Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684)

by Chomsky, Aviva

  Surveys taken of Mexican migrants in Mexico (i.e., having returned from the United States) show another side of the story: that lots of undocumented people return home after being in the United States. The Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University and the University of Guadalajara surveyed eighty thousand return migrants from twenty-one Mexican states, as well as migrants from those communities who have settled in the United States. In Mexico, the interviews show that 83 percent had entered the United States illegally on their first trip, and 73 percent on their most recent trip. In the United States, 77 percent responded that they had entered illegally on their first trip, and 56 percent that they entered illegally on their most recent trip. (The last response may be skewed by individuals reluctant to reveal current illegal status.)21

  To understand why and how so many Mexicans have come to be undocumented, it’s crucial to examine the history.

  The border that divides the United States from Mexico, and that large numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans cross each year without authorization, was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and adjusted by the Gadsden or La Mesilla Purchase of 1853. Much of the US Southwest used to be Mexico. The first Mexicans in the United States did not cross any border; rather, the border crossed them.

  Until 1924, the new border between the United States and Mexico was virtually unpoliced, and migration flowed openly. Mexicans worked in the mines and railroads of the Southwest and migrated to the factories and urban centers in the Midwest. In 1908, US Bureau of Labor Statistics researcher Victor Clark reported that, while “complete statistics of those who cross the frontier are not kept,” an estimated sixty thousand to one hundred thousand Mexicans crossed each year to work in the United States. “Except in Texas and California, few Mexicans become permanent residents, and even in those two states, a majority are transient laborers who seldom remain more than six months at a time in this country.”22

  The many laws that were passed to try to control immigration from the Civil War on did not apply to Mexicans, because Congress did not consider them immigrants or potential immigrants at all. In agriculture, Clark explained, “the main value of the Mexican . . . is as a temporary worker in crops where the season is short. . . . Mexicans are not likely to be employed the year round by small farmers, because they are not entertained in the family like American, German, Scandinavian, or Irish laborers of the North. Yet they do not occupy a position analogous to that of the Negro in the South. They are not permanent, do not acquire land or establish themselves in little cabin homesteads, but remain nomadic and outside of American civilization.”23

  RAILROADS AND MIGRATION

  Railroads played a crucial role both in moving Mexicans to the border and into the United States and in creating a demand for Mexican labor. Mexico’s nineteenth-century rail system was “designed, planned and constructed by Americans” and extended US lines into Mexico to facilitate the transport of US manufactured goods into Mexico. Thus, decisions about Mexico’s economy and infrastructure were made in the United States, for the benefit of US capitalists. The railroads also helped bring Mexicans to, and across, the border.24

  As US capital moved south, it drew southerners northward. Railroad concessions displaced over three hundred thousand peasants in Mexico’s central plateau, creating one pool of potential migrants. Many of them were recruited to work in new American enterprises in the north of the country. Some went to work on the railroad itself; others in new American-owned mining and oil operations. Mexico’s demographic patterns were fundamentally, and irrevocably, altered with this shift of population to the North.25 In Arizona, as the copper mines boomed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, they sent labor contractors to scour Mexico for workers being displaced from their lands. The first Mexican mineworkers in Arizona were Sonorans who crossed the border, but they were soon joined by central Mexicans who traveled north along the new rail lines.26

  Victor Clark described how the railroads contributed to the creation of a migrant labor force and the long-term social and cultural changes that the railroads and the migrations brought:

  In Mexico railways have given both the opportunity and the inducement to emigration. Needing unskilled labor for their construction and maintenance, they drew among the agricultural population along their lines, at first for a few days or weeks of temporary service between crops and later for more extended periods. At first the true peon was averse to leaving his home, and would not work where he could not sleep under his own roof, but gradually he became bolder and more worldly-wise and could be prevailed upon to work for a month or so a hundred miles or more up and down the line. He became accustomed to having silver in his pocket occasionally and found it would exchange for things he had not heretofore thought of having for his personal use. He became attached to cash wages in about the same degree that he became detached from his home surroundings. Employers in the more primitive parts of Mexico say that at present the people will not work for money so long as they have food in their cabins. When they first leave home they will work only long enough to provide themselves with food and shelter for a few days in advance. But the railways, bringing a greater variety of wares at lower prices, have made possible the attractive shop of the railway town, and this market for money has made the latter a more desirable commodity in the eyes of the peon. . . . The railways have thus attracted labor and have held it more and more permanently from a constantly widening area along their lines. A general officer of the National Railroad of Mexico stated that his company had brought north about 1,500 laborers to work on the upper section of the road within a year, and that practically all of them had ultimately crossed over into Texas.27

  Newcomers were met at the entry point and offered “fair wages.”28

  US aid and investment, then, directly uprooted Mexican peasants, recruited them into a migrant labor stream, and initiated the social and cultural changes that led them to leave their homes and work for cash in distant lands. It was US influence deep inside Mexico that set into motion the process of out-migration.

