Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930

Chapter 5 Northward Bound: Mexican Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees at the Border, 1900–1921

We can exclude practically all of the Mexican aliens of the laboring class who apply for admission at this port as persons likely to become a public charge, for the reason that they are without funds, relatives or friends in the United States, and have no fixed destination ; at the same time we know that any able-bodied man who may be admitted can immediately secure transportation to a point where employment will be furnished him. frank berkshIre, sUPervIsIng InsPector of the mexIcan borDer DIstrIct, 1909 By 1908, the U.S.-Mexico border had become virtually equated with immigrant smuggling and undocumented entry, and was viewed as the most important battleground between immigration authorities and excludable immigrants.1 Reports from immigration officers on the border in 1910 suggested that the bureau might soon master the smuggling situation, but the extent to which American immigration authorities could ever succeed in making border administration as effective as seaport administration remained very much up in the air. And as if struggles with Chinese, Japanese, and Lebanese smuggling operations were not enough, profound changes in the American Southwest and in the neighboring Republic of Mexico in the 1900s had introduced an unexpected wrinkle into border enforcement: the growing phenomenon of Mexican immigration and cross-border labor migration. Economic and political developments in Mexico and the American Southwest in the opening decades of the twentieth century shaped in important ways the halting development of immigration controls on the Mexican border by creating, for the first time, significant patterns of Mexican labor migration into the United States. Between 1900 and 1930, Mexican migrants increasingly came to predominate in the legal and undocumented cross-border traffic. By 1930 they would replace Asian and Chapter 5 northWarD boUnD: mexIcan ImmIgrants, mIgrants, anD refUgees at the borDer, 1900–1921 124 ImagInary LInes European migrants as the central focus of border authorities, but that process was gradual and uneven. Two events in the 1910s—revolution in Mexico and war in Europe—sparked this transition by interrupting the trans-Mexico smuggling routes that had flourished in the 1900s. At the same time, and more important, the dislocations of the Mexican revolution dramatically recast the scope and focus of border enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico line by further stimulating the relatively new phenomenon of Mexican immigration. By the mid-1900s a small but steady stream of Mexican immigrants, mostly men pulled by opportunities for wage labor in the Southwest, already were crossing the border; with the outbreak of violence in 1910, Mexican workers and families began crossing the border in even larger numbers. Mexican immigration profoundly complicated the picture of immigration law enforcement along the border. Border officials struggled to determine how best to enforce applicable immigration laws while accommodating the expanding market for Mexican labor. At the same time, Mexican immigrants were discovering for themselves the extent to which the border could be subverted. Because borderland Mexicans had often come to work temporarily or seasonally in the United States, border officials initially ignored the border crossings of the late 1890s and early 1900s. As a matter of administration, the fact that Mexicans were not subject to the immigrant head tax reinforced the practice of treating Mexican immigration separately. As a result, although subject to the general provisions of American immigration law, Mexican immigrants flowed across the border relatively unrestricted until the early 1900s. Even when border immigration authorities began scrutinizing them more closely after 1905 and rejecting some as diseased, contract laborers, or potential paupers, Mexicans immediately showed the same propensity as other immigrants to turn to surreptitious means of entry. But while Mexican immigrants appeared just as ready as others to disregard the prescribed legalities of border crossing and to enter the United States surreptitiously, they in fact at times found less need to do so. Through the 1900s and 1910s, American immigration authorities themselves at times used informal and formal means to open the border to technically excludable Mexican immigrants. Accommodating immigration laws to the waxing and waning demand for Mexican workers, border authorities became implicated in the construction of a permeable border during this period. By omission and commission, by regulation and by acts of discretion, they created a different, more flexible sort of border for some residents of the neighboring republic. northWarD boUnD 125 a neW stream Mexicans had crossed back and forth across the border with the United States in the decades following...