Read Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) Online
Authors: Aviva Chomsky
Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (7 page)
Most Europeans who arrived in the United States prior to 1924 did pretty much what immigrants from Mexico and Central America did a few decades later: they gathered their families and their belongings, put together the money they needed for the trip, and embarked on their journey. They didn’t “do it the right way,” wait in line, or follow a legal process, because there was no line or process.
The records of Ellis Island are filled with the stories of individuals like Irving Berlin, who went on to become an iconic American songwriter, author of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” and “God Bless America.” The family of Israel Baline, age five, fled their home in Russia after their village was attacked in a pogrom and their house burned to the ground. They traveled “illegally” because, in 1893, Russia (unlike most countries at the time) required a passport for travel and exit; they “smuggled themselves from town to town and country to country” until reaching Antwerp, Belgium, where they boarded a ship bound for New York. On the ship’s manifest, their last name was changed from Baline to Beilin, so they entered the United States under a false name. (The name “Irving Berlin” was introduced by a printer’s error when Israel produced his first album at age nineteen.)
8
Since the United States had only minimal entry requirements for Europeans at the time, family members were given a medical inspection by the US Public Health Service to determine whether they had any infectious disease and a legal inspection to determine whether they were likely to become public charges. Only about 2 percent of would-be immigrants were rejected as a result of these inspections.
Mae Ngai argues that with so few restrictions on immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “there was no such thing as ‘illegal immigration.’ The government excluded a mere 1% of the 25 million immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before World War I, mostly for health reasons. (Chinese were the exception, excluded on grounds of ‘racial unassimilability.’) The statutes of limitations of one to five years meant that even those here unlawfully did not live forever with the specter of deportation.”
9
The 1924 law, in addition to establishing the quota system, created the concept of illegality by making entry without inspection illegal, and making deportability permanent by eliminating the statute of limitations. Before 1924, what made a person deportable was his or her membership in an excluded class; furthermore, after the person had been in the country for a period of time, his or her presence became legal despite prior excludability. Now, a person who entered without inspection could be, technically, “illegal.”
10
Still, there were many ways for Europeans who didn’t “follow the rules” to become legal. The 1929 registry law helped those who entered before 1921. Between 1935 and the late 1950s, European immigrants without documentation were allowed to adjust their status by reentering through Canada to obtain legal permanent residency. After 1940, immigrants who could show that their families would suffer “serious economic detriment” could have their deportation suspended. All of these provisions applied only to European immigrants, since they were the only ones allowed to immigrate under the 1924 exclusions. (Mexicans were still crossing the border easily, but they were not considered immigrants.) Some two hundred thousand Europeans without documents were able to legalize their status using these means.
11
In 1965, the United States abandoned the differential quota system, replacing it with a new one that imposed equal quotas on all countries. This meant that, for the first time, Western Hemisphere migrants—primarily Mexicans—were classified as immigrants. This change essentially created illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America, but without all of the loopholes and exceptions that had allowed Europeans to adjust their status.
12
Donna Gabaccia’s research shows that media references to so-called illegal immigration closely followed restrictive legislation.
The earliest references are to “illegal immigration,” which referred to the movement of workers from China; they appeared immediately after passage of the 1882 Chinese exclusion. With the exclusion of all Asians and the restriction of southern and eastern European migrations in the 1920s, “illegal immigrant” became an intermittent fixture in the pages of
New York Times
, where it usually meant stowaways, persons who “jumped ship,” or the “immigrant bootleggers” who supposedly smuggled in workers and “immoral” women. Only after World War II (and a brief period when most stories about “illegal immigrants” focused on European Jews entering the British mandate in Palestine) did the term—understood by then to mean “wetbacks” crossing the Rio Grande—become attached firmly to workers from Mexico. And only after 1965 did the term become common in a wide array of writings by journalists, scholars, and Congressional representatives.
13
Today, of course, the term “illegal immigrant” has become common currency. The rest of this chapter will look at two of the largest sources of undocumented immigrants in the United States today, Mexico and Guatemala. It will ask how people from those countries came to migrate to the United States, and how and why their migrations have become illegalized.
AN OVERVIEW OF UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION
The undocumented population in the United States increased rapidly between 1965, when the first restrictive measures were passed against Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, and the beginning of the twenty-first century. By 1980, there were from 2 to 4 million undocumented immigrants in the country, rising to 8.5 million in 2000 and reaching a peak of almost 12 million in 2007.
14
Notably, over half of those undocumented in 2011 had arrived between 1995 and 2004, with only 14 percent arriving between 2005 and 2011.
15
Thus, most undocumented people have been in the country for quite a while. The rise in the undocumented coincided with an even greater rise in the overall Hispanic population in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1970, the 9.6 million Hispanics in the United States made up 4.7 percent of the population. Four decades later, the Hispanic population had jumped to 50.5 million or 16 percent of the population.
16
Most of these have consistently been Mexicans. Estimates for the undocumented Mexican population rose from 1.13 million in 1980 to 2.04 million in 1990 and 4.68 million in 2000, rising to a high of 7.03 million in 2008 before stabilizing and declining to 6.8 million in 2011. The Central American undocumented population also rose after 1980, reaching 570,000 Salvadorans, 430,000 Guatemalans, and 300,000 Hondurans in 2008. For Central Americans, the numbers continued to increase after 2008: in 2011, there were 660,000 from El Salvador, 520,000 from Guatemala, and 380,000 from Honduras. Together, Central Americans and Mexicans made up three-quarters of the growth in the undocumented population between 1980 and 2008.
