Editor's Introduction

Inspired by the June 2019 conference "Global Labor Migration: Past and Present" at Amsterdam's International Institute for Social History, Labor devotes this issue to a sample of the best of the latest research and writing across a diverse and stimulating field. In the first essay, Lauren Braun-Strumfels returns us to the formative early years of federal immigration control. Following the categorical exclusion of the Chinese in 1882, Congress revised the law to give immigration agents the right to exclude any person "likely to become a public charge," granting agents broad discretion to invoke what became known as the "LPC clause." Aside from inspector agency, Braun-Strumfels emphasizes the little-known role of the Italian government itself, with a special office (the only one of its kind) of its own to screen applicants at Ellis Island. Attempting to check outright exclusion of their emigrating nationals—a product of yawning rural poverty—that dwarfed that of any other country at the turn of the century, Italian officials played a dual role: protecting their own, while respecting the legitimacy of US efforts to stem the padrone system of labor control.

In the second essay, Sonia Hernández closely examines two cases that suggest the depth of transnational activism at the Mexico-US border. When immigrant farmer-cowboy Gregorio Cortez kills an investigating sheriff's deputy while trying to defend his own family in central Texas in 1901, his unhappy fate would seem to have been sealed. Yet the balance of local forces proved to be more complex. Cortez's defense team was able to rely on significant cross-class connections, including both organized obreros from the surrounding region and an influential, cross-border merchant, Francisco Chapa, with strong ties to the conservative Mexican government of Porfirio Díaz. The sustained pushback ultimately proved sufficient to win Cortez parole from the Texas governor. In her second case, Hernández focuses on Caritina Piña, an anarcho-syndicalist feminist from the working-class barrio of Villa Cecilia along Mexico's oil-rich Gulf Coast. Schooled in the revolutionary doctrines of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), Piña, like many of her comrades, regularly turned her attentions in the 1920s to cross-border events in the United States, closely monitoring and attempting to ease the fate of militant women arrested in the Luray Mills strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929.

Adam Goodman then zeroes in on the case of Rodolfo Lozoya to illustrate the politicization of border control policy in the early Cold War era. An immigrant steelworker and US Army veteran, living for years in Chicago with his US-born wife and seven children in Chicago, Lozoya was first identified for his Communist Party associations beginning in the 1940s. It was only years later, however, that authorities (ever following him) took advantage of the 1952 McCarren-Walter Act to deny Lozoya reentry to the United States after he returned home to visit his convalescent mother in 1957. As Goodman tells it, Lozoya's story provides a foreshadowing for the many latter-day cases of family separation and suffering due to administrative deportation orders. This one is made all the more poignant and mysterious, however, because the Department of Homeland Security continues to censor, and withhold, basic facts about the fate of Lozoya and his family.

With approximately two-thirds of the world's 258 million migrants in the labor force, the International Labor Organization, as Charlie Fanning and Nicola Piper reflect in the issue's final essay, has struggled to square "safe, regular and orderly" migration principles sought for migrants and refugees with the "decent work" standards imagined for all workers. A central tension, of course, is that defense of labor rights has always depended, in part, on controlling labor markets, whereas migrant opportunity equally requires access to those same markets. Threading the needle of democratic control of work standards, fundamentally decided at the national level, with a more universal, transnational agenda for migrant rights has placed the ILO in an inevitably fraught political position. As the failures of state-led efforts become increasingly evident, the authors conclude, only...