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Chapter 6 focuses on another price of China’s economic development: the poverty of rights for migrant laborers since 1978. While their poverty of rights is seen in the deprivation of their free migration rights, reinforced by institutional discrimination, this chapter emphasizes migrant laborers’ poverty of rights related to their ability to own independent urban dwellings and seek urban employment and education. The chapter concludes that Chinese migrant laborers and their children are experiencing an identity crisis that is destructive to China’s dual urban-rural socioeconomic structures.

This chapter presents a structural-environmental model of alcohol-related sexual HIV risk and prevention in Latino migrant day laborers (LMDLs). That is, the structural vulnerability of LMDLs to HIV, problem drinking, and many other psychosocial and health problems are theorized as rooted in the harsh living and working conditions that are reproduced for day labor in America (i.e., poverty, prolonged separation from family and country of origin, loneliness and isolation, stigma). Thus HIV prevention should involve scaling up community and cultural resources that help to mitigate such structural vulnerability, and help individuals cope more effectively with the risky environments and situations they frequently encounter. Chapter 1 serves as an overriding frame for subsequent book chapters, each of which considers where it stands in relation to a structural-environmental model of HIV risk and prevention in U.S. Latinos.

This chapter examines the link between new work opportunities, managerial paradigms, collective bargaining, and organized labour supply in India. Between 1800 and 1920, millions of people deserted their homes and jobs to find employment opportunities in new enterprises inside India and overseas. The employment of wage workers increased dramatically in scale and diversity during the colonial period. In the nineteenth century, migrant labourers formed nothing like a traditional social unit and were predominantly males who had left their families and villages behind. Migrant labourers formed teams in the plantations and textile factories around headmen, and this team concept was used by the employers to introduce supervision and training. This transformation is analysed by focusing on four case studies — eighteenth-century port cities, indentured workers to Mauritius in the early nineteenth century, Assam tea workers in the late nineteenth century, and cotton mill labourers in Bombay in the interwar period.

This chapter takes the idea of housing outside the realm of private dwellings to explore the migration of thousands of laborers out of India's largest and wealthiest cities during the early days of lockdown. It discusses how the laborers walked, sometimes thousands of kilometers, back to their home villages because lockdown meant that their ability to earn livelihoods in the city had abruptly come to a halt. It refers to precarity that was exacerbated by the withdrawal of the state in providing assistance to the laborers, generating liminal spaces of dwelling, governance, and citizenship. The chapter argues that the Covid-19 pandemic generated new forms of dispossession and vulnerability for migrant laborers. It elaborates how the laborers inhabited a state of both social and spatial liminality as they moved from their homes to their native villages.

This chapter focuses on migrant labourers. Here, millions of humble Londoners from Europe and other parts of the world have formed the backbone, skeleton, and flesh and blood of the city's life. It shows how the concept of cheap labour, associated not only with sugar bakers but, more especially, with Jewish ‘sweaters’, arose especially in clothing, shoe, and hat and cap manufacture in the East End before 1914. Cheap labour offers one explanation for the evolution of the concentrations of ethnic labour because, for example, the sugar bakers actually formed part of a migrant employment network, which brought Germans from Hanover in particular to work in this occupation. These networks have characterized numerous other migrant occupations in the metropolis, from German governesses to Irish builders and West Indian bus drivers.

This chapter highlights the long history of the African presence in Guatemala and provides a context for understanding relations between black migrant laborers and Guatemalan nationals on the Caribbean coast. It begins with an overview of Spanish attitudes toward blacks and mulattoes in the colonial period, before moving on to discuss how Guatemalan politics and economic priorities in the national period created a need for foreign involvement in railroad development, as well as foreign laborers to build the railroads. Subsequent sections of the chapter discuss how black laborers from Jamaica and the United States were recruited, as well as the tradition of labor radicalism that some Southern black workers brought to Guatemala with them.

This chapter retraces the trajectories of foreign-born men, women, and children driven out of their homelands and directed into French factories and fields by employers and labor recruitment organizations before, during, and after the Great War. It follows immigrants to the two lively melting-pot neighborhoods in Paris where they settled in greatest numbers between the wars and into the Occupation. It also looks at the lived experience of immigrants that observed how gender, marriage, and family that shaped the ways migrants moved through provincial France in search of work. The chapter discusses France's northern, eastern, and southern departments that drew large numbers of seasonal border migrants from Belgium, Italy, and Spain. It refers to migrant laborers that concentrated in mining areas of the Pas-de-Calais region after the war, as well as large city centers like Marseille or Lyon and its industrial peripheries.

Continuing the investigation into the economic incorporation and political exclusion of Palestinians, Chapter 14 analyzes the 2007 High Court ruling (the Givat Zeev case) which asserted the right of Palestinians employed by Israelis to benefit from the frameworks and protections granted all Israeli workers. This is viewed as the expansion of Israel’s judicial authority outside its official borders, but at the same time the national borders of the (Jewish) political community are guarded as diligently as ever, as reflected in Israel’s relation to “Arabs” and in its zigzagging migrant labor policies. However, the state makes great effort to integrate Palestinian citizens into the workforce, fearing the growth of “unproductive” populations. The chapter asserts that East Jerusalem Palestinians epitomize politically excluded labor: Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem left them caught between physical inclusion and precarious employment, and a political exclusion far more ostentatious than that endured by Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

This chapter considers the significance of the history of black migrant laborers in Guatemala and their place in the coastal workforce. For the freedmen who started immigrating as early as 1853, travel to Guatemala represented an escape from the white racist-controlled Jim Crow U.S. South and the French and British colonial Caribbean. Labor recruiters spread the word that Guatemala was “the next Booming Country,” where “White and Colored Laborers” could work for the railroad, save enough money to buy land, and become rich off of the turn-of-the-century frenzy for cultivating and selling bananas on the international market. For some, immigration to Guatemala provided an opportunity to purchase property and pursue entrepreneurial ambitions that would have been hard to achieve in the economically depressed and politically repressive regions the immigrants came from. But the effect of immigration on the history of Guatemala was even more profound, as migrant and Latin American laborers' militancy, though largely unsuccessful, paved the way for the struggles of later workers and permanently transformed the culture of Caribbean Guatemala.

