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Chapter 3 The strength practically of the guard established on our boundaries , land and water, is little better than that at its weakest point. frank P. sargent, annuaL reporT of The coMMissioner-generaL of iMMigraTion, 1902 When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of congressional oversight of immigration in 1889, it did so on the basis of a commonsense understanding of sovereignty. Any independent nation, the court reasoned, ought to exercise “jurisdiction over its own territory.” Such jurisdiction included the power to admit and exclude foreigners from its territory.1 The effect of the court’s ruling, upholding the ability of Congress to set and enforce federal immigration restrictions, coincided with the political temperament of the day. Amid the economic hardships and national political turmoil of the 1890s, voices demanding further reform of American immigration policy gained influence in Congress and successfully pressed the case for expanding the classes of restricted aliens. But even as the court recognized that the principle of sovereignty gave the federal government the right to monitor crossings of its physical borders , immigrants to the United States continued to undermine the exercise of that sovereignty by demonstrating the essential vulnerability of those borders. In fact, additions to the proscribed classes of immigrants through the 1890s and 1900s deepened and reformulated the already existing problems of undocumented immigration and led directly to an increase in borderland smuggling. New smuggling networks emerged to serve the needs of the newly banned immigrant classes, many of them the so-called “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, by making use of still lightly patrolled land borders. As what had been perceived as a “Chinese problem” on the borders became a more generalized “immigration problem ,” the difficulties of border enforcement edged from the periphery to the center of American immigration enforcement efforts. DraWIng the LInes: bLUePrInts for ImmIgratIon enforcement on the borDers, 1891–1910 6 ImagInary LInes As a result, the 1890s and 1900s witnessed the first federal effort to institute systems of immigration control at U.S. land borders, efforts that would have profound implications for both the Canadian and the Mexican border. The Immigration Act of 1891 had ended an unsatisfying decadelong experiment with state administration of federal immigration laws by creating the office of the superintendent of immigration and authorizing the development of a federal Bureau of Immigration.2 While restrictionists and their allies in Congress spent much of the 1890s waging a highprofile campaign for a literacy requirement for immigrants, authorities in the newly created Bureau of Immigration wrestled with the problems of adequately enforcing the restrictions already in law. The new patterns of undocumented border crossing, principally through Canada in the 1890s but increasingly through Mexico after 1900, consumed an increasing amount of the new agency’s attention and energies. This chapter examines the Bureau of Immigration’s efforts to regulate immigrant entry and, in particular, land border crossings from the time of the passage of the 1891 Immigration Act through the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. During this period, Bureau of Immigration officials struggled to impose a system of inspection on border-crossing immigrants and to bring an end to undocumented border crossings on the Canadian and Mexican borders. Central to those efforts was an extraordinary set of agreements by which Bureau of Immigration inspectors were stationed at Canadian seaports and permitted to examine—and reject— U.S.-bound immigrants as they arrived on Canadian soil in the 1890s. But the effectiveness of that approach was short-lived, and the bureau had resorted to establishing a dedicated inspection and patrol force along the border by 1901. An effective end to patterns of European immigrant entry through Canada came only after the Canadian government itself began more thoroughly scrutinizing and screening immigrants arriving at its seaports after 1902. Not surprisingly, a solution to the problem of undocumented entry and immigrant smuggling on the northern border deepened the bureau’s problems on the nation’s southern border. The increased likelihood of being detected and detained on the Canadian border after 1902 encouraged individual immigrants and professional immigrant smuggling rings to adopt routes through Mexico rather than Canada. By 1905 the principal lines of traffic for undocumented Asian and European migrants ran through Mexico, and the bureau shifted its energies to crafting a Mexican solution. But the Mexican border proved, for a variety of reasons, far less amenable to the reforms American officials desired. Efforts to negotiate [18.191.181.231] Project MUSE (2024...

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