Mexico is facing new challenges as millions of Mexican migrants return from the United States and Central Americans seek asylum and safe passage through the country. Historically, Mexico has been a predominantly immigrant-sending country.
Political unrest and violence in Central America, heavy-handed immigration enforcement in the United States, and increased development in Mexico has made Mexico a country of destination, return, and transit. Each of these roles demands a unique, humane, and thorough policy response.
Until recently, Mexico has never had a coherent immigration policy. Past laws, such as the General Law of Population, focused solely on enforcing criminal penalties for immigrants entering or staying in the country without authorization. The Mexican government has made efforts to ease the transition of returnees through the creation of several programs and initiatives aimed toward reintegration.
For example, the Somos Mexicanos initiative, which the National Institute of Immigration INM implemented in , aims to facilitate the reintegration of Mexican nationals, providing them with food, medical attention, toll-free calling, free transportation, and employment assistance upon initial return.
While such existing programs and initiatives are a step in the right direction, they have done little to ease the transition of many returnees, who continue to struggle with emotional trauma and lack access to employment, educational opportunities, and the long-term support they need to navigate life in Mexico.
With the government falling short, nonprofits have instead shouldered the responsibility of facilitating successful reintegration by directly working with returnees, providing them with long-term support, and serving as valuable networks.
Yet while nonprofits have worked to fill the gaps that exist between the services that government-run programs offer, Mexico is still struggling to keep up with returnees. Moreover, if the Trump administration is allowed to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals DACA program, stripping immigration status from approximately , current DACA recipients—nearly 80 percent of whom are from Mexico—the forcible or voluntary return of these long-term U.
Since early , Mexico has responded to the increased number of Central American migrants with force. In response to pressure from the United States , Mexico has heightened security efforts along its southern border and has detained and deported thousands of Central American migrants. Mexico and in fact, the entire Western hemisphere was exempt from the quotas in part because of the agricultural lobby: farmers in the U.
Southwest argued that without Mexican migrants, they would be unable to find the laborers needed to sow and harvest their crops. In addition, migration from the Western Hemisphere made up less than one-third of the overall flow of migrants to the United States at the time.
Finally, the perceptions of Mexicans as temporary migrants and docile laborers contributed to the fact that they were never included in the quotas. Soon after the quotas, the Cristero War erupted in Mexico.
What impact did this have on immigration? Between and , Catholic partisans took up arms against the Mexican federal government in protest against a series of laws that placed strong restrictions on the public role of the Catholic Church.
In a country that was 98 percent Catholic, this provoked a furious response. Many Mexican Catholics were determined to go to war against their government until the laws were overturned. The Cristero War had a twofold effect: first, it led to new waves of emigrants, exiles and refugees who fled the violence and economic disruption.
Second, it politicized Mexican migrants in the United States around the Cristero cause. While not all Mexican migrants supported the Catholic side of the conflict, thousands did.
They organized mass protests of the Mexican government from within their communities in the United States. He was eventually caught in Tucson, where he was subsequently put on trial.
The plot was uncovered by agents working for the U. Department of Justice. He served some time in jail, although he was eventually able to get his sentence commuted, thanks to some powerful supporters within the U. Catholic hierarchy. His story was important because it demonstrated how far some Mexican immigrants were willing to go in order to fight the Mexican government during the Cristero War years. And shortly after that, the Stock Market crashed and altered Mexican immigration once again.
The immigration histories of national groups from Asia, Africa, and Europe were much more varied in trajectory and tempo. These usually began with massive movements, driven by famine, political strife, or burgeoning economic opportunities in the United States; they then slowed, tapered off, or abruptly ended, as was the case with Chinese immigration, from to This fact helps explain why Mexico has been the single largest source of immigrants in the United States for the longest period of time, which paradoxically begs for explanation at this moment, when so much anti-immigrant rhetoric is focused on Mexico and not the other countries, which have also been major sources of unauthorized immigrants.
Geographic proximity, compounded by profound economic disparities between the two countries and easily accessible work opportunities, have continuously pulled Mexican immigrants northward.
Their quick and easy movement has been facilitated by a porous border, one that remains poorly marked, and, for much of the 20th century , laxly and often only seasonally patrolled to assure employers unfettered access to cheap labor with minimal government regulation.
This expanse of over 1, miles is poorly marked. In many places, only old concrete markers, sagging, dry-rotted fence posts, rusted barbed wire, and the Rio Grande, which has continually changed its course over the centuries, demarcate these two sovereign nations.
