Mexican and Chinese Immigration
Picking up from Immigration Fairness, I left out most of the references to Chinese and Mexican immigration because they seemed to support a story of their own. Relevant portions are repeated here. I should note that this is a ridiculously superficial discussion of these subjects. For deeper discussions, Roger Daniel’s Guarding the Golden Door and Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects are recommended reading.
There are a few themes worth mentioning with respect to the treatment of these two ethnic groups. The first is how their status has changed over time. Chinese went from being banned to today’s idea of “model immigrants”. In large part, that change was affected by the propaganda needs of World War II and then later the Cold War. On the other hand, Mexican immigrants have been thought of as necessary and useful workers but also undesirable invaders, sometimes at the same time.
The Mexican Border
The attentive reader might ask — if there was no restriction on immigration from the Americas prior to 1965, including Mexico (the “Americas Loophole”), how did the Border Patrol come to start enforcing laws restricting Mexicans in the early 20th century, well before 1965? The answer is a mire of concerns about Chinese circumventing the Chinese Exclusion Act (Ngai, p64), Europeans circumventing restrictions and then quotas, and bootleggers. As agribusiness picked up in Texas and California in the 1920s, “the agricultural labor market assumed a distinctive migratory character.” (Ngai, p130) This migratory nature led to a complex love-hate relationship with those workers that continues to this day.
The original Border Patrol was literally recruited from the Klan and the Texas Rangers (who were themselves little better than Klansmen with badges, but that’s another story). These petty and sometimes blatantly racist bureaucrats loaded Mexican migrants and day laborers up with petty regulations, taxes, and degrading activities like bathing and delousing. Ngai says (Ngai, 2004, p. 89),
Walking (or wading) across the border emerged as the quintessential act of illegal immigration, the outermost point in a relativist ordering of illegal immigration. The method of Mexicans’ illegal entry could thus be perceived as ‘criminal’ and Mexican immigrants as undeserving of relief. Combined with the construction of Mexicans as migratory agricultural laborers (both legal and illegal) in the 1940s and 1950s, that perception gave powerful sway to the notion that Mexicans had no rightful presence on United States territory, no rightful claims of belonging.
As discussed in Immigration Fairness, all sorts of forgiveness was forthcoming for Europeans who immigrated in violation of restrictions (including the ever popular “overstayed visa”), but not so for Mexicans. These included
- In addition to pre-examination, the INS implemented a wartime measure of suspending deportation orders under the Alien Registration Act. Applied from 1941 through the late 1950s, several thousands of deportations were suspended every year. These included seamen, tourist visa overstays, and border crossers, but were mostly limited to Europeans (73%), not Mexicans (8%). (Ngai, Impossible Subjects, pp. 87–88)
- “Pre-examination” consisted of receiving a pre-examination certification, going into Canada, going to a US consulate there, receiving a visa for permanent residence, and then returning to the United States. (Ngai, 2004, p. 84) “The data indicate that between 1935 and 1959 the INS processed nearly 58,000 pre-examination cases and granted approval in the vast majority of them.” (Ngai, 2004, p. 87) The procedure found widespread use for European immigrants, but was denied to Asians because Chinese were ineligible for citizenship, and denied to Mexicans because the consul in Juarez, William Blocker, determined that the applicants were of “the laboring class” and should not be eligible. (Ngai, 2004, p. 86)
This is not to say that Mexican immigrants were completely left out of special exemptions. At times, large scale agricultural interests in Texas and California succeeded in lobbying to let agricultural workers into the country by challenging the complexity of the regulations. As Ngai summarizes it, “the growers invoked the ‘right to hire and fire farm labor as we [see] fit’. Growers further believed that too many federal agencies were involved in the program and specifically that the Department of Labor intruded upon the employment relationship.” (Ngai, 2004, p. 152) When the INS made exceptions in favor of these agricultural interests, it was known as “drying out the wetbacks.” (Ngai, 2004, p. 153)
For example, in the 1948 “El Paso Incident”, “the INS (with the approval of the White House) opened the border at El Paso to allow the entry of some seven thousand migrants who had massed there and threatened to overrun the border. The INS ‘arrested’ them and then paroled them to employers, explaining that this was a humanitarian gesture because both the laborers and farmers were ‘desperate.’” (Ngai, 2004, p. 153) In 1949 the INS legalized four thousand illegal farm laborers for work in California and Arizona and eighty thousand in Texas. In 1953 the United States authorized bracero contracts to some five thousand illegal agricultural workers.…
A second ‘border incident’ took place in January 1954, when the INS orchestrated the legalization of several thousand farm workers by allowing them to effect a voluntary departure — in some cases stepping eighteen inches over the international boundary line — and then ‘enter’ the United States under the Ninth Proviso.” (Ngai, 2004, p. 153)
During the Depression, large numbers of legal Mexican immigrants were repatriated by the simple expedient of cutting them off from the social safety net that sprung up for the rest of the US (well, the white inhabitants — see Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law), and then offering to pay their way back home. About 20% of the Mexican population in the US was repatriated during this time. (Ngai, pp72–75).
