From South Africa within the 19th century to Hong Kong at the present time, countries worldwide, together with the U.S., have became to guestworker courses to regulate migration. those transitority exertions recruitment platforms represented a state-brokered compromise among employers who sought after international employees and those that feared emerging numbers of immigrants. not like immigrants, guestworkers could not settle, deliver their households, or turn into voters, they usually had few rights. certainly, rather than making a potential type of migration, guestworker courses created a particularly susceptible category of labor.

in keeping with an enormous array of resources from united states, Jamaican, and English documents, in addition to interviews, No Man's Land tells the historical past of the yankee "H2" software, the world's moment oldest guestworker application. for the reason that international warfare II, the H2 software has introduced thousands of in most cases Jamaican males to the U.S. to perform a little of the nation's dirtiest and most threatening farmwork for a few of its largest and strongest agricultural organisations, businesses that had the facility to import and deport employees from in another country. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land among international locations, secure neither by way of their domestic executive nor through the USA. the staff complained, went on strike, and sued their employers at school motion court cases, yet their protests had little influence simply because they can be repatriated and changed in an issue of hours.

No Man's Land places Jamaican guestworkers' reports within the context of the worldwide background of this fast-growing and dangerous kind of hard work migration.