Since , when the U. Border Patrol was created mainly to prohibit the unauthorized entry of Chinese immigrants through Mexico—not to stop Mexican laborers—American attempts to regulate entries and exits effectively have been concentrated mainly along the most highly trafficked transportation routes leading north. The inability of the United States to patrol the entire length of its border with Mexico has meant that any Mexican eager to work in the United States has rarely found the border an insurmountable obstacle.
If they have encountered it temporarily so, immigrants tried to cross until successful, or they have turned to professional smugglers known as coyotes to maximize safe passage into the country without border inspection or official visa authorization. In , there were approximately 11 million such unauthorized immigrants in the United States, 56 percent, or 6.
Over the course of the last years, Mexican immigrants have largely toiled in agriculture, ranching, railroad construction, and mining. Since the s, as agricultural work was increasingly mechanized, displaced workers moved into cities laboring in construction and service industries. The history of this migratory stream and the political responses to it have evolved through six distinct periods, each marked by its own logic, demands, xenophobic anxieties, and levels of federal governance.
Mexican immigration began in , at the conclusion of the US-Mexican War. Driven by annexationist designs for additional western lands and resources, the United States militarily invaded Mexico and occupied its sovereign space for almost two years. The United States provoked hostilities by entering Mexican territory that the Republic of Texas spuriously claimed after its independence in When Texas became an American state in , the United States government pressed this claim, sending soldiers into the contested territory and provoking hostilities.
To this day, when Mexicans hear American rants about Mexican immigrants illegally invading sovereign American space, their retort is that American Texans were really the first illegal immigrants who invaded Mexico and began the US-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war on February 2, , gave Mexican citizens residing in the ceded territory one year to remove themselves and their property back into Mexico. Estimates suggest that roughly 31, individuals moved back into Mexico.
Those who followed the Mexican mining personnel were of peasant origin. They got pushed out of Mexico by high rates of unemployment among an increasingly landless rural peasantry and pulled to the United States by higher wages. Since the s, largely influenced by French, British, and American liberal theorists, Mexican intellectuals believed that if their country was to prosper and modernize, its land tenure system, then characterized by large tracts held by the Catholic Church, the military, professional guilds, and indigenous communities, had to be unfettered and transformed into private property.
The legal potential for achieving this goal came through the promulgation of the Ley Lerdo , legislation that prohibited corporate groups from holding land in common.
In the years that followed, many indigenous villages saw their communal lands privatized, morselized, and alienated, leaving behind a swelling landless peasantry. By , 98 percent of all families in central Mexico were landless. The vast majority of Mexican workers who first immigrated to the United States originated from these places. In step-like fashion these men first left their ancestral villages, then migrated to urban centers seeking wage work. A worker laying railroad ties in Mexico, on average, earned 20 cents a day in In the United States, the same work paid one dollar.
Between and , mostly male Mexican immigrant workers were concentrated in a number of economic sectors. They first came to work in the gold mines of California, then moved on to other extractive industries, mostly copper and coal. Next, they built the railroads that began to crisscross the American West, followed by the construction of the irrigation works that transformed the arid deserts of the West into verdant farmland.
Women sometimes migrated with their male kin, working in homes as nannies and domestic servants or in restaurants, hotels, and laundries, but their numbers were never proportionally significant until after the s. The Mexican immigrant population of the United States grew rapidly in subsequent years. The US census counted roughly 42, ethnic Mexicans residing in the United States in ; 68, in ; 78, in ; , in ; , in ; , in ; and , in By , 41 percent of these workers were concentrated in Texas, mostly picking cotton and tending livestock.
Next in regional importance was California, where 31 percent of all Mexican immigrants toiled in agricultural fields. Arizona employed 8 percent of the numeric total, New Mexico, 3 percent; and Colorado, 2 percent; most of these laborers worked mainly in sugar beet production.
The human and economic displacements unleashed by Mexican modernization between and made this massive migration into the United States possible at a moment of intense labor demand in the United States. Mexican peasants had lost vast expanses of ancestral lands. High inflation in the price of basic commodities followed, producing profound income inequalities, which, when compounded by middle class grievances against the state, precipitated the Mexican Revolution of As different factions in this civil war wrestled for control of the state apparatus, perhaps as many as 1.
Those able to move sought refuge from the violence in the United States. According to the Annual Reports of the Commissioner General of Immigration , between and , about , Mexicans officially entered the United States as immigrants, a statistic that vastly underreports the true magnitude of this influx. Before , federal statistics were kept only on foreign-born immigrants arriving at maritime ports, such as those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Baltimore.