  A TYPICAL SENDING COMMUNITY: ARANDAS, JALISCO

  By 1933, economist Paul S. Taylor found that a tradition of migration had become well established in the Mexican sending community of Arandas in Jalisco. The ongoing migration, he wrote, was “but a modern and expanded phase” of a process that had begun decades before.29

  First, the railroad arrived. The Mexico City–El Paso rail line, which passed through Jalisco, recruited workers from the adjacent countryside. Then US railroad and mining companies began to send employment agents into Mexico’s interior to contract potential migrants and deployed station agents on the border to recruit arriving workers.

  The earliest migrants from Arandas had heard rumors about the availability of work in the United States from former prisoners, local men who had been arrested and sent to fight in ongoing military campaigns against the Yaqui Indians in Sonora. They traveled by rail to El Paso, where an employment agency contracted them for railroad work in Independence, Kansas. On their next venture, agents in El Paso sent them to Fresno, California, again to work on the railroad.30

  Mexican employment agents also visited Arandas to recruit laborers. One former migrant told Taylor that a railroad construction recruiter offered him free passage to the border.31 “In 1913, an agent [Mexican] from the Santa Fé railroad came to Arandas and took three or four of us by auto to the railroad, and north. I did not pay anything to go to the frontier; they paid all,” one source from the village told Taylor, adding that “American contratistas, representing railroads and mines, had been all through the region twenty-odd years ago.”32

  Taylor emphasizes that the migration was spurred by US actions. When Congress passed the Literacy Act for immigrants in 1917, railroad, agricultural, and mining corporations raised a howl of protest and insisted that an open border was essential in order to obtain the labor they needed.33 In response, Congress quickly exempted Mexicans from the literacy requi
rement. Migration ebbed and flowed directly in response to employment demands in the United States.34 When they needed workers, employers turned to Mexico. When they didn’t—as in 1929, when Depression-era unemployment began to rise—the State Department instructed consular officers to increase their enforcement of the “likely to become a public charge” restriction on would-be immigrants and refuse to grant entry visas to Mexicans unlikely to find work.35

  Emigrants from the small community of Arandas worked in twenty-four states in the United States by the 1930s, and in a wide variety of industries ranging from automobile factories to agriculture to coal mining, though the railroad was by far the largest employer.36 Most came to the border without papers and were automatically granted entry. After 1928, the American consular service began to encourage prospective migrants to obtain permits from a consulate before arriving at the border, though this was still not required.37

  Some also crossed without inspection, either paying a small sum to a professional or simply wading across the river at a spot distant from any border post. By 1931, though, the word had spread that the consular service was not granting papers, that deportations were rising and employment contracting.38

  BORDER PATROL AND SEGREGATION

  Although the 1924 law did not include any restrictions on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, it did create a new border police force, the Border Patrol. In the early years, according to historian Aristide Zolberg, “its mission was to prevent the entry of alcohol rather than people, so that in effect, the border remained an informal affair.”39 The force also sought to deter prohibited Chinese attempting to enter through Mexico.

  Was it a paradox that the Border Patrol was created in the 1920s, just when agribusiness, with its need for migrant labor, was rapidly expanding in the Southwest? Several scholars argue that in fact the system worked well for farmers who needed migrant workers. Mexican workers could still cross the border easily, but because they became more deportable, the new laws also made them more exploitable. “Agribusinessmen kicked, winked, screamed, lobbied, and cajoled for border patrol practices that allowed unrestricted access to Mexican workers while promoting effective discipline over the region’s Mexicano workforce.”40 Deportability was part of that discipline. Local officials served farmers’ interests by carrying out deportation raids in cases of union organizing or, sometimes, just before payday.41

  The need to patrol the border was mitigated in some ways by the fact that the (mostly) men who crossed into the United States carried the border with them, even before the Border Patrol was created. Many had worked under segregated conditions for US enterprises inside Mexico. In Mexico, workers did “Mexican work” and received a “Mexican wage”; they lived in segregated housing.42

  These segregated conditions were replicated in the United States. “Recruited laborers whether destined for northern Mexico or for the United States, travel in parties, under a boss, or ‘cabo’ who holds the tickets,” wrote Victor Clark in 1908. Then, after “crossing a virtual open border, Mexican workers were again housed in company towns, confined to ‘Mexican work,’ treated to dual wages, and segregated socially . . . the workers’ experiences in Mexico continued in the United States.”43

  Thus, the most important border was the internal or racial one that kept Mexicans and Americans socially separated from each other, even as they labored in a single, integrated economy on both sides of the political boundary that separated the countries. Gilbert González concludes that “rather than interpreting segregation as a means of keeping people out of the ‘mainstream’ or of ‘marginalizing’ them to the social and economic periphery, segregation was the method of integrating Mexican immigrants and their families into the heart of the American economy. . . . Segregated settlements brought a variation of the border to the employers’ doorsteps.”44

  Mexican workers’ theoretical deportability became real in 1929, as the country entered the Great Depression. On the pretext that they were likely to “become a public charge” as employment opportunities evaporated, both Mexicans and Mexican Americans were rounded up for deportation. A “frenzy of anti-Mexican hysteria” justified roundups of entire Mexican neighborhoods and hundreds of thousands were deported with little attention to legal niceties.45

  THE BRACERO PROGRAM

  With the ending of the Depression and the coming of World War II, agricultural interests confronted a new labor shortage. The US government responded with the Bracero Program, administered jointly by the US and Mexican governments from 1942 to 1964, which recruited millions of Mexicans to migrate north for a season or more.46 Over the period, 4.5 million contracts were signed, representing some 2 million workers (many went more than once). The program cemented US agribusiness’s reliance on migratory Mexican workers to the present day.

