Laguerre traces Haitian migration to New York from the beginning of the Duvalier era, when repression and a shrinking economy pushed mainly upper- and middle-class Haitians abroad, through the boat arrivals that began in 1972 and turned detention policy into a national argument. He notes the contrast with Cubans, received as refugees with federal support, and its consequences for undocumented Haitians who avoid public hospitals for fear of exposure and rely instead on folk remedies or Haitian-staffed clinics.

The book rests on fieldwork carried out in Haiti during the mid-1970s and in New York in 1977 and 1978. It works outward from the conditions that determine who leaves — household strategies, the pull of Port-au-Prince, the travel agent as broker — to the community that resulted: its Manhattan and Brooklyn blocks, its churches and Creole-language publications, its households and the strain between parents and children socialised in different worlds, and its portrayal in the American press.