ABSTRACT
In this chapter we document the experience of migration into the US Virgin Islands (USVI) during the period 1917 to the present, as well as the social processes and friction that derived from the experience of massive labor migration to supply the tourism industry. We then compare those experiences of migration in the USVI to global trends in migration patterns, as documented by migration scholars like Stephen Castles, Michael Douglass, Aihwa Ong and Ronald Skeldon. 2 This comparison is done in an attempt to argue that neoliberal strategies for controlling labor migration were present in the Caribbean long before it started to become ‘global’. The Caribbean was the place where many of these neoliberal practices where first put to the test, before they were exported elsewhere. In fact, we propose that we view contemporary patterns of migration as part of a broader process that we could call, metaphorically at least, a process of the ‘Caribbeanization of the world’.