  The four central-western states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Zacatecas comprised 45 percent of the participants. “Here,” argues historian Michael Snodgrass, “is where a culture of Mexican migration first took root in the early twentieth century.” Because of demand from both would-be migrants and local officials, the Mexican government established its processing centers in Guanajuato and Jalisco. Workers from “depressed mining villages and drought-stricken farm towns” flocked to the program.47

  Alongside Bracero migrants, others from the same region migrated on their own, undocumented, but not unwelcome. “It was easy then,” Snodgrass explains. “When he headed north for the first time in 1955, the first English expression that Gerardo López learned was ‘go ahead,’ the words a Border Patrol agent spoke while encouraging his entry.”48 Aristide Zolberg, who was stationed in El Paso for military service in the mid-1950s, commented that “informality” prevailed regarding border crossings. “You were more likely to be stopped crossing the Juarez Bridge if you looked like an American in military service than like a Mexican seeking work.”49

  Former migrants from the highlands of Jalisco recalled that the program resurrected networks that had been established in the 1920s, only to be temporarily interrupted in the 1930s. Other parts of Jalisco, like the sugar region, had no prior history of migration. Now, though, union leaders began to demand Bracero contracts for their members during the tiempo muerto from May to December, which conveniently coincided with California’s harvest season. Thus, new areas were drawn into the “culture of migration.”50 Remittances became Mexico’s third-largest source of foreign exchange by the 1950s. While renewing old flows and creating new ones, the Bracero Program also redefined the destinations of Mexican migrants: now almost all of them were recruited directly into farm labor.51

  The program also deepened the structures and culture of migration, including extralegal migration, in western Mexico.52 A whole industry of smugglers or “coyotes” emerged, who worked with US-based labor contractors to supply undocumented workers to farmers.53 Some famers preferred to avoid the bureaucracy and protections involved with the official system. Others lived in states like Texas that the Mexican government blacklisted from the program because of labor violations. By the time the program ended in 1964, it had outlived its demand because the extralegal system that had grown alongside it had grown large and strong enough to fulfill the country’s farm labor demand.54

  Legal scholar Daniel Kanstroom argues that the program legitimized “a particularly instrumentalist view of Mexican immigrant workers.” Employers, the law, and the population in general had long seen Mexicans as different from other immigrants—as essentially temporary and disposable. The Bracero Program institutionalized this position for the post–World War II period. Mexicans in the United States were automatically assumed to be temporary and perhaps without papers. In other words, Mexicans’ status was inherently “legally tenuous.”55

  The Bracero Program was also accompanied by a “massive bilateral deportation policy” that increased deportations to some seven hundred thousand by the early 1950s. “The wetback is a person of legal disability who is under jeopardy of immediate deportation if
caught. He is told that if he leaves the farm, he will be reported to the [Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which] will surely find him if he ventures into town or out onto the roads,” reported the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor in 1951.56

  Still, both farmers and government tacitly admitted that the line between legality and illegality was a fine one, and that “wetbacks” were an essential component of the system.57 In one incident in early 1954, as workers massed on the border seeking to cross in Mexicali, the INS urged them to the edge of town, where they crossed “illegally.” “Instead of sending them back to Mexico, however, US Border Patrol officials trotted them to the US side of the official crossing and directed them to touch a toe onto the Mexican side. . . . When this was done, US Labor Department officials gave the migrants contracts to sign, which completed their transformation from illegal immigrants to guestworkers.”58

  Just a few months later, the Eisenhower administration initiated Operation Wetback, a massive, military-style sweep of Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods aimed at deporting en masse those deemed to be in the country “illegally.” Over a million were deported. Like the deportations of the 1930s, Operation Wetback snared many individuals, including US citizens, simply for being ethnically Mexican.

  Attorney General Herbert Brownell distinguished between “the illegal Mexican migrants known as ‘wetbacks,’ and the legal Mexican nationals known as ‘braceros.’ . . . The illegals, who cross the border furtively in violation of the laws and regulations of both the United States and Mexico cause serious social and economic problems for the United States.”59 Yet the operation illustrated the symbiotic relationship between the Bracero Program and undocumented workers. Even as it was being carried out, Bracero recruitment continued unabated, and the INS offered numerous methods for farmers to legalize the workers they needed, a process termed “drying out the wetbacks.”60 As Kanstroom points out, “The remarkably symmetrical relationship between labor recruitment and the deportation system is illustrated by the fact that, up to 1964, the number of braceros, nearly 5 million, was almost exactly the same as the number of deportees.”61