In her study of mass incarceration, Michelle Alexander notes that coerced labor has given way to mass unemployment among black men. First slavery and then Jim Crow were designed to make blacks work for the white-dominated economy. The dismantling of Jim Crow, she argues, coincided with the collapse of the American manufacturing sector and loss of the jobs that sustained African American communities. She cites sociologist Loïc Wacquant, who “emphasizes that the one thing that makes the current penal apparatus strikingly different from previous racial caste systems is that ‘it does not carry out the positive economic mission of recruitment and disciplining of the workforce.’ Instead it serves only to warehouse poor black and brown people for increasingly lengthy periods of time, often until old age. The new system does not seek primarily to benefit unfairly from black labor, as earlier caste systems have, but instead views African Americans as largely irrelevant and unnecessary to the newly structured economy.”27
The newly structured economy may not need to benefit unfairly from black labor, but it still needs to benefit unfairly from the labor of some socially marginalized community. In the late twentieth century, African Americans became less “cheap” because they gained legal rights, gained access to social services, and organized unions. Simultaneously, the sectors like manufacturing and government that had employed them collapsed, contributing to high unemployment among African Americans. But other sectors—“downgraded manufacturing and expanded service sectors,” in Nicolas De Genova’s study of Chicago—began to massively employ immigrant and, especially, undocumented immigrant workers.28 (Chapters 5 and 6, on the topic of working, go into more detail about the kinds of work undocumented people do.)
Here, however, I’d like to emphasize how useful illegality has been in the late twentieth-century reconfiguration of work from an obligation to a privilege. Illegality is a way to enforce a dual labor market and keep some labor cheap, in a supposedly postracial era. Illegality uses lack of citizenship—that is, being born in the wrong place—to make workers more exploitable. Once naturalized, the status neatly hides the human agency that forces workers into this marginalized status. It is not just coincidence that illegality has burgeoned in the postindustrial societies of the Global North at the end of the twentieth century. It serves a crucial role in their economies and ideologies.
CHAPTER 2
Choosing to Be Undocumented
US citizens often wonder why immigrants in the United States don’t “do it the right way” and obtain proper documents to authorize their entry and presence in the country.1 They believe—usually erroneously—that their own ancestors obtained proper visas prior to coming to the United States and also know that if they intended to travel or move to another country, they would assemble their documents before attempting to travel.
When you get your US passport in the mail, it comes with a flyer that says “With Your US Passport, the World Is Yours!” Holders of the US passport are accustomed to simply arriving at the border of another country, showing their passport, and easily crossing. Rarely, they have to apply for a visa in advance. If they pay the fee and fill out the application correctly, the visa is routinely granted. Holders of US passports tend to believe that freedom to travel is their birthright, a view reinforced by the literature that comes with their passports. For the cost of a plane ticket, and occasionally a small visa fee, they can leave the country they were born in any time they want.
For most of the world’s population, though, freedom to travel is a distant dream. They can’t leave the country of their birth because, instead of that magical ownership of the world that comes with a US passport, they are citizens of countries in Africa, Latin America, or most of Asia. Many of them are also poor and people of color. They can’t leave their countries because no other country will let them in. Least of all, the United States. In today’s global apartheid, whole countries—almost all of them in the First World—shut themselves off to travelers, while assuming that their own citizens have the right to travel anywhere they choose. Meanwhile, the citizens of other countries—mostly in the Third World—are imprisoned in the country they are born in, because of the restrictions established by those richer and more powerful.
From the comfort of their First World homes, many citizens of the United States assume that anyone can get a visa to travel legally to any country. If someone comes to and/or lives in the United States without proper documentation, they assume it must be because they simply failed to follow the correct procedure. If only there were such a procedure to follow.
I’ve even heard a Massachusetts state legislator express this assumption in a hearing on the question of allowing undocumented students to be considered state residents for the purpose of paying in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities. He interrogated a panel of students, members of the Student Immigrant Movement who had come to testify in favor of the bill. All were undocumented, and each one explained how and why he or she had ended up with that status.
“What’s your status now?” the legislator asked them. “I’m undocumented,” one Brazilian student answered, bewildered. “Why don’t you start the process to become a citizen?” he continued. “I can’t,” she explained. “Why not?” he asked, revealing his profound ignorance of immigration law. Just as the law forbids most residents of the Third World to travel here—by requiring visas, but refusing to grant them—it also forbids virtually all people who are undocumented to regularize their status.
SOME HISTORY
Structural factors, mostly related to the economy and labor needs, have shaped migrations for centuries. Some of the largest sources of out-migration to the United States today were recipients of in-migration only a few generations ago. The Caribbean islands in particular fall into this category. Other places that now send large numbers of migrants to the United States have long histories of temporary, seasonal, and permanent out-migration. Mexico stands out in this regard.
Since the nineteenth century, nation-states have increasingly attempted to regulate migration and control freedom of movement across often newly established borders. US immigration policies have changed frequently, creating a mesh of regulations and statuses that even immigration lawyers and scholars find confusing.
