Guest Workers, Temporary Labor & the Future of American Immigration

In America, more than any other place in the world, guest workers are used to lower labor costs under the guise of filling shortages for substandard or scarce skilled jobs. Immanuel Ness shows migration’s influence in weakening wages and working conditions in countries that send and receive guest workers. His in-depth case studies of hospitality workers from India and Jamaica not only reveal how these programs expose guest workers to employers’ abuses but also detail how organized labor ought to protect the interests of migrant and US-born workers alike. Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He has published scholarly books and monographs on unemployment, precarious labor, migration and guest work, syndicalism, and new worker organizations.

This event is sponsored by the Forum on Migration and Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race as part of the Migration, Race, and Ethnicity lecture series.