Strange Neighbors: The Role of States in Immigration Policy

2. How Arizona Became Ground Zero in the War on Immigrants

40 > 41 program that sought to revive immigration flows that had died in the deportation campaigns of the 1930s (Calavita 1992). The program grew slowly at first, but expanded dramatically in the 1950s after employers complained about labor shortages and citizens reacted against undocumented migration. At that time, there were no numerical limits on the number of resident visas available to Latin Americans, and by the late 1950s around a half-million Mexicans were legally entering the United States each year, 90% temporarily as guest workers and 10% as permanent residents. Bracero migration was overwhelmingly male and focused heavily on growers in California, and to a lesser extent on agricultural employers in Texas. Braceros and legal immigrants also went to work sites in Illinois , particularly Chicago, where Mexican migrants had established a foothold in the 1920s (Arrendondo 2008). As temporary and permanent migration from Mexico grew during the 1950s, social networks evolved and ramified to connect workers in Mexico with employers in the United States, and by 1960 the movement of male workers back and forth was fully institutionalized and well integrated into social structures on both sides of the border. This mass movement was entirely legal, and unauthorized migration was close to nonexistent. For most Americans, Mexican migration, despite its volume, was invisible, and the presence of Mexicans in the country was uncontroversial. The Rise of Undocumented Migration This picture of tranquility along the border came to an end in 1965, when the U.S. Congress undertook two actions that greatly reduced the legal possibilities for entry into the Untied States from Latin America, especially from Mexico. Politically, these actions were not framed as anti-immigrant measures so much as civil rights reforms. As the civil rights movement gained momentum during the 1960s, pressure grew to eliminate racism from the U.S. immigration system, and in 1965 Congress responded, first by passing landmark amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act and second by terminating the Bracero Program, despite strenuous objections from Mexico. The 1965 amendments eliminated long-standing prohibitions on immigration from Asia and Africa and discarded the discriminatory 42 > 43 Homeland Security (2011) to assess Mexican migration to the United States in three categories: legal permanent residents, legal temporary workers, and illegal border crossers. Legal immigration is indicated by the number of Mexicans admitted to permanent residence, guest worker migration by the number of entries made by temporary workers , and undocumented migration by the annual number of apprehensions divided by the number of Border Patrol officers (expressed per thousand). The latter indicator—apprehensions per thousand officers— is a proxy for the volume of undocumented migration in any given year, one that standardizes for the intensity of the enforcement effort, which as we shall see has varied greatly over time. As can be seen, in 1959 guest worker migration was just under 450,000 per year, and during the early 1960s legal immigration fluctuated around 50,000 per year. Apprehensions, meanwhile, were occurring at around 10,000 per officer per year. With the elimination of the Bracero program in 1965, however, and the progressive imposition of more restrictive limits on legal immigration from the Americas, undocumented migration rose dramatically, with the number of apprehensions per officer increasing from around 30,000 in 1965 to 464,000 in 1977. Legal immigration increased more slowly, rising from around 40,000 in 1965 to reach 135,000 in 1978. Although the 20,000-visa cap took full effect in 1977, immigrants increasingly were able to overcome this limitation by acquiring U.S. citizenship. Whereas legal residents have the right to sponsor the entry of spouses and minor children subject to quota limitations, once they become U.S. citizens they obtain the right to sponsor the entry of these relatives outside of the quotas. Newly naturalized citizens also acquire the right to sponsor the entry of parents without restriction, as well as the right to sponsor the entry of brothers and sisters subject to numerical limitations. In other words, each new U.S. citizen tends to create additional legal immigrants in years to come, and as more Mexicans have attained U.S. citizenship, the volume of legal immigration has continued to grow and has remained well above the annual cap of twenty thousand visa entries for decades. As suggested by figure 2.1, the migratory system stabilized during the late 1970s, and the volume of both documented and undocumented immigrants stopped...