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This chapter analyzes the imperative of worker subordination as it plays out in worker-guest interactions and relationships. Building on the finding that guests treat workers quite well, the chapter shows that workers adhere to and enforce an implicit contract according to which their labors entitle them to emotional and financial reciprocity from guests. When guests fail to meet workers' expectations, however, workers limit their own self-subordination in both practical and symbolic ways. Guests likewise articulate a sense of contract, describing their own rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis workers. In part, their reciprocal behavior stems from the generalized social norm of reciprocity, but it also arises from expectations constructed in the hotel. These relations are the cornerstone of normalizing guests' entitlement to workers' labor, because both workers and guests endeavor to see themselves as equal individuals.

This chapter investigates the reasons why immigration to Germany continued after the 1973 ban on recruiting guest workers, despite official declarations that Germany was ‘not a country of immigration’. First, judicial decisions supported the right of migrant workers to stay. This was accentuated by further judicial support for family reunification on humanitarian grounds, which was confirmed by legislation in 1990. Finally, the legacy of Nazi‐era guilt has operated to confirm a liberal interpretation of asylum law, which has made Germany the world's major asylum‐granting country.

This chapter argues that the Bracero Program, begun as an international agreement between the US and Mexico to fill agricultural labor shortages during World War II, served as a way for agricultural interests in the rest of the nation to recreate the labor supply conditions enjoyed by the growers of South Texas. As a result, the Bracero Program mobilized large numbers of foreign workers, stripped of their basic rights of choice and mobility, for use all over the country. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but its importance and effects have lasted much longer. This chapter also deals with the overwhelming importance of Texas as both a model and an obstacle to the smooth running of the system throughout its existence. From its inauguration in 1942 as a temporary wartime emergency measure until its quiet demise in 1964, the Bracero Program took the spirit of the deeply unequal labor relations of South Texas and spread them to the rest of the nation as a supposedly rational, necessary response to the exigencies of the agricultural labor market.

This chapter reflects on the difficulties of immigration, both of ethnic Germans and of foreigners, that, be it in the form of guest-workers or asylum seekers, are creating a multiethnic society in the Federal Republic.

This chapter investigates the policy and practice of established U.S. labor unions toward migrant labor and guest workers and provides alternative models for building worker power on a global basis. Organized labor operates at a disadvantage as it typically responds rather than acts as capital changes the nature of work to lower wages. Ideally, a proactive labor movement would shape the nature of work. Therefore, U.S. national labor unions and peak organizations have historically opposed all forms of migration. Most notably, in 1986, national unions were instrumental in shaping the employer-sanction provision in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). However, because legal penalties for hiring undocumented workers are minimal, the law has not deterred employers from hiring them. Furthermore, because minimum wage and hour standards are often unenforced by state and federal government regulatory agencies, undocumented immigrants are frequently more desirable to employers than U.S.-born workers.

Analysis of German immigration policy shows the limits to which immigrants can be assimilated without granting them citizenship. Non‐citizen status becomes especially problematic for second‐ and third‐generation immigrants. This chapter examines the problems of integrating Turkish guest workers, whose situation and status is becoming increasingly relevant as European integration proceeds. The widely held assumption, that Islamization was mostly a phenomenon limited to the first‐generation immigrants, has proved to be mistaken, and the outcome of a clear trend towards nationalist and religious retrenchment among the third‐generation immigrants remains worryingly problematic.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the social, political, and legal dimensions in which the ethnographic study took place by examining: (a) the history of Germany’s recruitment of guest workers and the laws regulating citizenship for guest workers and their descendants; (b) the immigration and integration debates in Germany today, including the recent debate surrounding Sarrazin’s comments on Muslims in Germany; (c) immigrants’ chances of success in the German school system and the formal economy; (d) the crime rates of immigrants in Germany today; and (e) Germany’s current drug laws. It also provides some context about the neighborhood in which the young men lived and where they operated within the drug market.

Western European governments face a dilemma. On the one hand, their immigrant population is growing. On the other hand, the public opposes large-scale immigration and wants to restrict immigrants’ access to social benefits. We argue that in ‘reluctant countries of immigration’ such as France, Germany, and Great Britain, this tension is attenuated by reforms of social and migration policies. Firstly, migration policies are changed to encourage the arrival of ‘desired’ workers, while barriers to entry for ‘undesired’ immigrants are erected. Secondly, immigrant-specific social security schemes are reformed in order to reduce the incentive for immigrants to come in the first place. Finally, immigrants are disproportionately affected by the cutbacks in social security programs since the 1990s. These reforms contribute to the persistence of socio-economic differences between immigrants and citizens despite considerable efforts aimed at integrating the immigrants into their host societies.

This chapter examines the new neoliberal phase of corporate restructuring, which is producing a new foreign workforce that will have even less power than undocumented workers today. The rise of guest worker programs is an integral component of a dramatic shift in the global division of labor, perpetuated through technological advances, which permits corporations to deskill many professional jobs and reduce the number of workers necessary to perform tasks, and relies increasingly on low-skilled labor. In this hostile environment, the working class and organized labor in the United States and throughout the world must search for a means to counter neoliberal reforms that only benefit corporations at the expense of workers everywhere. But unions must reject business as usual and new forms of labor organizations rooted in nonhierarchical structures must emerge to mobilize workers in the United States and throughout the world.

This chapter examines how skilled and semi-skilled guest worker programs contribute to the displacement of workers throughout the U.S. economy. In the future, as migrant labor programs are institutionalized through the World Trade Organization and are viewed as the latest formula for economic development, it is likely that this new commodification of labor will spread into a growing number of labor market sectors, including manufacturing and transportation. At the same time the chapter reveals that while corporate human resource executives view migrant laborers as docile and complacent, a growing number are resorting to collective action in the form of micro organizing, where small groups organize to address the specific problems they face.

