Jackson follows the Haitian teachers, doctors and engineers recruited into the United Nations civilian operation in Congo after independence from Belgium. Haiti supplied one of the largest national contingents in the mission, and Haitians held senior posts in UNESCO's Africa division, the WHO medical team and, by 1963, the ONUC military command.

The research pairs interviews conducted in Montreal, Paris, New York and Port-au-Prince with archival records in Kinshasa, in Haiti and at United Nations headquarters. Raoul Peck, whose father went out with the first contingent, is among the informants; against the assumption that these migrants lived as privileged expatriates, he recalls a first year without a car, riding the same crowded buses as Congolese workers. Andree Blouin's memoir gives the contrary view, of Haitians arriving by way of Papa Doc and blending in too easily.

He uses that tension to question both the picture of Haitian migrants as destitute refugees and the reading of international organizations as neo-colonial machinery.