Imported Labor in the U.S.: A Symposium on Guestworker Programs

and Foreign Contract Labor

Reading Materials

  1. Foreign Contract Labor - 1860 to 1941: Chinese “coolies” and Italian contract laborers and their Padrones.
  • Patricia Cloud and David W. Galenson, Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century, Explorations in Econ. History 24, 22-42 (1987).
  • Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Immigrant Padrones and Contract Laborers in North America, 1885-1925, The Journal of Am. History, 848-871 (December 1996).
  1. The Bracero Program, 1942-1964
  • Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (San Jose: The Rosicrucian Press, 1964).
  • Rigoberto Garcia Perez, The Story of a Bracero, Interviewed by David Bacon.
  • Manuel Garcia y Griego, The Bracero Program, inMigration Between Mexico and the United States - Binational Study (Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US Commission on Immigration Reform, 1998).
  • Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America Series (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004).
  1. The H-2A temporary foreign agricultural worker program
  • Human Rights Watch, Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards, (2000), p. 151.
  • Cindy Hahamovitch, “In America Life is Given Away”: Jamaican Farmworkers and the Making of Agricultural Immigration Policy, inThe Countryside in the Age of the ModernState: Political Histories of Rural America, 134-160 (Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert Johnson, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
  • Leah Beth Ward, Thai Farm Workers Seek Equity in Strange Land, Yakima Herald-Republic, October 9, 2005.
  1. The H-2B temporary foreign non-agricultural worker program
  • CRS Report RL32044, Immigration: Policy Considerations Related to Guest Worker Programs, by Andorra Bruno, updated April 8, 2005.
  • Steven Greenhouse, Migrants Plant Pine Trees but Often Pocket Peanuts, N.Y. Times, February 14, 2001.
  • Pamela Stallsmith, Foreign ‘Guests’ Work; Does the Program?, Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 10, 2003, at A1.
  1. The H-1B program
  • CRS Report RL 30498, Immigration: Legislative Issues on Nonimmigrant Professional Specialty (H-1B) Workers, by Ruth Ellen Wassem, Updated January 19, 2005.
  • GAO/HEHS-00-157, H-1B Foreign Workers: Better Controls Needed to Help Employers and Protect Workers, September 2000.
  • GAO-03-883, H-1B Foreign Workers: Better Tracking Needed to Help Determine H-1B Programs’ Effects on U.S. Workforce, September 2003.
  • William Branigin, High Tech’s Hired Hands: Critics Say Visa Program, Immigrants Exploited, Wash. Post, July 26, 1998.
  • Gary Cohn and Walter F. Roche, Indentured Servants for High-Tech Trade Labor: For a Rich Fee, Companies Called "Body Shops" Supply Waves of Unwitting Immigrants to the Nation's Computer Industry, Baltimore Sun, Feb. 21, 2000.
  • Mitra Kalita, Immigrant Wives’ Visa Status Keeps Them Out of Workplace, Wash. Post, October 3, 2005, at A01.
  1. Suggested further reading
  • Calavita, Kitty. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS, 1992, Routledge
  • Chan, Sucheng, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910
  • Craig, Richard B. The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy, 1971, U. Texas Press
  • Daniel, Cletus. Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers 1870-1941, 1981, CornellU. Press
  • Daniel, Pete. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969, 1972, U.Ill. Press
  • Galarza, Ernesto. Farm Workers and Agribusiness in California 1947-1960, 1977 U.Notre Dame Press
  • Galarza, Ernesto. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story,1964, Rosicrucian Press (a classic)
  • Gamboa, Erasmo. Mexican Labor and World War II : Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942-1947, 2000, Columbia Classics reissue
  • Hahamovitch, Cindy. The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty 1870-1945, 1997, UNC Press
  • Hahamovitch, Cindy.Creating Perfect Immigrants: Guestworkers of the World in Historical Perspective, Labor History, Vol. 44, No. 1, (January 2003): 69-94
  • Herrera-Sobek, Maria. The Bracero Experience : Elitelore Versus Folklore, 1979 & 1987, UCLA Latin American Studies V 43
  • Lowell, Lindsay B. (ed.), Temporary Migrants in the United States, U.S.Commission on Immigration Reform (1996).
  • Ward, Leah Beth, Desperate Harvest, a three-part series on the H-2A program in the Charlotte Observer, October 30-Nov. 1, 1999.
  • Wilkinson, Alec. Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida, 1989, Alfred A. Knopf (originally in New Yorker magazine; won RFK Memorial Book Award)