This introductory chapter lays out the major themes to be explored in this book, and positions guest workers (as opposed to undocumented migrant workers) at the center of discussion. Ineffectual regulatory policies have bifurcated migrant workers into two groups—undocumented laborers and guest workers. Focusing on guest workers rather than on undocumented laborers foreshadows the potential prospects and pitfalls of the program for foreign workers as well as U.S. nationals, and the potential influence of such a program on the broader labor movement and working class. Moreover, the chapter focuses the U.S. as the world's leading recipient of foreign workers in order to briefly examine the intersection between labor, capital, and government policies in advancing corporate profits.

Chapter 3 sheds light on the efforts to create a transnational labor organization, the National Alliance of Mexican Braceros in the United States. This organization, founded by braceros, initially challenged policy restrictions that prohibited braceros from organizing through unions. However, the subsequent demise of Alianza solidified the growing divide between Mexican and American labor-organizing efforts in the United States. This chapter describes Alianza’s goals and limitations, and explores the organization’s relationship with the prominent labor activist, Ernesto Galarza. Galarza began by working with the Alianza to incorporate guest workers into his American unionizing efforts. However, after he grew frustrated with the Mexican government’s repressive treatment of the Alianza, he changed his tactics from unionizing braceros to working to terminate the Bracero Program itself.

Historically, those societies that have the longest tradition in multicultural policies are settler societies. The question of how to deal with temporary migrants has only recently aroused their interest. In Europe, temporary migration programmes have a much longer history. In the period after WWII, a wide range of legal frameworks were set up to import temporary workers, who came to be known as guest workers. In the end, many of these ‘guests’ settled in Europe permanently. Their presence lay at the basis of European multicultural policies. However, when these policies were drafted, the former mobility of guest workers had been forgotten. This chapter will focus on this mobility of initially temporary workers, comparing the period of economic growth 1945-1974 with the years after the 1974 economic crisis. Further, it will look at the kind of policies that were developed towards guest workers in the era before multiculturalism. This way, it shows how their consideration as temporary residents had far-reaching consequences for the immigrants, their descendants and the receiving societies involved. The chapter will finish by suggesting a number of lessons from the past. If the mobility-gap between guest workers and present-day migrants is not as big as generally assumed, then the consequences of previous neglect should serve as a warning for future policy making.

This chapter examines the effects of global capitalism on India's class divide and economic development. Focusing on the case of Hyderabad, it considers the fate of skilled migrant workers in the information technology industry who stay in India and compares their situation with that of Indian guest workers who travel to the United States to find jobs in the low-wage industrial labor market sectors. It first provides a background on neoliberal reform in India and the country's relationship with the United States in the neoliberal global system. It then considers complicating depictions of the emergence of a globally connected Indian middle class tied to the proliferation of outsourcing. The chapter's analysis of shifting labor markets shows that neoliberal globalization has benefited India's capitalist classes more than the poor and working classes. It also illustrates how dislocation and poverty have forced many South Asian migrants to risk moving to other regions of the world.

This chapter shows how economic instruments can align the rights and obligations of employers and migrants to keep guest worker programs truer to their purpose. It further explains how to minimize the distortion and dependence that are inevitable in guest worker programs, how cooperation can ensure that the exodus of highly skilled migrants does not slow development in countries of origin, and how various policies can protect the rights of migrants. The chapter addresses an important question: “How can guest worker programs be managed so that the inequalities promoting migration narrow over time?” It also proposes that developed nations partially replenish the human capital they have attracted from developing countries by supporting and strengthening primary and secondary schooling systems in migrant countries of origin. For unskilled migrants, the chapter proposes taxes and subsidies to align the rights and duties of employers and migrants.

Labor relations are a paramount consideration in crop agriculture, a labor-intensive industry that is dependent on land. The U.S. government has long regulated the supply of foreign farm labor on behalf of agribusiness, and that role became more critical as the industry restructured itself in the competitive neoliberal climate since the early 1990s. The H2A program, which permits quasi-private labor brokers to import Mexican “guest workers” for seasonal work on U.S. farms, expanded after 1990 into states in the mid-South, which was also experiencing new flows of undocumented immigrants. North Carolina emerged as the state importing the most H2A workers. This chapter draws on the case of the North Carolina Growers Association, the state's large H2A brokerage, to examine the relationship between the neoliberal state and guest workers during the 1990s. It shows that during the 1990s, the North Carolina H2A program morphed into a model of contractual labor relations that represented a case of “government by proxy,” not unlike other public-private partnerships formed in the neoliberal era. In this case, the state delegated responsibility for labor supply manipulation, control of workers, and regulatory oversight directly to private brokers who publicly represented and shared revenue streams with agribusiness growers.

The H-1B visa is a large-scale guest worker program that grants high-skilled foreigners temporary work authorization in the United States. It is an employer-driven program, meaning that an employer must sponsor the H-1B visa for the worker. Further, employers have the discretion to sponsor an H-1B worker for lawful permanent residence. Many policymakers have highlighted sponsorship for permanent residence as a key feature of the H-1B program because it has become a significant source of employment-based permanent immigration for high-skilled foreigners. The paper examines sponsorship for permanent residence by the top H-1B employers, which have received a large share of the visas in recent years. Clear patterns emerge from the data, with some firms sponsoring large shares of H-1B workers for permanent residence, whereas, other firms sponsor few or none of its H-1B workers. Those firms with high rates of permanent resident sponsorship tend to make products, while firms sponsoring at low rates employ an offshore outsourcing business model. Other important patterns emerge. Offshore outsourcing firms tend to pay H-1B workers significantly lower wages, their H-1B workers have lower educational attainment, and the H-1B workers mostly come from one country, India.