The chapter examines the intertwined movement of indigenous letters and bodies in the March to the East. In an array of letters Andeans demanded they take part in colonization in the 1950s and then denounced its shortcomings in the following decade. The chapter follows their petitions as they traveled from highland hamlets and humid settlement zones to the halls of government. Letters produced in the Andes in the 1950s and 1960s painted a provocative portrait of desperate situations in home communities with the promise and allure of the tropical environment of the lowlands. Writers attempted to shame the state by emphasizing their struggles as migrant laborers or braceros in neighboring Argentina and demanded land as part of the state’s commitments to its own revolutionary legacy. Along the lowland frontier, the reality of colonization failed to match the harmonious human experiment depicted in state propaganda. Government officials blamed a high rate of settler abandonment in new colonization zones on the “backwards” cultural practices of Indigenous migrants. Settlers flung this accusation back on the state, claiming that the MNR had abandoned them. Each group would cast failure as the justification for new rounds of intervention or radicalism in the following decades.

This chapter analyzes debates around agricultural development, race, and sanitation in the Panama Canal Zone. When the waterway opened, the Zone was largely rural and roadless. US canal administrators’ plans for the hundreds of square miles of territory not immediately necessary for transportation or residential purposes became a point of political tension. The Zone’s rural question—how to manage landscapes depopulated by the US government—had implications beyond land use, per se. Among Panamanians, it raised concerns about the scope of US ambitions on the isthmus. Were administrators simply operating a canal or constructing an autonomous imperial enclave? The question of howto use rural lands implied a secondquestion: Who, if anyone, shouldusethem? The chapter examines a Canal Zone program that permitted former canal laborers—primarily black West Indian migrants—to leaseland for farming. The contentious policy precipitated abanana boom in the enclave.

This chapter examines the growth of a large marginalized, often migratory, workforce that was systematically disempowered by growers and government: the farmworkers. The modernization and professionalization of agriculture reshaped many farm owners’ thinking about labor and production. Beginning in the twentieth century, multitudes of migrant laborers shouldered the burden of work on large farms that used to be handled by families and local hired hands. This chapter considers how farm owners, acting in concert with the government, denied farmworkers political power in order to maintain a cheap and plentiful supply of agricultural labor. It argues that farmworkers, who acted as the “hidden” hands of the harvest, fell out of view of the public eye and did not benefit from the protection of the growing body of labor laws introduced in the mid-twentieth century. It shows how farmworkers sought allies outside of the agricultural industry in their pesticide reform campaigns.

This chapter studies migrant delivery workers in Dubai, who are predominantly male and from the Indian subcontinent, performing tasks that others do not want to do. It mentions how the delivery workers put their own health at risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to make a living and keep much-needed supplies delivered to more affluent residents who were able to remain at home. It also argues that the pandemic magnified existing socio-economic divides and put them on full display, noting vulnerable migrant-laborers had no option but to continue working at a time of great uncertainty. The chapter sheds some light on migration and urban inequality in the Gulf. It highlights the added pressures of the pandemic as it disproportionately impacts the lower-income segments within Dubai.

This chapter reflects on the experiences of the authors during a combined three decades of research in Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh, highlighting their shifting and contingent subject positions as they moved through urban spaces in the Arabian Peninsula and interacted with various interlocutors during their dissertation research. It examines how prevalent ideas about identity in North American and European societies, which have heavily influenced postcolonial and postmodern anthropological attempts to be more inclusive and attentive to subject position, are also forms of baggage that academics bring to the field. The chapter draws on feminist and postcolonial traditions of reflexive ethnography that have deconstructed the figure of the social scientist as a neutral and unmarked observer. It also looks at the production of the Gulf expat as a symbolic field in which imperial histories, concepts of race, neoliberal urban development, and nationalism intersect. By exploring the role of Gulf expats as both migrant laborers and participants in labor exploitation and class hierarchy, the chapter encourages an approach to labor and migration in the Gulf that highlights the region's connection to global networks rather than one that reproduces tropes of its supposed exceptionalism.

Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is about the plight of an illiterate Filipino field worker in Depression-era California going deeper and deeper into debt in order to woo a white American woman. This chapter argues that the story and its contemporary staged adaptation powerfully subvert accumulative values while also introducing a Filipino American alternative economy based on reciprocity and non-accumulation. The illiterate character Magno Rubio shows us how to read.

This chapter examines the plight of Mexican male workers in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Although the use of migrant labor drew heavy criticism and scapegoating from some of the city’s politicians and residents, the overarching narratives of the disaster and their emphasis on anti-black workplace discrimination rendered Latinos invisible—both long-time Latino residents, namely the region’s large Honduran population, who were displaced by the hurricane, and the phalanx of migrant laborers who took up much of the immediate post-disaster clean-up and rebuilding work. Drawing on a wealth of fieldwork in the New Orleans metropolitan area, the chapter considers the dramatic rise in workplace injury, illness, and fatalities among the Latino workers and presents an empirical portrait of labor conditions, particularly in the construction industry, in post-disaster New Orleans. It also discusses the impacts of neoliberal politics on the most dispossessed and marginalized and, as such, provides a unique vantage point from which to contemplate the possibility of more egalitarian modes of economy, urban living, and democratic society.