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6 Mexican Immigrants and Immigration Debate Two years after passing the historic 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which severely curtailed the number of southern and eastern Europeans coming into the United States and made it virtually impossible for immigrants from Asia and Africa to enter at all, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings to discuss a bill to amend that act to include the Western Hemisphere.1 The hearings, however, focused on only one aspect of immigration, as indicated by the title, “Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico.” During these hearings, Roy Orchard Woodruff, a Michigan congressman who opposed the bill, read a prepared statement about the important role Mexicans played on his state’s farms. To convince his fellow congressmen that the Mexicans who had been working in Michigan did not create any “race problems,” Woodruff told them that when 3,500 Mexicans met for three days to celebrate “Mexican Independence” in the small town of Shepherd, a town of one thousand whites, there was not the slightest disturbance. “It was the most orderly meeting of its kind” ever seen. But before Woodruff could continue his statement, Congressman Albert Johnson, one of the main architects of the 1924 act and chair of the current hearings, interrupted him, asking: “Now, did you say that Shepherd has become a sort of a Mexican village?” Woodruff quickly replied: “No; there are not Mexicans living there at all. They just assembled there for the purpose of celebrating this particular holiday.” When asked by Johnson whether any Mexicans stayed in Michigan during the winter months and “become reconciled to the surroundings,” Woodruff claimed, “Not to any extent. I have not known of any who remained during the winter. The Columbia Sugar Co. when the season is closed, gets them together and returns them to the Mexican border. I do not know whether under the law you can compel them to go or not, but I have never observed a single Mexican family around that part of the state in winter time.”2 This encounter between Woodruff and Johnson demonstrates that the repatriation campaigns of 1920–21 had not stopped the sugar beet industry from looking to Mexico for labor. As early as 1922, Michigan’s sugar beet companies began recruiting Mexican workers, and by 1927 Mexicans and Mexican Americans would make up 75 percent of the labor force. The encounter between Woodruff and Johnson also demonstrates that the issue of immigration restriction had not been completely resolved with the passing of the 1924 act. In fact, the Johnson-Reed Act, which did not apply to the Western Hemisphere, fueled the flames of restrictionists, who believed that the bill’s restrictions had not gone far enough and that Congress had created a new immigration problem while solving the old one. In the words of one of the most famous nativists, Madison Grant, “it is not logical to limit the number of Europeans while we throw the country open without limitation to Negroes, Indians and half breeds.”3 Believing that the newly built immigration wall allowed “unworthy” immigrants to continue to enter the nation, men like Albert Johnson of Washington and John Box of Texas began a campaign to shut what they referred to as the “back door.” They convinced their fellow congressmen to hold hearings in 1926, 1928, and 1930 to consider various bills to modify the 1924 Immigration Act to include either the Western Hemisphere as a whole or Mexico alone.4 Recycling much of the racial nativism of the pre-1924 era, avid restrictionists, including eugenicists, labor leaders, patriotic society members, and congressmen , warned that Mexicans, like the “hordes” of southern and eastern Europeans who had come before them, could not truly assimilate into American society. They charged that Mexican immigrants posed a particular threat to the nation because they were “docile,” “indolent,” and “backward.” Restrictionists raised the peril of allowing in a “race” of agricultural workers who would not only undermine white men and wages but also U.S. agriculture—one of the celebrated foundations of American democracy. These nativists went even further by arguing that Mexicans were part of a “racially mixed” population who would undermine the racial stock of the nation. At a time when the nation was attempting to harden its racial boundaries—the Supreme Court had just ruled that Japanese and Indian immigrants were ineligible to naturalize because they were not “white”—Mexican immigrants seemed to pose a particular threat.5 As they labored to build a legal...

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