Until 1890, there was no national immigration system or agency in the United States. Individual states enforced existing immigration laws until the establishment of the federally operated immigration inspection station at Ellis Island in 1892. Certain categories of people became excludable starting in 1875, and in 1891 the law provided for deportation of an immigrant who became a public charge within a year of arrival or was found to belong to a prohibited or excluded group—like Chinese contract workers, prostitutes, convicted criminals. After a year, though, those who had entered “illegally”—that is, in violation of the laws that excluded them—could no longer be deported. The 1903 Immigration Act extended these periods of potential deportability to two years for becoming a public charge, and three years for belonging to an excludible class. In 1917, this was extended to five years.2
It’s important to note that so-called illegal entry, up until this time, referred to entry by persons belonging to a class of people who were unilaterally denied entry: it had nothing to do with the way a person entered. It was the 1907 Immigration Act that first made entering without inspection itself a violation of the law. The 1907 act formalized the inspection procedure, requiring every would-be immigrant coming in by sea to pass through inspection, and made it a misdemeanor for a ship owner to bring in anybody belonging to an excluded class.3 The act did not apply to Mexicans. Inspection was for immigrants, and immigrants were defined as people who arrived by sea, not Mexicans, who crossed the southern border to work. Likewise, Mexicans were exempted from the literacy requirement and head tax imposed on immigrants in 1917, as long as they were coming to work in agriculture. Mexicans weren’t even required to enter through an official port or inspection point until 1919.
For Europeans, a passport
was first required for entry in 1918, but even then, it was only for identification. Would-be immigrants did not need to obtain prior permission in their home countries before traveling to the United States, and they couldn’t be deported for entering without inspection until 1924.4 In 1929, entry without inspection became a misdemeanor, punishable with fines and jail time.5 But there were still exceptions for Europeans.
A new process called registry for noncitizens who had entered without inspection prior to this time allowed them—if they were otherwise (i.e., racially) eligible to citizenship—to regularize their status if they could demonstrate “that they had resided in the country continuously since 1921, were not otherwise subject to deportation, and were of ‘good moral character.’”6 In practice, the registry helped Europeans who had evaded the 1919 inspection requirement. The registry system set a precedent—that a period of residence outweighed the technicalities of inspection, or lack of inspection, upon entry. Later laws like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and the twenty-first-century proposals for a path to citizenship would revive that idea.
The 1924 Immigration Act created what was called the “quota system,” putting numerical limits on immigration (still conceived as European immigration) for the first time. Immigrants from Europe now had to comply with quotas established based on the proportion of immigrants from that country already present in the United States. Non-Europeans didn’t get quotas. The Bureau of Labor Statistics explained the intent of the law: “Immigrants of New World countries or their descendants, aliens ineligible to citizenship or their descendants, the descendants of slave immigrants, and the descendants of American aborigines were specifically excluded from the national-origins plan. In a broad sense, therefore, the problem was to find the extent to which the various countries of Europe, as now constituted, had contributed to the white population of the country.”7 For the first time, Europeans could be excluded, not on the basis of their individual characteristics, but because of the country they came from. Somewhat paradoxically from today’s perspective, Mexican labor migration was unaffected by the restrictive law.
Most Europeans who arrived in the United States prior to 1924 did pretty much what immigrants from Mexico and Central America did a few decades later: they gathered their families and their belongings, put together the money they needed for the trip, and embarked on their journey. They didn’t “do it the right way,” wait in line, or follow a legal process, because there was no line or process.
The records of Ellis Island are filled with the stories of individuals like Irving Berlin, who went on to become an iconic American songwriter, author of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” and “God Bless America.” The family of Israel Baline, age five, fled their home in Russia after their village was attacked in a pogrom and their house burned to the ground. They traveled “illegally” because, in 1893, Russia (unlike most countries at the time) required a passport for travel and exit; they “smuggled themselves from town to town and country to country” until reaching Antwerp, Belgium, where they boarded a ship bound for New York. On the ship’s manifest, their last name was changed from Baline to Beilin, so they entered the United States under a false name. (The name “Irving Berlin” was introduced by a printer’s error when Israel produced his first album at age nineteen.)8 Since the United States had only minimal entry requirements for Europeans at the time, family members were given a medical inspection by the US Public Health Service to determine whether they had any infectious disease and a legal inspection to determine whether they were likely to become public charges. Only about 2 percent of would-be immigrants were rejected as a result of these inspections.