During the most violent phase of the Mexican Revolution, from to , on average, only 16, Mexican immigrants requested entry at all of these ports yearly. Clearly, most Mexicans were not traveling to the United States by ship; they were coming by train, on mules, or by foot. In alone, after inspection stations finally were constructed along the land border between Mexico and the United States, the number of Mexican entrants jumped to nearly 88,, perhaps better reflecting the true dimensions of this exodus on a yearly basis.
Mexican immigrants were needed in the United States from to because the labor of other easily exploitable immigrants had been severely restricted or outlawed. As early as the s the arrival of large numbers of foreign workers ignited nativist fears among American workers. The American government addressed the unregulated entry of immigrant workers slowly, at first with the growth of federal regulation over immigration, which had previously been a state right, then with qualitative restrictions on the type of the immigrants granted entry, which eventually were coupled with quantitative limits.
US federal oversight of immigration began in , when the Federal Bureau of Immigration was established. Previously, states had the authority to admit whom they wished. A Superintendent of Immigration housed in the Treasury Department came next, in , followed in by the construction of Ellis Island as an immigrant inspection station. The first qualitative restrictions on immigration were imposed by the Immigration Act of , which excluded.
To assure that immigrants would not become public charges dependent on poor relief, each arrival had to pay a four-dollar head tax and pass a host of physical exams affirming their fitness, vigor, and ability to engage in hard work. The Immigration Act of was more expansive, coupling these qualitative entry restrictions with the first quantitative limits to the total number of immigrants admissible yearly.
Literacy tests, ordered for all persons over the age of sixteen, were aimed primarily at excluding Southern European Catholics and Eastern European Jews. The head tax was doubled to eight dollars, and an additional visa fee of ten dollars was levied. The impact of this legislation was soon evident. In , , immigrants entered the United States. By , the number had shrunk to , The culmination of this era of heightening immigration restriction came in , with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, which established national quotas based on the percentage of foreign born from a particular country as enumerated in the census.
The total number of immigrants admitted yearly was capped at , In , the total number of immigrants admitted into the United States was ,, of which , were from Northern and Western Europe. Only 21, immigrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe. The Johnson-Reed Act also created the U. Border Patrol under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor, which was given broad authority to enforce immigrant entries and exits, particularly along the southern border.
The reasons for this were several. Mexico had actively courted Chinese and Japanese capital since the late 19th century as part of its own modernizing ambitions, offering wealthy investors rapid paths to Mexican citizenship. Mexican citizens, even of ethnic Chinese and Japanese ancestry, were not barred from entry into the United States. The border patrol was tasked with the regulation of this traffic.
Though many American nativists and their congressional allies railed loudly against the increasingly visible presence of large numbers of Mexican immigrants, demanding entry limits, the Johnson-Reed Act did not placate them largely because of the political power of economic interests in the American West.
The Act included a major quota exception for workers from Western Hemisphere countries, meaning from Mexico and Canada. Since the net migrant flow between Canada and the United States was minimal, the exception placated agricultural, mining, and manufacturing enterprises, which by had become almost completely dependent on Mexican labor, which they found cheap, tractable, subservient, and willing to endure wretched work conditions without complaint. From to , nearly , authorized Mexican immigrants entered the United States.
The majority, or 87 percent, was congregated in rural areas of the Southwest, working mainly as seasonal itinerant agricultural wage laborers. They vividly described the brutal work and living conditions that awaited them, along with widespread super-exploitation and racism.
They emigrated, nevertheless. There was little work in Mexico. Since the ratification of the US Alien Contract Law in , American employers had been prohibited from issuing such contracts to foreign workers before they set foot on American soil.
Mexicans who emigrated north between and faced a double bind. They could not legally obtain contracts and thus could not obtain the requisite local exit approvals. Nor did they have the resources to pay US head taxes and visa fees. For the majority of these immigrants, their exit from Mexico was unsanctioned, as was their entry into the United States, thus rendering them particularly vulnerable to the abuses and exploitation, of which Mexico constantly warned its citizens.
