Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [72]
Mass emigration from Mexico didn’t begin until the first decades of the twentieth century. The migration was triggered in part by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and facilitated by the construction of north-south railway lines. Labor shortages in the Southwest at the time, caused by government crackdowns on Asian immigrants, also attracted Mexicans. Railroad, mining, agriculture, and construction workers were needed to get the natural resources of the West to markets back East. And so, between 1900 and 1920 more than a quarter-million Mexican enganchadores, or laborers, headed north. Private labor contractors recruited them. Uncle Sam looked the other way. As the sociologists Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan Malone explain in Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, it would mark the beginning of America’s schizophrenic relationship with Mexican immigrants.
The outbreak of WWI halted European immigration but induced a huge expansion of U.S. industries. This forced industrialists in Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and other cities facing labor shortages to rely even more heavily on foreign labor. Soon enough, Uncle Sam got in on the act. When Congress moved to restrict immigration in 1917 by imposing a head tax, literacy test, and other provisions on all new arrivals, the U.S. attorney general exempted Mexicans. And once the United States entered the war, write the authors, “the government assumed a direct role in labor recruitment by creating its own [foreign] worker recruitment program.”
Throughout the 1920s, when Congress was closing off immigration from Europe, the established quotas never included Mexicans, or any other countries in the western hemisphere. “Although the total number of immigrants was capped at 357,000 in 1921, then lowered to 164,000 in 1924 and 154,000 in 1929,” write the authors, “these numerical limitations were never applied to Mexico, whose nationals were free to enter without quantitative restrictions and did so in large numbers.” It wasn’t until the Great Depression that public sentiment turned against Mexican immigrants.
Policy makers and assorted demagogues in the press found in the Latino migrants a convenient scapegoat for high unemployment. Like today, Mexicans were accused of simultaneously stealing jobs and living on the dole. Deportation campaigns followed, and between 1930 and 1940 the Mexican population in the United States fell by more than 40 percent.
But the 1940s brought another world war, another economic boom, another acute labor shortage, and finally, another government program to recruit Mexican workers. This time, they were called braceros, and some 5 million entered the country during the program’s twenty-two-year history. “Although originally envisioned as a temporary war-time measure,” write Massey, Durand, and Malone, “the booming postwar economy perpetuated growers’ fears of a labor shortage, and under considerable pressure from the Texas and California delegations, Congress extended the bracero program on a year-to-year basis through the late 1940s.”
In 1951 they made it permanent, and it stayed that way for thirteen years. Anti-immigrant sentiment grew during the Korean War and the McCarthy era, culminating with the deportation of 1.2 million illegal immigrants during Operation Wetback in 1954. But even this temporary crackdown was paired with an expansion of legal immigration. And by the time pressure from U.S. labor unions ended the Bracero Program a decade later, illegal immigration from Mexico had been all but eliminated.
Even after the program’s termination, however, U.S. policy sent mixed signals to both employers and migrants. Employers could hire undocumented workers with impunity, and so the availability of jobs continued to serve as a magnet. From 1965 to 1986, nothing in U.S. labor law stopped businesses from employing illegal aliens.