Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Exteriores, and the Hermenoteca Nacional. While extraordinarily helpful in terms of understanding the Mexican politics of emigration control, these archives did not hold what I was hoping to find—the records of the Mexican Department of Migration.
Established in 1926 and known as the Mexican Department of Migration (MDM) until 1993, the Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) in the Secretaría de Gobernación is responsible for enforcing Mexican immigration law by managing, facilitating, regulating, and policing human migration into and out of Mexico. The officers of the INM spend their days enforcing immigration restrictions against foreign nationals and managing the exit and return of Mexican citizens. Much of the history of migration to and from Mexico during the twentieth century is thus held in the records of the INM. When I first began my research in Mexico, the historical records of the INM, namely, the records of the Mexican Department of Migration, had yet to be officially archived, systematically indexed, or publicly released, much like the records of the U.S. Border Patrol. But in collaboration with the INM and Professor Pablo Yankelevich of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, we launched the first indexing and research project at the Archivo Histórico del Instituto Nacional de Migración (AHINM). The archive was housed in an abandoned factory in Mexico City. Many of the boxes contained papers that had literally disintegrated into slush, but about four thousand boxes containing an estimated four hundred thousand files had survived the years of disregard in a forgotten and leaky warehouse.11
The surviving records of the Mexican Department of Migration speak against the tendency to frame U.S. immigration control and border enforcement exclusively in terms of U.S.-based concerns regarding sovereignty, labor control, and unwanted migration. South of the border, Mexican officers attempted to prevent Mexican workers from illegally crossing into the United States and, when politically possible, pushed and prodded representatives of the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the U.S. Border Patrol to improve border control and to deport Mexican nationals who broke both U.S. and Mexican law by surreptitiously crossing into the United States.12 Further, a constellation of records pulled from U.S. and Mexican archives trace how the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands developed in partnership with the establishment and expansion of cross-border systems of migration control during the 1940s and early 1950s. The Border Patrol’s deepening focus on the southern border and on persons of Mexican origin evolved during the 1940s, in great part, in response to Mexican demands and in coordination with Mexican emigration-control efforts. This book, therefore, complicates notions that the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol is the product of exclusively U.S.-based interests and makes Mexico a crucial partner in the development of modern migration-control and border-enforcement practices in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
To incorporate Mexican interests in and influences upon the U.S. Border Patrol, I tell the history of the patrol within the bi-national context of migration control between the United States and Mexico. I narrate the U.S.-Mexico encounter implicit within this bi-national history according to the career of U.S. imperialism in Mexico. Between 1848 and World War II, U.S. economic imperialism in Mexico was aggressive, uncompromising, and punctuated by threats of military invasion. But World War II shifts in U.S. global power and claims by the Mexican political and economic elite forced U.S. imperialism in Mexico to operate with the support and collaboration of Mexican economic and political elites.13 John Mason Hart describes the new era of U.S. imperialism in Mexico as one defined by “cooperation and accommodation.”14 Under the new conditions of U.S. imperialism in Mexico, migration control operated as a site of cross-border cooperation and accommodation. Understanding U.S. Border Patrol practice as a site of cross-border negotiation and cooperation (although still shadowed by an imbalanced relationship between the United States and Mexico) opens space for exploring the pivotal role that Mexico played in deepening the Border Patrol’s focus upon the southern border and policing undocumented Mexican immigration, particularly during World War II.
While unearthing such community and cross-border influences, this book stretches the domain of the U.S. Border Patrol from its familiar home within U.S. immigration history to write immigration control into the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The history of the U.S. Border Patrol is much more than a chapter in the story of Mexican labor migration to the United States. As such, this book centers upon examining the entanglement of Mexican labor migration and Border Patrol practice, but it enters this story from the perspective of a police force coming of age in twentieth-century America. In particular, this book charts the history of the Border Patrol within the context of the expansion of U.S. federal law enforcement in the twentieth century.
When Congress first established the U.S. Border Patrol, it joined a small and relatively weak collection of federal law-enforcement agencies.15 Not until the New Deal did Congress and executive authorities begin to part with the American tradition of local law enforcement by strengthening federal crime-control bureaucracies and expanding federal crime-control powers. In its first decades, the U.S. Border Patrol, like its federal counterparts, was a small outfit of officers working on the periphery of law enforcement and crime control in the United States. In these days, the mandate for migration control may have come from Washington, D.C., but Border Patrol practices and priorities were primarily local creations.
During World War II and in the decades to come, federal initiatives, resources, and, at times, directives dramatically altered the balance of law enforcement and criminal justice in the United States. While municipal police forces continued to dominate patrol activities, World War II internment and border-security efforts, Cold War concerns regarding saboteurs, the demands of civil rights workers for federal protection from local political violence in the American south, and, most important, the ascent of drug control as a national program all pushed a hard turn toward nationalized systems, discourses, and projects of crime control in the second half of the twentieth century. The U.S. Border Patrol benefited enormously from new investments in and concerns about federal law enforcement. Overall funding increased, payroll expanded, technologies improved, and, most important, immigration control was more tightly linked to federal objectives ranging from domestic security to drug interdiction, namely, those concerning the U.S.-Mexico border. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there would be expansions and contractions in Border Patrol budgets, but the organization never returned to its origins as a decentralized outfit of local men enforcing federal law. In many ways, the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands is a story about the expansion and consolidation of federal law-enforcement capacities in the twentieth century.
In detailing these many dimensions of the patrol’s turn toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration, this book sharpens our understanding of how U.S. Border Patrol practice evolved as a very specific site of racial inequity. Immigration control, as legal scholars Linda Bosniak, Kevin Johnson, and others argue, is not simply matter of keeping immigrants out or letting immigrants in. Rather, the U.S. immigration regime operates as a formal system of inequity within the United States because, beyond questions of basic political enfranchisement, various social welfare benefits are distributed according to immigrant status, and individual protections such as those against indefinite detention are categorically denied to excludable aliens. The U.S. immigration regime, in other words, operates as a deeply consequential system that manages, shapes, and participates in the inequitable distribution of rights, protections, and benefits between citizens and immigrants and among the various immigrant-status groups within the United States.16
For unauthorized immigrants, the formal tiers of inequity embedded within the U.S. immigration regime are compounded by the fear of deportation that encourages unauthorized migrants to attempt to evade detection by finding safety in zones of social, political, and economic marginalization. Susan Bibler Coutin describes these zones of marginalization as “spaces of nonexistence” that function as “sites of subjugation” and “loci of repression” by both formally and informally “limiting rights, restricting services, and erasing personhood.”17 Similarly Mae Ngai defines illegal immigrants as “a caste, unambiguously situated outside the boundaries of formal membership and social legitimacy.”18 Whether understood as a manifestation of nonexistence or caste, the relentless marginalizations of illegal status, formal and informal, transform persons guilty of the act of illegal immigration into persons living