Be Our Guest: Foreign Guest Workers in the United States’’ Tourism and Hospitality Industries

Adopting a geographic lens to examine the employment of guestworkers in the United States, Be Our Guest offers readers the most comprehensive analysis of guestwork in tourism that has been produced to date. In weaving together the constellation of political and economic factors that exist across multiple scales, the case is made for how and why so many tourism-dependent areas of the United States have developed a dependency on temporary foreign workforces. Taking a holistic approach, special emphasis is placed on the economic histories of these areas and shifting patterns of employment, seasonality, gentrification, and related housing shortages.

Throughout, the voices of stakeholders involved in every aspect of guestwork are included: human resources managers battling labor shortages, town planners mitigating workforce housing shortages, and attorneys and advocates helping to directly assist migrant workers and affect policy changes. These perspectives are coupled with detailed analysis of state policies regarding guestworker visa programs and labor market stress to illustrate a vivid picture of the precarious lives of the migrant laborers who arrive in the United States.

Be Our Guest serves to specifically address a lacuna in critical tourism studies and the growing concern among practitioners over workforce quality and supply. Nevertheless, it will benefit everyone with an interest in issues of labor migration, precarity, housing policy, and immigration reform.

Dr William Terry, Clemson University, USA