Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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a period popularly known as “el Porfiriato,” changed the history of Mexican immobility. Díaz pursued a program of modernizing Mexico in the image of nations such as Argentina and the United States. He dramatically expanded Mexico’s railroad system (with significant investments from U.S. and English financiers), sparked massive land accumulation (land most often purchased by foreign investors), and encouraged a switch to wage labor. His campaign for “order and progress” released an estimated five million Mexican campesinos from debt peonage and laid tens of thousands of miles of track as economic production increased at a relatively robust rate of 2.7 percent annually, exports in general rose by 6.1 percent per year, with agricultural exports, in particular, expanding by 200 percent between 1876 and 1910. These marks of modernity were followed by a dramatic population increase from nine million in 1876 to more than fifteen million in 1910. In addition, literacy was on the rise. Yet, Díaz’s world of “order and progress” was forged at a tremendous price of dispossession and poverty for Mexico’s overwhelmingly rural population.31
Unabated poverty was the consequence of Díaz’s program. More Mexicans were free wage laborers, but more Mexicans were also dangerously poor. Therefore, Mexico’s newly mobile wage-labor force migrated in search of work and higher wages.32 In 1884, the completion of the railroad at El Paso, Texas, directly linked Mexican workers in the populous central regions of Mexico to jobs north of the U.S.-Mexico border.33 The expansion of U.S. capital in Mexico created corridors of migration that brought Mexican workers north when the southwestern agribusiness boom began in the early twentieth century.
Lawrence Cardoso estimates that Mexican nationals made at least five hundred thousand border crossings into the United States between 1900 and 1910.34 Migration continued during the 1910s, when the violence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, combined with disease and the ongoing entreaties of U.S. labor contractors, encouraged Mexican labor migration to the United States. It was during the 1920s, however, that Mexican labor emigration surged with the massive expansion in southwestern agribusiness. Cardoso estimates that the total number of border crossings undertaken by Mexican nationals skyrocketed to more than one million during the 1920s.35 Amid the convergent booms in southwestern agriculture and Mexican labor migration, the United States Congress launched a new era of work, labor, and migration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by tightening U.S. immigration laws and establishing the U.S. Border Patrol. Although Mexico’s emigrant workers were not the primary targets of U.S. immigration restrictions, in time and according to a collision of dynamics, they would become the primary targets of U.S. immigration law enforcement.
U.S. IMMIGRATION LAW: THE GENEALOGY OF A MANDATE
The United States Congress established the U.S. Border Patrol on May 28, 1924, by discreetly setting aside one million dollars for “additional land-border patrol” in the Department of Labor Appropriations Act of that year, but the congressional effort of migration control began many years earlier and carried many ambitious projects within it. Beginning with the passage of the 1862 Act to Prohibit the “Coolie Trade,” Congress launched an era of increasingly restrictive immigration laws that climaxed with the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924. Passed during the Civil War and driven by the notion that Chinese immigrants were unfree workers, that is, “coolies,” the 1862 act functioned, argues historian Moon-Ho Jung, as both the “last slave-trade law” and “the first immigration law.”36 In the era of black emancipation, Jung explains, the turbulent and contested intersection of race, labor, and freedom in the United States framed the origins of U.S. immigration control.
After the passage of the 1862 coolie labor law, Congress spent the next several decades deeply shaping the course of American history by placing a series of limits on immigration to the United States.37 In 1875, Congress prohibited criminals and prostitutes from legally entering the United States and extended the ban upon contract labor from China.38 In 1882, Congress passed a general Immigration Act that banned all “lunatics, idiots, convicts, those liable to become public charges, and those suffering from contagious diseases” and expanded the 1862 and 1875 bans on the coolie trade by prohibiting all Chinese laborers from entering the United States.39 To fund the growing bureaucracy of migration control, the 1882 Act also introduced a 50-cent tax on each person entering the United States. In 1885, Congress expanded the prohibition upon Chinese contract labor by making it unlawful to import any contract laborer into the United States.40 In 1891, Congress added polygamists to the list of banned persons and authorized the deportation of any person who unlawfully entered the United States.41 In 1903, epileptics, anarchists, and beggars joined the growing group of excluded persons, and Congress transferred the Bureau of Immigration to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor.42 The 1903 Immigration Act also provided for the deportation of immigrants who became public charges within two years of their arrival in the United States and extended to three years the period during which an immigrant could be deported if found to have been inadmissible at the time of entry. The Immigration Act of 1907 increased the head tax to four dollars per person and added each of the following to the list of excluded persons: “imbeciles, feebleminded persons, persons with physical or mental defects which may affect their ability to earn a living, persons afflicted with tuberculosis, children unaccompanied by their parents, persons who admitted the commission of a crime involving moral turpitude, and women coming to the United States for immoral purposes.”43 The 1907 Immigration Act also extended the period during which immigrants could be deported if they became public charges from causes existing prior to entry and defined entering the United States without official inspection to be a violation of U.S. immigration restrictions. The Bureau of Immigration was transferred to the newly independent Department of Labor in 1913.44 The immigration Act of 1917 created the Asiatic-Barred Zone, which prohibited entry by any immigrant of Asian descent while raising the head tax to eight dollars, imposing an additional ten-dollar visa fee, requiring all eligible immigrants to pass a literacy test, broadening the scope of deportation to a period of five years, and prohibiting entry into the United States at any point other than an official port of entry.45
By 1917, the list of persons prohibited from entering the United States included all Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract laborers, unaccompanied children, idiots, epileptics, the insane, paupers, the diseased and defective, alcoholics, beggars, polygamists, anarchists, and more. The penalties for violating U.S. immigration laws varied. For example, importing an immigrant “for the purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose” was a felony punishable by a prison term of up to ten years and a fine not to exceed five thousand dollars. Both unauthorized entry and immigrant smuggling were defined as misdemeanors punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of two thousand dollars. An assortment of Anglo-American nativists, labor unions, progressives, and others had pushed these many exclusions and penalties into U.S. immigration law. Still the most ardent Anglo-American nativists were not satisfied, and their collective influence was growing in American society, politics, and culture during the 1920s.
THE NATIVISTS’ CRUSADE
Comprised of eugenicists, xenophobes, scholars, Klan members, labor organizers, and others, nativists united in opposition to what they viewed as the menacing growth in immigration from eastern and southern Europe.46 Beginning in the early 1900s, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and others had rushed into U.S. industrial centers such as New York and Chicago. Their arrival fueled the rise of American manufacturing, but nativists regarded these groups as “undesirable immigrants” who were socially inferior, culturally alien, and politically suspect. Fearing the “contamination” of Anglo-American society and culture by these “new stock” immigrants, nativists demanded an end to immigration from anywhere other than northwestern Europe.47
In 1924, Anglo-American nativists played a crucial role in crafting and passing the National Origins Act of that year. The act was a dense bill that outlined, in detail, the limitations placed upon legal immigration. Most important, it ratified all previous immigration restrictions and introduced a nationality-based quota system that strictly limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year. According to the intricate quota system, Germany, Britain, and Northern ireland were afforded 60 percent of the total number of slots made available to all immigrants subject to the National Origins system.