In the 1940s, the US government established the Bracero program to promote and regulate the use of Mexican contract workers. In the 1950s, Operation Wetback was instituted to stop the use of Mexican workers. And so it goes…
Chinese Immigration
After the Civil War, the US found itself expanding trade into Asia, and signed the Burlingame Treaty with China. Among other things, and echoing Jefferson’s eloquent 1774 appeal to migration as a basic human right (conservatives who constantly appeal to The Founders never seem to mention that), the treaty “recognized the ‘inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects, respectively, from the one country to the other, for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.’” (Abrams, April 2005, “Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law”, Columbia Law Review, 105(3), 641–716) At the time, immigration was considered to be a state rather than federal concern, especially with respect to Irish immigration in the Atlantic northeast (Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor). Thousands of Chinese laborers had been actively recruited to build the western railroads, and upon completion of the Central Pacific, many subsequently moved to San Francisco to find work. In a reenactment of the reaction to Irish immigration, anti-Chinese societies began to form and California began to attempt to restrict Chinese immigration, running headlong into the federal realm of foreign policy and the Burlingame Treaty.
The Page Act represented an unprecedented expansion of federal regulation into areas previously thought of as state areas of responsibility. This was the era when the federal government began to expand its powers from constitutional limit to constitutional license, and it did so to support the pseudo-scientific race theories of that day which declared that Asians were naturally inclined to slavery, immorality, and disease. In particular, the Page Law was based on California state laws directed towards the supposed lewdness and immorality of Chinese women. Anti-Chinese sentiment at the time was popular enough that the 1876 Republican platform included the plank opposing the “immigration and importation of Mongolians.” (Abrams, p. 690)
The Page Act was not enough for anti-Chinese activists of the day. Both political parties wanted to renegotiate the Burlingame Treaty, and Congress reacted by barring entrance to any ship with more than 15 Chinese passengers. Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed it not on account of the explicit racism — in fact, he inveighed against Chinese as manifesting “all the traits of race, religion, manners, and customs, habitation, mode of life, segregation here, and the keeping up of the ties of their original home …[which stamp them as strangers and sojourners, and not incorporated elements of our national life.” (Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, p. 18) Eventually, the treaty was renegotiated and Congress responded by passing an Act which banned Chinese immigration for 20 years. Republican president Chester A. Arthur vetoed this with a message, “It may be that the great and paramount interest of protecting our labor from Asiatic competition may justify us in a permanent adoption of this policy; but it is wiser in the first place to make a shorter experiment, with a view hereafter of maintaining only such features as time and experience may command.” (Daniels, p. 20) Congress re-passed an act with a 10 year limit — this was the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an act which began to selectively close the open border with an overtly racist proscription that would be enforced until 1943.
When the 10 years was up, Congress once again extended and amplified the original act with the Geary Act. This law suspended bail to Chinese aliens in habeus corpus proceedings and placed the burden of proving citizenship on Chinese immigrants rather than the government. They were required to obtain a certificate of citizenship or face deportation. (Daniels, p. 21) In the same period, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1891, which formally established an immigration bureaucracy for the first time. As a result, Ellis Island was established the very next year as the primary point of entry on the East coast.
Daniels points out that a second immigration office was opened on the West coast in 1910: Angel Island. Although putatively thought to be serving the same function, in practice Ellis and Angel Islands were very different. Over its life, Ellis Island rejected about 1.5% of the applicants coming through it, while Angel Island rejected about 19%. (Daniels, p. 25) The practice in Ellis Island was to move Europeans through quickly, while the practice at Angel Island was to be adversarial. This experience at Angel Island was to dominate the immigration service and lead to many of the policies which ran contrary to the principles of Anglo-American jurisprudence upon which the country was founded. Daniels (Daniels, p. 26) quotes Lucy Salter on the result:
The doctrines providing the foundation for immigration law arose out of struggles on the West Coast among Chinese immigrants, government officials, and federal judges over the enforcement of the Chinese exclusion laws. Though on the margins of society, Chinese immigrants in their resistance to exclusion laid claim to principles and practices — habeus corpus, due process, evidentiary rules, judicial review — that were at the heart of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Officials were faced with the choice of extending those core principles to the Chinese…. Rejecting that option, government officials instead persuaded Congress and the Supreme Court that the nation’s gates could be effectively guarded only if they were allowed full authority and discretion … without interference from the federal courts. Ironically, in their efforts to secure the door against Chinese immigration, officials undermined the very principles they accused the Chinese of subverting. The immigration law resulting from this struggle stood at odds with one of the most esteemed Anglo-American legal principles- the rule of law.
In 1943, in an effort to counter Japanese propaganda during WWII, Congress finally repealed the Chinese exclusion laws. However, the action did not open the borders to Chinese immigration: the quota was set to 105 per year. That meant 105 ethnic Chinese, regardless of their starting point, not just people moving from China. (Ngai, p203) However, by 1950, about 25% of the Chinese living in the United States had come in illegally — many of them “paper sons” who had claimed to be the children of US citizens. A frequent justification for these claims was the devastation of public records resulting from the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco. As a result of Cold War policies, the federal government established the Chinese Confession Program in 1957 to allow them to clear up their status. (Ngai, p.204–206)
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Again, my purpose here was to illustrate the ways in which immigration policy has a racist tinge to it, but is also subject to the needs of wartime propaganda and business. Chinese and Mexican immigration has been treated very differently than European immigration, largely as a result of the waves of xenophobia and eugenics that washed over the US in the late 19th and early 20th century which culminated in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. Chinese were allowed to immigrate for use in the construction of the transcontinental railroads, but then completely banned until Congress had a need to counter Japanese war propaganda. Mexicans were not actually banned from immigration by the 1924 Act. However, their presence in the country has always been a sore spot for xenophobes, a boon to large scale agribusiness, and a human right to classical liberals and humanists, setting up a tension that blows with political winds.
