Sentenced for the season: Jamaican migrant farmworkers on Okanagan orchards

Despite perfunctory characterisation of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as a ‘triple win’, scholars and activists have long admonished its lack of government oversight, disrespect for migrant rights and indentureship of foreign workers. This article contends that the SAWP is predicated upon naturalised, deeply engrained and degrading beliefs that devalue Black lives and labour. Based on twenty months’ ethnographic fieldwork in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada, it reveals the extent to which anti-Black racism permeates, organises and frustrates workers’ lives on farms and in local communities. It situates such experiences, which workers characterise as ‘prison life’, in the context of anti-Black immigration policy and the workings of racial capitalism. This ethnography of Caribbean migrants not only adds perspective to scholarship hitherto focused on the experiences of Latino workers, but it also reinforces critical work on anti-Black racism in contemporary Canada.

Black Immigrants and the Changing Portrait of Black America

I review the literature on the social integration of black immigrants residing in the United States between 1910 and 2018, with the goal of highlighting how the growth of the black immigrant population has complicated the scholarly understanding of the causes and consequences of both intraracial disparities among blacks and disparities between blacks and whites in the United States. The article comprises three substantive sections. First, I examine the changing birth-country composition of the black immigrant population that arrived in the United States from 1900 to 1930 and review the literature on the social integration of black immigrants during the early twentieth century. Second, I review the literature that demonstrates how selective migration and disparate pre-1965 histories have shaped contemporary disparities between black immigrants and black Americans. Third, I discuss the implications of black immigration for understanding the evolution of racial disparities in the twenty-first century.

The Making of a Liverpool Community: An Elusive Narrative

Tracing the black presence in Liverpool, the oldest black community in Europe, is the subject of this chapter by Ray Costello. He begins by recounting and dispelling the ‘Windrush myth’—a misconception that the arrival of nearly 500 Jamaican workers on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 was the beginning of the history of black settlers in Britain. Instead, black communities had existed in Britain for at least five centuries with Liverpool having the most continuous presence including enslaved black servants, freed slaves, sailors, children of African royalty attending school, and free Black Loyalists from the Americas. Costello describes the diverse backgrounds, cultures and languages of black settlers in Liverpool following each of Britain’s wars which obscured the true age of the community and perpetuated a view of local blacks as exotic foreigners. The failure to recognize the age and Britishness of an established black Liverpudlian population, Costello fears, preserves a belief in the recency of black immigration promotes the idea that assimilation and acculturation are the keys to integration and racial equity.

Testing the Limits of Postwar Reform

This chapter charts the formal repeal of Asian exclusion from the vantage point of the Japanese American Citizens League and of other Americans involved in the postwar campaigns that culminated in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Generally known as a Cold War measure, the law’s lesser known provisions formally ended Asian exclusion as a feature of U.S. immigration and naturalization policy. But a “colonial quota” amendment spurred protest by African and Afro-Caribbean American activists, who denounced it as an underhanded attempt by racist lawmakers to end black immigration from the Caribbean. This little-known episode of black-Japanese conflict problematizes an easy analogy between postwar legislative gains for Asian Americans and those for black Americans as wholly complementary developments; to the contrary, it identifies the postwar immigration debates as a site of greater intergroup competition than collaboration.

“A Cross-Fire between Minorities”

This article examines the Japanese American Citizens League’s (JACL) postwar campaign to secure U.S. citizenship eligibility for first-generation Japanese (Issei) as a civil rights effort that brought Japanese Americans into contention with African American and Afro-Caribbean community leaders during the height of the U.S. Cold War in East Asia. At the same time, JACL’s disagreements with Chinese Americans and Japanese American liberals precluded any coherent Japanese or Asian American position on postwar immigration policy. The resulting 1952 McCarran-Walter Act formally ended Asians’ exclusion from U.S. immigration and naturalization, even as a colonial quota in the law severely restricted black immigration from the Caribbean and galvanized black protest. This episode of black-Japanese tension complicates scholarly understandings of the liberalization of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws toward Asian peoples as analogous with or complementary to black civil rights gains in the postwar years. In so doing, it suggests the need to think more critically and historically about the cleavages between immigration and civil rights law, and between immigrant rights and civil rights.

«Black» immigration in Spain

The article deals with the problem of illegal immigration to Spain mainly from subSaharan Africa. It provides an overall perspective of the phenomenon in terms of its origin, development, stimulating factors. «Black» immigration is seen as an internal problem of the state and the phenomenon of international scope. Representatives of different political forces and social movements consider the problem in ambiguous way and there are different ways to solve it, but the question remains open.