Mexican seasonal immigrants became the preferred work force in the American Southwest because they bore the costs of their own travel and domestic reproduction during the winter and fallow seasons. My obligation is ended. Typically, Mexican immigrants migrated into cities at the end of the harvest and there sought poor relief for their months of unemployment. The rhetoric of the Mexican Problem eventually encompassed other seething resentments toward these immigrants, made all the more potent by their rising numbers, their increasing visibility, and the racially motivated fears they ignited about the potential mongrels they would surely sire if allowed to mix with white women freely, as some of these Mexicans were clearly doing.
Reverse migration, accomplished through massive repatriation campaigns, characterizes the second phase of Mexican immigration history. Black Thursday , October 24, , marks its start, when the American stock market crashed, causing a major global economic depression.
Social workers, who had been instrumental in rhetorically framing and militating against the Mexican Problem, accelerated their campaigns, taking them to Congress, complaining that Mexican immigrants were lazy, inordinately dependent, diseased, delinquent, illiterate, and inassimilable.
Success finally came shortly after Working together, social workers and immigration officials identified Mexicans who had asked merely for food baskets and clothing, declared them public charges, and demanded their rapid deportation.
What followed were dragnets between and in workplaces, in parks, and even in public squares throughout the Southwest. The dragnets indiscriminately swept up Mexican immigrants—Mexican American citizens, and permanent visa residents alike—put them on trains and sent them south to the border, sometimes deep into Mexico.
The intent of these forced deportations and so-called voluntary repatriations was clear: to rid the republic of ethnic Mexican competitors for unskilled, low wage work that white Americans said they would willingly perform and rightfully belonged to them.
While social workers doggedly resisted undertaking such draconian actions against Northern and Western European immigrants living in the Midwest and Northeast, massive deportations became possible in the Southwest because few Mexicans had naturalized as citizens, most were politically disenfranchised, and most also had toiled in racially segregated enclaves that limited their social integration into local communities and the larger body politic.
Organized labor forged alliances with American workers through working class solidarity, something Mexican American community organizations did as well, favoring their American citizen kin over their Mexican co-ethnics and former countrymen.
The mechanics of deportation were hastened by cooperation between federal immigration authorities and local charity agencies.
The State of California apologizes to those individuals. The State of California regrets the suffering and hardship those individuals and their families endured as a direct result of the government sponsored Repatriation Program of the s. The lull in emigration from Mexico to the United States lasted from roughly to The Immigration and Naturalization Service INS routinely denied their requests, explaining that there was an abundant supply of American labor eager to perform the necessary work if offered competitive wages.
Congress quickly negotiated a set of increasingly expansive bilateral labor agreements with Mexico for the importation of guest laborers, known as braceros brazo in Spanish means arm; braceros were men who worked with their arms, mostly as farmhands.
In , the United States had outlawed contracting foreigners to work on American soil, deeming such agreements unfree labor akin to chattel slavery. Despite such laws, reaffirmed in the Immigration Act, on August 4, , the United States and Mexico established a program for the recruitment and importation of Mexican contract laborers.
It was the first such guest worker program, although several more followed. In the United States, the Bracero Program was packaged as a wartime emergency measure that would prevent the disruption of agricultural production and minimize food price inflation. Since the enacting the Mexican Constitution, the country had demanded that emigrants gain local sanction and obtain a foreign contract to exit. Now, as the official labor contractor, Mexico had a way to enforce its laws, only approving the exit of young, working-age, landless men formally contracted by the government, which could prove that their labor was not needed locally, thus largely originating from the central Mexican states where peasant unemployment was highest.
Employers initiated the process by requesting a certain number of Mexican contract workers. The State Department then conveyed the request to the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations, which in turn recruited the number requested. Once braceros entered the United States, American intermediaries transported them to assigned sites. Braceros were guaranteed set wages comparable to those paid American agricultural workers, for specific periods of time, with decent living and working conditions, transportation to and from the border, and a withholding of 10 percent of their earnings, which would be set aside in a Mexican bank account and paid if and when they returned to Mexico.
This emergency labor mobilization, initially known as Public Law 45, originally was congressionally authorized from to It was renewed each year through and then reauthorized in Public Law 78, which expired in From to , , Mexican braceros participated in the program, working in twenty-four states.
The majority were concentrated in California agriculture, tending to cotton, citrus fruits, melons, lettuce, and a host of other table vegetables. About a third of all braceros were employed by railroad companies.
This issue is still being litigated in Mexican courts. The Bracero Program provided the ideal, pliable workers American employers desired.
By , the United States acknowledged that the limited number of bracero contracts and the immense demand for cheap labor during World War II had resulted in a large Mexican immigrant population that easily found employment without border inspection or work authorization documents.
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