Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
negroes? We would never think of such a thing.”65 In these very strategic discourses that negotiated the differences between regional particularity and national trends, the Californians drew upon the black/white divide to explain the social position of Mexicans north of the border. African Americans, they argued, represented the unmitigated bottom of the racial hierarchy, and Mexico’s migrant laborers, they suggested, presented a superior alternative of racial inferiors to labor in the fields of the American southwest.
Struggling to fit Mexicans into the prevailing discourse of racial difference, inequity, and control, the borderlanders constructed Mexicans as more or less black or more or less white: they were an in-between people without a clear place in a racial order grounded in the black/white divide.66 The overwhelmingly marginalized but generally unfixed position of Mexicanos in the separate and unequal borderlands contrasted sharply with the America that the nativists were trying to formulate through U.S. immigration restrictions. In metaphor, comparison, and everyday social practices the borderlanders had created an unequal but ambiguous place for Mexicans north of the border.
To calm the ardent nativists who did not believe that the southwestern growers could control the racial meanderings of Mexican immigrants in American social and cultural life, the growers made one final pitch. “The Mexican is a homer. Like a pigeon he goes back to roost” explained Frisselle.67 Mexican immigrants, in other words, were at least temporary if not contained, and their transitory presence in the fields of the southwest would benefit agribusiness without having any major or long-term impact upon American society. From the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, Frisselle’s promise appears foolish. During the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants entered the United States. The notion that they would have no impact upon American life was a massive miscalculation drenched in the fundamentally flawed philosophy that Mexicans were both temporary and innately marginal. Mexicans, according to Frisselle, were nothing more than a source of cheap and disposable labor whose impact upon America would only be measured in dollars and sweat. “He is not a man that comes into this country for anything except our dollars and our work,” testified Frisselle, who promised that Mexicans would always go home and leave nothing but profit behind.68 With such promises of control, containment, and, at the very least, impermanent Mexican settlement in the United States, the agribusinessmen triumphed in their clash with the nativists, and the numerical limits of the quota era were never placed upon Mexican immigration to the United States.69
With the exemption provided for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, the National Origins Act of 1924 capped Congress’s sixty-two year drive for increasingly restrictive immigration legislation. Yet legislators understood that the passage of the National Origins Act did not automatically translate into a new social reality. Many years of experience had taught them that without aggressive U.S. immigration law enforcement, persons excluded from legal entry would simply disregard and violate U.S. immigration law by entering the United States without authorization. “So long as the border is not adequately guarded,” explained F. W. Berkshire, supervising inspector of the U.S.-Mexico Border District for the Immigration Service, “the restrictive measures employed at ports of entry, simply tend to divert the illegal traffic to unguarded points.”70 For example, since the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an enterprise of smuggling Chinese immigrants into the United States had thrived along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders and between Florida and Cuba.71 In addition to the categorically excluded Chinese workers, other classes of immigrants—persons infected with contagious diseases, illiterates, and those unable to pay the head taxes and visa fees—also chose the poorly guarded land borders as a “back door” entry into the United States.72 The vibrant world of unsanctioned migration along the U.S.-Mexico border registered in the United States District Courts that heard immigration cases. Between April of 1908 and the spring of 1924, for example, more than one-third of the persons tried for immigration offenses in the Laredo Division of the U.S. District Court carried non-Spanish surnames.73 And between July of 1907 and September of 1917, only 15 percent of the persons tried for immigration violations in the Southern California division of the U.S. District Court carried Spanish surnames, most of whom were tried for immigrant smuggling.74 The majority of persons standing trial in U.S. District Courts were Chinese, Japanese, Eastern European, and East Indian immigrants who had evaded U.S. immigration restrictions by entering the United States without sanction. Therefore, to prevent unlawful entry into the United States, three days after passing the National Origins Act of 1924, Congress set aside one million dollars to establish a “land-border patrol” in the Immigration Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor.75
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE U.S. BORDER PATROL
The Border Patrol’s beginnings were inauspicious. The million-dollar kick-off appropriation comprised less than 25 percent of the Immigration Bureau’s total budget of $4,084,865 for that year. Funded as a small corner of the Immigration Bureau, the Border Patrol’s position within the broader apparatus of U.S. immigration control did not improve significantly over time. Edging up to just $1,150,000 in 1926, the Border Patrol’s budget climaxed at $2,198,000 in 1932 before dropping to $1,735,000 in 1939; all the while holding an ever-smaller share of the Immigration Bureau’s total budget, which hovered around $10,000,000 throughout the 1930s. The Border Patrol’s limited funds were used for basic operational and equipment costs such as buildings, horses, cars, guns, and uniforms, but, most of all, they paid for the salaries of U.S. Border Patrol officers as the patrol’s authorized force increased from 472 in 1925 to 916 in 1939.76
The Border Patrol’s small beginnings however can best be understood when examined within the context of federal law enforcement during the 1920s, namely, in the realm of liquor and drug control. Most efforts to expand federal law enforcement were stymied during the early twentieth century by anxious southerners who opposed federal intervention in southern race relations. In particular, the powerful southern bloc opposed federal response to African American activists who demanded an end to the rising number of lynchings occurring in the south. The development of federal immigration law enforcement at the nation’s borders therefore was tempered by efforts to protect white supremacy in the southern states. However, federal efforts at drug control and liquor control grew during these years.77 In 1914, the U.S. Congress had passed the Harrison Act, which required all persons involved in the manufacture, distribution, and sale of narcotics (morphine, cocaine, opium, and heroin) to be registered and to pay a tax on all narcotics sales. Enforcement of the Harrison Act was given to the Bureau of Revenue within the Treasury Department. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1919–1933) and the Volstead Act of 1919 prohibited the manufacture, sale, transport, import, or export of intoxicating beverages. The Prohibition Unit within the Internal Revenue Board was established to enforce federal liquor prohibition, and the enforcement of the Harrison Act was transferred to the Narcotics Enforcement Division within the Prohibition Unit. In comparison to the Border Patrol’s original appropriation for $1,000,000 in fiscal year 1925, the 1925 appropriation for the narcotics Division of the Prohibition Unit was $11,341,770, a figure more than ten times greater than the Border Patrol’s annual budget but only an estimated 10 percent of the total combined funds provided for the enforcement of federal liquor and narcotics control.78 Similarly the month before Congress established the U.S. Border Patrol, it had provided the U.S. Coast Guard with a $12,000,000 boost to enhance its interdiction efforts along United States coasts.79 In the world of federal law enforcement, the U.S. Border Patrol and immigration control had very low priority, and significant growth was unlikely until the south’s black/white divide was challenged.
Congress seconded its paltry funding of U.S. immigration law enforcement by failing to define clearly the new land-border patrol’s mandate and authority. According to its foundational act, the Border Patrol was instructed to enforce the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1917 and subsequent acts and, more specifically, to prevent the unlawful entry of aliens into the United States. But by 1924 there were so many methods of unlawful entry (unsanctioned border crossings, fraudulent documents, breaking the conditions of legal residence) and so many classes of persons explicitly prohibited from legally entering the United States that U.S. immigration restrictions provided a broad field of possible subjects for U.S. immigration law enforcement. Prostitutes and anarchists