameworks like the nation, slavery, indenture, and the idea of the isolated Caribbean island. Against the imperialist differentiation of the region, major contemporary poets and novelists from the Caribbean like Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott have attempted to recuperate a sense of connectivity between the islands based on a shared history of diaspora, errantry, and exile. No Man's Land locates that differentiation not in the early centuries of European colonialism in the Caribbean but in the years immediately leading up to decolonization. The US guestworker programs, she suggests, further differentiate the region into distinct units, putting individual islands in competition for miserable yet highly coveted farm jobs in the USA. In this regard, the book could have included more on how American neo-imperialism has shaped the Caribbean region. There is no sustained discussion of the 1958 West Indian Federation, which failed just a few years later, and which, some scholars have suggested, never had a chance because of the neocolonial perpetuation of competition between the individual island nations. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to suggest that the failure of British West Indian nations to consolidate their bargaining power in 1951 was an eerie precursor to the failed federation. However, where Hahamovitch's work does excel is in its meticulously detailed portrayal of the continued transmutation of the Caribbean geographical region into an economic sphere.

At the center of this economic sphere is the reduction of an international black labor force to a nationless commodity in itself. Hahamovitch's account of the Caribbean guestworker as someone who exists “in a no man's land between nations” (2) subtly frames the figure of the domestic mid-twentieth-century black worker in a similar way. Though the discussion of African American workers' experiences is not the major focus of No Man's Land, Hahamovitch implicitly suggests that African American farmworkers occupy a correspondingly liminal space, one that radically circumscribed their ability to contest their own marginalization. What allowed the southern Florida guestworker programs to emerge in the first place, Hahamovitch argues, is not a dearth of domestic labor but a racist ideology that framed black workers as undifferentiated and exchangeable. From chapter 2 through chapter 5, Hahamovitch masterfully explains this dynamic of exchange: how poor African American workers' demands for improved wages and working conditions were undermined by the growers' ability to import other black laborers, first from the Bahamas and then later from Jamaica and other British West Indian colonies; and how attempts by black American workers to strike, protest, or otherwise mobilize were systematically undercut by industrial lobbyists who recast their resistance as laziness or incompetence as opposed to deliberate and politicized defiance.

Hahamovitch's account of this phenomenon serves as an important counternarrative to the way black workers were discursively produced by the mid-century media. At one point, Hahamovitch cites a general manager of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, who in 1952 called some workers “temperamentally unfit or emotionally unstable” (106), recoding concrete attempts to protest dire working conditions as mere “trouble-making.” In this way, her focus on guestworkers registers the effects on African American labourers, whose efforts at self-advocacy were thwarted by a system that maintained their interchangeability with other black laborers of the world while simultaneously undermining any possibility of unity. The division of labor, the segmentation of both production and the workforce itself, ensured that groups with common interests were divided and that unified attempts at change were foreclosed before they could begin to occur.

What emerges from Hahamovitch's account is a complex geopolitical network in which contemporary practice is indivisible from colonial legacy. Twentieth-century agricultural practice appears as an iteration of nineteenth-century colonialism; labor practices are linked to the prevalence of indentureship in the nineteenth-century British Empire. In this way the book involves a series of haunting historical echoes and reechoes. Fundamentally, though, the focus on repeated transnational currents and interregional exchange is also the history of capital that inextricably links these nations. The discussion of the transnational sugar industry exemplifies this connection and reiteration because of the way “Big Sugar” keeps returning throughout the narrative. From 1943 through the 1990s, Hahamovitch points out, Florida's sugar industry was the largest employer of H2 guestworkers. In the early phases of the postwar guestworker program, lobbyists for US Sugar played an integral role in getting the program extended and privatized, eliminating US government control and regulations. In some ways, and though it doesn't focus solely on sugar, Hahamovitch's book is an excellent companion text to Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986) and Fernando Ortiz's seminal Cuban Counterpoint, originally published in 1940, the beginning of the time period to which Hahamovitch devotes the most attention. Mintz's book featured a study of a single commodity; Hahamovitch's is a story of a singular form of labor. If Sweetness and Power accounted for the global transition from agrarian to industrial production, No Man's Land offers a detailed study of the aftermath that cannot shake its legacy.

In a book focussed on historical reiteration – the resurgence of nineteenth-century indentured servitude on twentieth-century American farms, the transfiguration of slavery's whip into guestwork's deportation – sugar emerges as a powerful material and figurative trope. The centrality of the sugar industry to the development of the guestworker program in the USA evokes that centrality in the whole apparatus of the transatlantic slave trade. Part of what makes Hahamovitch's writing so gripping is the way it is infused with a sense of secrecy and urgency regarding this pervasive industry. In the introduction, Hahamovitch recounts how US Sugar responded to her requests for interviews and corporate records by sending “a little white pamphlet with gold lettering on the cover that touted the miracle of sugar production in the Everglades” (10). The irony of this document resides in its fairytale discourse of miraculous production, a narrative that erases both the human cost of performing “the worst job in the world” and the ecological violence of the draining of the Everglades which forms the invisible backdrop of Hahamovitch's chapters on Florida agriculture. As I reread this section I was struck by the perhaps unwittingly figurative invocation of “white gold” in the propagandistic document Hahamovitch described, white with gold lettering. “White gold,” of course, refers to a common imperial description of sugar itself, and I couldn't help but think of the document Hahamovitch described as an extension to this mythology. The white-and-gold-washing of the story of the means of sugar production – the transmutation of the global history of sugar and its concomitant forms of slavery into the “miracle of sugar production in the Everglades” – testifies to an open secret Hahamovitch has thoroughly and compellingly divulged.

The short tenth chapter offers a suggestive coda about the contemporary persistence of guestworker programs, in which early abuses are perpetuated in new ways. Though Hahamovitch's discussion of the gendered “maid trade” could be expanded, her survey-like glance at global guestworker schemes at the turn of the twenty-first century evinces that logic of the open secret in a haunting manner that adeptly sets up the book's conclusion. In these final pages, No Man's Land evokes a host of new but uncanny injustices: the rise of for-profit recruitment agencies that locate and manage workers, illegally denying wages and claiming nonexistent taxes; companies that falsely promise US green cards; systematic silence regarding individual rights violations due to the consistent threat of deportation; a company fined again and again by the Labor Department for revoking wages, but still granted its requests for more guestworkers. The pervasiveness of these practices is offset by their discursive invisibility. Present in the hundreds of millions of real bodies, and extant in the hundreds of billions of dollars they send home, guestworkers and the conditions under which they migrate and work are obscured in national narratives and archives.

Early in the book, Hahamovitch makes reference to this deficiency, claiming, “It's sad to say that I now have more records of the Ministry of Labour in my attic than Jamaica has in its National Archives” (10). In the same section, she mentions an interview with an anonymous official from the Jamaican Ministry of Labor who claimed that the ministry burned documents that were ostensibly incriminating. When Hahamovitch suggests that “one can only presume that the Ministry's bonfires were meant to shield the workings of the agency from inquiring minds like mine” (10), her writing bears the hint of conspiracy theory. Of course, one of the great strengths of No Man's Land – even in instances of conspiratorial revelation like this – is that it isn't at all about a grand secret not already exposed. It is not about a grand conspiracy, even though the account Hahamovitch gives has all the elements of one: old allegiances, backroom lobbying, the perpetuation of slavery post-emancipation (indeed, into the twenty-first century), governmental exploitation of the least empowered individuals for political gain. No Man's Land reveals all of those things, but what is most unnerving about the revelation is the way exceptional events are so clearly the rule, the way the conventional elements of conspiracy are systematically, institutionally, continually practiced.