17
Moreover, a significant proportion—over half—of Mexicans and Central Americans who are here are undocumented. Fifty-eight percent of Mexicans, 57 percent of Salvadorans, 71 percent of Guatemalans, and 77 percent of Hondurans are undocumented. “Never before have so many people been outside the law and never before have the undocumented been so concentrated within such a small number of national origins,” wrote Douglas Massey and Karen Pren.
18
Mexico and Central America are thus key pieces in the puzzle of undocumentedness in the United States.
With this big picture in mind, we must start to untangle the history of undocumented migration from Mexico and Central America.
MEXICANS
The largest group of undocumented people in the United States today comes from Mexico. Many are from the central-western Mexican states that have been sending migrants northward for over a century, although increasingly migrants hail from heavily indigenous regions in the south of the country that had seen little out-migration before the 1990s. Almost 60 percent of the undocumented, over 6 million people in 2010, were Mexican. Other Latin Americans make up another 23 percent.
19
Mexicans also make up the largest foreign-born population in the United States, with about 29 percent of the foreign-born or 12 million people.
20
As noted above, over half of Mexicans in the United States are undocumented.
Surveys taken of Mexican migrants in Mexico (i.e., having returned from the United States) show another side of the story: that lots of undocumented people return home after being in the United States. The Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University and the University of Guadalajara surveyed eighty thousand return migrants from twenty-one Mexican states, as well as migrants from those communities who have settled in the United States. In Mexico, the interviews show that 83 percent had entered the United States illegally on their first trip, and 73 percent on their most recent trip. In the United States, 77 percent responded that they had entered illegally on their first trip, and 56 percent that they entered illegally on their most recent trip. (The last response may be skewed by individuals reluctant to reveal current illegal status.)
21
To understand why and how so many Mexicans have come to be undocumented, it’s crucial to examine the history.
The border that divides the United States from Mexico, and that large numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans cross each year without authorization, was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and adjusted by the Gadsden or La Mesilla Purchase of 1853. Much of the US Southwest used to be Mexico. The first Mexicans in the United States did not cross any border; rather, the border crossed them.
Until 1924, the new border between the United States and Mexico was virtually unpoliced, and migration flowed openly. Mexicans worked in the mines and railroads of the Southwest and migrated to the factories and urban centers in the Midwest. In 1908, US Bureau of Labor Statistics researcher Victor Clark reported that, while “complete statistics of those who cross the frontier are not kept,” an estimated sixty thousand to one hundred thousand Mexicans crossed each year to work in the United States. “Except in Texas and California, few Mexicans become permanent residents, and even in those two states, a majority are transient laborers who seldom remain more than six months at a time in this country.”
22
The many laws that were passed to try to control immigration from the Civil War on did not apply to Mexicans, because Congress did not consider them immigrants or potential immigrants at all. In agriculture, Clark explained, “the main value of the Mexican . . . is as a temporary worker in crops where the season is short. . . . Mexicans are not likely to be employed the year round by small farmers, because they are not entertained in the family like American, German, Scandinavian, or Irish laborers of the North. Yet they do not occupy a position analogous to that of the Negro in the South. They are not permanent, do not acquire land or establish themselves in little cabin homesteads, but remain nomadic and outside of American civilization.”
23
RAILROADS AND MIGRATION
Railroads played a crucial role both in moving Mexicans to the border and into the United States and in creating a demand for Mexican labor. Mexico’s nineteenth-century rail system was “designed, planned and constructed by Americans” and extended US lines into Mexico to facilitate the transport of US manufactured goods into Mexico. Thus, decisions about Mexico’s economy and infrastructure were made in the United States, for the benefit of US capitalists. The railroads also helped bring Mexicans to, and across, the border.
24
As US capital moved south, it drew southerners northward. Railroad concessions displaced over three hundred thousand peasants in Mexico’s central plateau, creating one pool of potential migrants. Many of them were recruited to work in new American enterprises in the north of the country. Some went to work on the railroad itself; others in new American-owned mining and oil operations. Mexico’s demographic patterns were fundamentally, and irrevocably, altered with this shift of population to the North.
25
In Arizona, as the copper mines boomed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, they sent labor contractors to scour Mexico for workers being displaced from their lands. The first Mexican mineworkers in Arizona were Sonorans who crossed the border, but they were soon joined by central Mexicans who traveled north along the new rail lines.
26
Victor Clark described how the railroads contributed to the creation of a migrant labor force and the long-term social and cultural changes that the railroads and the migrations brought:
In Mexico railways have given both the opportunity and the inducement to emigration. Needing unskilled labor for their construction and maintenance, they drew among the agricultural population along their lines, at first for a few days or weeks of temporary service between crops and later for more extended periods. At first the true peon was averse to leaving his home, and would not work where he could not sleep under his own roof, but gradually he became bolder and more worldly-wise and could be prevailed upon to work for a month or so a hundred miles or more up and down the line. He became accustomed to having silver in his pocket occasionally and found it would exchange for things he had not heretofore thought of having for his personal use. He became attached to cash wages in about the same degree that he became detached from his home surroundings. Employers in the more primitive parts of Mexico say that at present the people will not work for money so long as they have food in their cabins. When they first leave home they will work only long enough to provide themselves with food and shelter for a few days in advance. But the railways, bringing a greater variety of wares at lower prices, have made possible the attractive shop of the railway town, and this market for money has made the latter a more desirable commodity in the eyes of the peon. . . . The railways have thus attracted labor and have held it more and more permanently from a constantly widening area along their lines. A general officer of the National Railroad of Mexico stated that his company had brought north about 1,500 laborers to work on the upper section of the road within a year, and that practically all of them had ultimately crossed over into Texas.
27
