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This book examines the impact of globalization—and of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in particular—on the North American poultry industry, focusing on the displacement of African American workers in the southeast United States and workers in Mexico. The book documents how the transformation of U.S. poultry production in the 1980s increased its export capacity and changed the nature and consequences of labor conflict. It documents how globalization, and especially NAFTA, forced Mexico to open its commodity and capital markets, and eliminate state support of corporations and rural smallholders. As a consequence, many Mexicans were forced to abandon their no-longer-sustainable small farms, with some seeking work in industrialized poultry factories north of the border. By following this trail, the book breaks through the deadlocked immigration debate, highlighting the broader economic and political contexts of immigration flows. The narrative that undocumented workers take jobs that Americans don't want to do is too simplistic. The book argues instead that illegal immigration is better understood as a labor story in which the hiring of undocumented workers is part of a management response to the crises of profit making and labor-management conflict. The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the implications of globalization for labor and how the externalities of free trade and neoliberalism become the social problems of nations and the tragedies of individuals.

This book goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor standards apply to all workers, yet this principle clashes with increasingly restrictive immigration laws and creates a confusing bureaucratic terrain for local policymakers and labor advocates. The book examines this issue in two of the largest immigrant gateways in the country: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas. The book reveals two cities with very different approaches to addressing the exploitation of immigrant workers—both involving the strategic coordination of a range of bureaucratic brokers, but in strikingly different ways. Drawing on the real-life accounts of ordinary workers, federal, state, and local government officials, community organizers, and consular staff, the book argues that local political contexts matter for protecting undocumented workers in particular. Providing a rich description of the bureaucratic minefields of labor law, and the explosive politics of immigrant rights, the book shows how the lessons learned from San Jose and Houston can inform models for upholding labor and human rights in the United States.

Government bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cultural diversity within their populations. Using culture as a category to process people and dispense services, however, can create its own problems and unintended consequences. This book investigates how and when the categories “cultural” and “acultural” become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations. In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan migrants are minor minorities in an ethnic constellation dominated by other minority groups. As a result, they often find themselves in contexts where the challenge is not to establish the terms of the debate but to rewrite them. To navigate complicated and often unyielding bureaucracies, they must become skilled in what the book calls “reflexive engagement” with the multiple social orders they inhabit. Those who are successful are able to parlay their own cultural expertise (their “Samoanness”) into an ability to subtly alter the institutions with which they interact in their everyday lives. Just as the “cultural” is sometimes constrained by the forces exerted by acultural institutions, so too can migrant culture reshape the bureaucracies of their new countries. This book contributes significantly to our understanding of the modern immigrant experience of making homes abroad.

For Mexicans on both sides of the border, the migrant experience has changed significantly over the past two decades. This book draws on the experiences of indigenous people from a region in the Mexican state of Guerrero to explore the impact of this transformation on the lives of migrants. When handicraft production was able to provide a viable alternative to agricultural labor, most migrants would travel to other parts of Mexico to sell their wares. Others opted to work for wages in the United States, returning to Mexico on a regular basis. This is no longer the case. At first almost everyone, including former craft vendors, headed north; however it also became more difficult to go back home and then re-enter the United States. One migrant laments, “Before I was an artisan and free to travel all over Mexico to sell my crafts. Here we are all locked in a box and cannot get out.” NAFTA, migrant labor legislation, and more stringent border controls have all affected migrants' home communities, their relations with employers, their livelihoods, and their identity and customs. The book traces the personal lives and careers of indigenous men and women on both sides of the border. It finds that the most pressing issue facing undocumented workers is not that they are unable to earn enough money but, rather, that they are living in a state of ongoing uncertainty and will never be able to achieve their full potential. Through these stories, the book offers a nuanced understanding of the predicaments undocumented workers face and the importance of the ongoing debate around immigration policy.