Learning to Labor Like a Hard-working Foreigner

Foreign workers are often extolled for their superior work ethic, a presumably essential trait which characterizes them prior to working in host countries. The trope of the hard-working foreigner appears in both popular and scholarly accounts. In contrast, we consider hard work as a learned disposition, and ask, how do foreigners learn to embrace working hard at low-wage jobs? Based on a qualitative longitudinal study of foreign student workers in temporary service jobs, we examine hard work as a process of acculturation to the American workplace. Using ethnographic data on three seasons in a tourism-dependent location, we show that, over the course of their seasonal employment, students shift from consumers seeking a cultural experience to economically motivated hard workers: industrious, managing multiple jobs, and uninterested in leisure. While their employers see foreign students as possessing a superior work ethic, we argue that their work habits result in part from prevailing labor conditions in the work setting and beyond, including high living costs, restricted leisure time, and precarious pay and hours. In the course of becoming marginalized, these students become hard-working foreigners. Our findings inform debates on foreign labor by unpacking and partly challenging notions of culturally specific work ethics.