Mae Ngai argues that with so few restrictions on immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “there was no such thing as ‘illegal immigration.’ The government excluded a mere 1% of the 25 million immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before World War I, mostly for health reasons. (Chinese were the exception, excluded on grounds of ‘racial unassimilability.’) The statutes of limitations of one to five years meant that even those here unlawfully did not live forever with the specter of deportation.”9
The 1924 law, in addition to establishing the quota system, created the concept of illegality by making entry without inspection illegal, and making deportability permanent by eliminating the statute of limitations. Before 1924, what made a person deportable was his or her membership in an excluded class; furthermore, after the person had been in the country for a period of time, his or her presence became legal despite prior excludability. Now, a person who entered without inspection could be, technically, “illegal.”10
Still, there were many ways for Europeans who didn’t “follow the rules” to become legal. The 1929 registry law helped those who entered before 1921. Between 1935 and the late 1950s, European immigrants without documentation were allowed to adjust their status by reentering through Canada to obtain legal permanent residency. After 1940, immigrants who could show that their families would suffer “serious economic detriment” could have their deportation suspended. All of these provisions applied only to European immigrants, since they were the only ones allowed to immigrate under the 1924 exclusions. (Mexicans were still crossing the border easily, but they were not considered immigrants.) Some two hundred thousand Europeans without documents were able to legalize their status using these means.11
In 1965, the United States abandoned the differential quota system, replacing it with a new one that imposed equal quotas on all countries. This meant that, for the first time, Western Hemisphere migrants—primarily Mexicans—were classified as immigrants. This change essentially created illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America, but without all of the loopholes and exceptions that had allowed Europeans to adjust their status.12
Donna Gabaccia’s research shows that media references to so-called illegal immigration closely followed restrictive legislation.
The earliest references are to “illegal immigration,” which referred to the movement of workers from China; they appeared immediately after passage of the 1882 Chinese exclusion. With the exclusion of all Asians and the restriction of southern and eastern European migrations in the 1920s, “illegal immigrant” became an intermittent fixture in the pages of New York Times, where it usually meant stowaways, persons who “jumped ship,” or the “immigrant bootleggers” who supposedly smuggled in workers and “immoral” women. Only after World War II (and a brief period when most stories about “illegal immigrants” focused on European Jews entering the British mandate in Palestine) did the term—understood by then to mean “wetbacks” crossing the Rio Grande—become attached firmly to workers from Mexico. And only after 1965 did the term become common in a wide array of writings by journalists, scholars, and Congressional representatives.13
Today, of course, the term “illegal immigrant” has become common currency. The rest of this chapter will look at two of the largest sources of undocumented immigrants in the United States today, Mexico and Guatemala. It will ask how people from those countries came to migrate to the United States, and how and why their migrations have become illegalized.
AN OVERVIEW OF UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION
The undocumented population in the United States increased rapidly between 1965, when the first restrictive measures were passed against Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, and the beginning of the twenty-first century. By 1980, there were from 2 to 4 million undocumented immigrants in the country, rising to 8.5 million in 2000 and reaching a peak of almost 12 million in 2007.14
Notably, over half of those undocumented in 2011 had arrived between 1995 and 2004, with only 14 percent arriving between 2005 and 2011.15 Thus, most undocumented people have been in the country for quite a while. The rise in the undocumented coincided with an even greater rise in the overall Hispanic population in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1970, the 9.6 million Hispanics in the United States made up 4.7 percent of the population. Four decades later, the H
ispanic population had jumped to 50.5 million or 16 percent of the population.16
Most of these have consistently been Mexicans. Estimates for the undocumented Mexican population rose from 1.13 million in 1980 to 2.04 million in 1990 and 4.68 million in 2000, rising to a high of 7.03 million in 2008 before stabilizing and declining to 6.8 million in 2011. The Central American undocumented population also rose after 1980, reaching 570,000 Salvadorans, 430,000 Guatemalans, and 300,000 Hondurans in 2008. For Central Americans, the numbers continued to increase after 2008: in 2011, there were 660,000 from El Salvador, 520,000 from Guatemala, and 380,000 from Honduras. Together, Central Americans and Mexicans made up three-quarters of the growth in the undocumented population between 1980 and 2008.17
Moreover, a significant proportion—over half—of Mexicans and Central Americans who are here are undocumented. Fifty-eight percent of Mexicans, 57 percent of Salvadorans, 71 percent of Guatemalans, and 77 percent of Hondurans are undocumented. “Never before have so many people been outside the law and never before have the undocumented been so concentrated within such a small number of national origins,” wrote Douglas Massey and Karen Pren.18 Mexico and Central America are thus key pieces in the puzzle of undocumentedness in the United States.
With this big picture in mind, we must start to untangle the history of undocumented migration from Mexico and Central America.
MEXICANS
The largest group of undocumented people in the United States today comes from Mexico. Many are from the central-western Mexican states that have been sending migrants northward for over a century, although increasingly migrants hail from heavily indigenous regions in the south of the country that had seen little out-migration before the 1990s. Almost 60 percent of the undocumented, over 6 million people in 2010, were Mexican. Other Latin Americans make up another 23 percent.19 Mexicans also make up the largest foreign-born population in the United States, with about 29 percent of the foreign-born or 12 million people.20 As noted above, over half of Mexicans in the United States are undocumented.
Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) Page 5