Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ moral turpitude, and women coming to the United States for immoral purposes.”⁴³ The 1907 Immigration Act also extended the period during which immigrants could be deported if they became public charges from causes existing prior to entry and defined entering the United States without official inspection to be a violation of U.S. immigration restrictions. The Bureau of Immigration was transferred to the newly independent Department of Labor in 1913.⁴⁴ The immigration Act of 1917 created the Asiatic-Barred Zone, which prohibited entry by any immigrant of Asian descent while raising the head tax to eight dollars, imposing an additional ten-dollar visa fee, requiring all eligible immigrants to pass a literacy test, broadening the scope of deportation to a period of five years, and prohibiting entry into the United States at any point other than an official port of entry.⁴⁵

      By 1917, the list of persons prohibited from entering the United States included all Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract laborers, unaccompanied children, idiots, epileptics, the insane, paupers, the diseased and defective, alcoholics, beggars, polygamists, anarchists, and more. The penalties for violating U.S. immigration laws varied. For example, importing an immigrant “for the purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose” was a felony punishable by a prison term of up to ten years and a fine not to exceed five thousand dollars. Both unauthorized entry and immigrant smuggling were defined as misdemeanors punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of two thousand dollars. An assortment of Anglo-American nativists, labor unions, progressives, and others had pushed these many exclusions and penalties into U.S. immigration law. Still the most ardent Anglo-American nativists were not satisfied, and their collective influence was growing in American society, politics, and culture during the 1920s.

      THE NATIVISTS’ CRUSADE

      Comprised of eugenicists, xenophobes, scholars, Klan members, labor organizers, and others, nativists united in opposition to what they viewed as the menacing growth in immigration from eastern and southern Europe.⁴⁶ Beginning in the early 1900s, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and others had rushed into U.S. industrial centers such as New York and Chicago. Their arrival fueled the rise of American manufacturing, but nativists regarded these groups as “undesirable immigrants” who were socially inferior, culturally alien, and politically suspect. Fearing the “contamination” of Anglo-American society and culture by these “new stock” immigrants, nativists demanded an end to immigration from anywhere other than northwestern Europe.⁴⁷

      In 1924, Anglo-American nativists played a crucial role in crafting and passing the National Origins Act of that year. The act was a dense bill that outlined, in detail, the limitations placed upon legal immigration. Most important, it ratified all previous immigration restrictions and introduced a nationality-based quota system that strictly limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year. According to the intricate quota system, Germany, Britain, and Northern ireland were afforded 60 percent of the total number of slots made available to all immigrants subject to the National Origins system. Europeans of any background grabbed 96 percent of the total available slots. Beyond the quota system, the national origins Act reconfirmed total Asian exclusion from the United States. Historian John Higham described the National Origins Act as a “Nordic Victory,” a triumph of the narrow racial nationalism of Anglo-American nativists during a decade he has characterized as the “tribal twenties.”⁴⁸ Ironically, however, as Mae Ngai has deftly argued, the long-term impact of that triumph was the reconstitution of a “white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to not be white. In the construction of whiteness, the legal boundaries of both white and nonwhite acquired sharper distinction.”⁴⁹ The National Origins Act, in other words, remapped and broadened the category of white to include previously “hyphenated” Europeans against the total exclusion of those defined as nonwhite, namely, Asians.

      The powerful lobby of southwestern agribusinessmen tempered the nativists’ quest for a “whites-only” immigration policy by supporting an exemption from the national quota system for all immigrants from countries in the Western Hemisphere such as Canada, Cuba, and Mexico. Mexico’s immigrant workers, therefore, were allowed to continue entering the United States without any preset numerical limit. In agreeing to the Western Hemisphere exemption, the nativists capitulated to the growers’ lobby in 1924, but after the passage of the National Origins Act, a committed core of nativists continued to oppose Mexican immigration to the United States. As one congressmen complained during the 1924 hearings, “What is the use of closing the front door to keep out undesirables from Europe when you permit Mexicans to come in here by the back door by the thousands and thousands?”⁵⁰ After the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act, the nativists campaigned to add Mexico’s migrant workers to the quota system. Mexico was a nation of mongrels, they argued. As such, Mexicans were inassimilable racial inferiors, and unrestricted Mexican immigration jeopardized the core objective of the National Origins Act. “The continuance of a desirable character of citizenship is the fundamental purpose of our immigration laws. Incidental to this are the avoidance of social and racial problems, the upholding of American standards of wages and living, and the maintenance of order. All of these purposes will be violated by increasing the Mexican population of the country,” explained Congressman John C. Box (Texas), who co-sponsored a 1926 bill to limit Mexican immigration to the United States.⁵¹ The growers defeated the 1926 Box Bill, but the nativists tried again in 1928, arguing that the exemption for Mexican workers needed to be terminated because, as they forebodingly warned, “Our great Southwest is rapidly creating for itself a new racial problem, as our old South did when it imported slave labor from Africa.”⁵²

      Throughout their debates with the nativists, southwestern growers fully agreed with the notion that Mexico’s immigrant workers presented a “racial problem” and thereby conceded the nativists’ point that Mexican immigration posed a threat to American society. As S. Parker Frisselle of the California Farm Bureau Federation explained during the 1926 hearings, “With the Mexican comes a social problem . . . . It is a serious one. It comes into our schools, it comes into our cities, and it comes into our whole civilization in California.”⁵³ But after assuring the nativists that “we, gentlemen, are just as anxious as you are not to build the civilization of California or any other western district upon a Mexican foundation,” the growers countered the nativists’ call to place a numerical limit upon Mexican immigration to the United States by arguing that without unrestricted access to Mexican workers, the rising empire of agribusinesses in the American southwest would turn to ruin.⁵⁴ Instead of ending Mexican immigration, they offered the nativists a promise. “We, in California,” vowed Frisselle, “think we can handle that social problem.”⁵⁵ For, as another agribusinessman from Texas explained, “If we could not control the Mexicans and they would take this country it would be better to keep them out, but we can and do control them.”⁵⁶

      The pledge that “we can and do control them” referred to the social world of agribusiness in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Agribusinessmen and the demands of their enterprises dominated the political, social, and cultural life of borderland communities as the racialized organization of work refracted throughout community life. Whites held land or managed workers, while Mexicanos harvested, plowed, picked, tended, reaped, and migrated. As Devra Weber, Paul Schuster Taylor, and others have detailed, the racialized divisions in California were so crude that “the owners and top managers were white: foremen, contractors and workers were Mexican.”⁵⁷ In Texas, one young white farmer explained that white landholders and tenants lived a life of leisure because “we have the Mexicans here and don’t work.”⁵⁸ The hierarchy between Anglo-American landowners, white managers, and Mexicano workers reverberated throughout the region where highly racialized practices of social segregation, political repression, and community violence accompanied the patterns of economic exploitation that locked the region’s large Mexicano population into low-wage work. From Texas to California, white and Mexicano youth graduated from separate and unequal schools. Poll taxes and political bosses effectively disenfranchised Mexicano voters. Mexicans had limited employment options outside of agriculture. Police violence against Mexicanos was common. Labor organizing among СКАЧАТЬ