That people demarcated by the US government as non-immigrant workers are placed in a ‘vulnerable’ position by virtue of their limited access to the wide range of entitlements and protections that adhere to the notion of US citizenship has long been a tenet of critical scholarship on US immigration history more generally (e.g. Samora 1971; Burawoy 1976; Ngai 2004; Douglas and Saenz 2008), and, more specifically, various US guest worker programs that have been established over the course of the 20th century (Calavita 1992; Hahamovitch 1997; Holley 2001; Rodriguez 2004; Yasseri 2009; Chien 2010). Non-immigrant workers are considered vulnerable here in the sense that, lacking such access, they are more susceptible to exploitation and discrimination from their employers on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, gender, age and so on (Ontiveros 2006; Southern Poverty Law Center 2007; Haynes 2009), and that this can be manifest in physical and emotional pain and distress as well as financial insecurity and penury (Fisk 2002; Gorman 2010). The position of guest workers has even been termed ‘slave-like’ (Ontiveros 2007; Tripathi 2008), insofar as, it is argued, successive US governments have created a cheap yet disposable workforce for the US economy, one that, moreover, is predicated upon, and also normalizes, the notion of the citizen/ non-citizen border on the one hand, and the commodification, reification and mobilization of human labour on the other (Bosniak 1994). The vulnerability of guest workers has also been an intermittent concern

of various state legislators whose prerogative, collectively, is to stipulate the scope and character of these entitlements (utilizing summaries such as Bruno 2007), as well as local, circuit and federal court officials whose remit is to interpret these stipulations. Here, however, such interests have been trumped time and again by a concern to protect either the profitability of US businesses or the ‘right to work’ of domestic labour. This is because while the United States has a long history of liberalization in regard to the opening up of trade barriers and investment fields, there has been no similar, sustained effort to liberalize immigration, which remains firmly tied to the notion of a

territorialized mode of citizenship. As the judicial system seeks to weigh the relative entitlements (and hence vulnerabilities) of US business, US workers and alien workers, this last group is delineated from the outset as ‘other’. More specifically, as Ontiveros (2006) points out, the free market philosophies of ‘freedom of contract’ and ‘employment at will’ that underpin domestic labour relations – wherein an employees main protection comes from the market value of their skills and their capacity to change employers – are not extended to guest worker programs, where it is a fundamental requirement of legal entry and employment that the worker is tied into a contract with one particular employer.1 Aside from which, in a situation wherein guest workers are easily replaceable from across the US-Mexico border, their reproductive costs are largely borne in Mexico, and prevailing wage rates in Mexico are so much lower, such philosophies make even less sense than they do in regard to protecting the domestic workforce. In this chapter, I want to look more closely at one particular legal grouping

of guest workers – the H-2B visa holder – introduced in 1986, and how this has emerged within the broader context of immigration legislation, which has, over the years, sought to negotiate (with varied results) the vulnerabilities of US business, US workers and guest workers. This provides a useful context for understanding the range and scope of entitlements and protections afforded by various legislative regimes, and in particular the relative paucity of stipulated regulations regarding the well-being of H-2B workers. This paucity stands in stark contrast to the wealth of bureaucratic procedures required to accomplish the H-2B hiring process, which make it an especially onerous task for employers and workers, more often than not undertaken under the aegis of specialized immigration lawyers and recruiters. And yet, in doing so, I want to avoid the tendency, common in many

accounts of the vulnerability of guest workers cited above, of reading the state as a monolithic entity that, via the passage of legislation, reaches down into the lives of individuals and fully disciplines their conditions for being. In positing the state as existing at some transcendent level, an appreciation of the context within which legislation is proposed, debated, passed, disseminated and enacted upon – what has elsewhere been termed the geographies of legislative discourse (Dixon and Hapke 2003) – is lost. While such analyzes, correctly, draw attention to the seemingly infinite array of state rules and regulations pertaining to the status of guest workers, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of ‘border control’ that animates them, they also gloss over the differential practices via which these are recognized, interpreted and responded to. The cumulative impression such literature affords is of an abstract yet allpowerful state that exists at the ‘national’ scale, over and against ‘localized’ and vulnerable workers, who embody suffering but no other active agency. In contrast, my own approach is predicated upon a feminist geopolitics,

and in particular what has been termed by geographer Cindi Katz a ‘countertopography’ that uses, as an entry point for analysis, the bodies of those

at the ‘sharp end’ of various forms of international activity, from trade to development to warfare (Katz 2001). A mathematical topology draws a series of lines between elements of a network; no matter the distortion placed upon the ensuing shape, these lines remain unbroken. In its geographic incarnation, however, topography refers to the in-depth study of a site as it changes over time and, as Katz points out, these studies have, traditionally, been integral to the orderly enumeration and mapping of people alongside other useful resources; what has been termed, in more recent years, a ‘biopolitics’. A counter-topography, in Katz’s sense of the term, draws upon both of these definitional frames, in that it refers us to the intricate relations that bind people and things across vast physical spaces, no matter their seeming reification under seemingly abstract terms such as ‘globalization’. It also draws our attention to those sites that exist ‘in-between’ which, although they are often hidden from view by the majority are nevertheless integral to the emergence, functioning and transformation of these relations. For those researching and writing a feminist geopolitics, such as Jennifer

Hyndman and Alison Mountz, these in-between spaces are, importantly, animated by the bodies of asylum seekers, refugees, bombing victims and so on, all ‘vulnerable’ groups in the sense that they are more often than not subject to violence, discrimination, harassment, boredom, frustration and anxiety by virtue of their placement within these relations (Hyndman and Mountz 2006). For them, the global is an intimate affair, in that it is constituted in large part from ‘embodied social relations that include mobility, emotion, materiality, belonging, alienation. The intimate encompasses not only those entanglements rooted in the everyday, but also the subtlety of their interconnectedness to everyday intimacies in other places and times: the rough hands of the woman who labours, the shortness of breath of the child without medication, the softness of the bed on which one sleeps’ (Hyndman and Mountz 2006: 447). And, it is this more nuanced, embodied reading of geopolitics that allows for a recognition of the manner in which individuals can critique and act upon their placement within such relations.2 Although, it must be acknowledged, such critical responses are often re-scripted, via the judicial complaints procedure, as ‘victim narratives’, furthering the notion that such problems are to be located at the ‘localized’ scale of the non-immigrant body. The import of this framework for my own work is that attention must be

drawn to how particular bodies proceed to become disconnected from some forms of relation, and connected to others, as they take on the positionality of ‘female non-immigrant H-2B worker’. Some of these relations are produced and shaped according to US legislation on non-immigrant work, certainly, but also household and business needs and expectations, regional economies and job markets, networks of knowledge concerning job opportunities, transport and accommodation facilities, and intra-personal bonds, to name only a few. To be sure, some of these may be considered more important (or ‘causal’) than others in shaping the scope and character of the relations

of

though which migrant worker bodies are produced, but what a countertopography draws attention to is the significance of the body throughout as a key object of analysis, and the cumulative impact of such relations upon the body. Such an analysis, then, read subsequent experiences not as evidence of a state-induced vulnerability, but as an on-going process of embodiment that must be assessed in terms of the experiencing of opportunities and constraints, physical as well as regulatory, as well as a wealth of impressions, thoughts and accompanying emotions.