Abstract
Recruitment of female guestworkers by the US seafood processing industry provides Mexican women with opportunities to support their families financially through legal seasonal labor migration at the cost of family separation. Based on interviews with workers and former workers from crab processing plants in the rural Southeast, I find that family contexts, isolated employment conditions, and precarious legal status shape possibilities for permanent settlement. Despite classification as “temporary nonimmigrants,” crab pickers, or jaiberas, use seasonal migration to the United States as a long-term strategy to support families in Mexico and are held in temporary positions in both locations. These arrangements subject jaiberas to systems of social control that have important policy implications regarding the labor and family rights of so-called unskilled workers in the H-2 program.
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