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‡ People have been moving around the earth for millions of years. National borders, and attempts to govern the flows of migration by governments, are only a few hundred years old.
‡ Governments have often tried to control the size and makeup of their populations by:
- controlling movement and settlement within their borders
- controlling reproduction within their borders
- expelling people within their borders
- exterminating people within their borders
‡ Naturalization Act of 1790 defined U.S. citizenship as being limited to "free white persons."
‡ In 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts provided for the deportation of “dangerous” immigrants — especially those who said anything critical of the government (i.e. "seditious speech").
‡ In 1830, the Indian Removal Act deported about 100,000 Native Americans to West of the Mississippi River.
‡ In 1848, the United States government crossed the Mexican border without permission, and then annexed half of Mexico.
‡ In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted former slaves the rights of persons, by making citizenship open to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States."
"The first restrictions on immigration trace back to right after the Civil War, when the Fourteenth Amendment creates citizenship by birth, an entirely new concept that means anyone born in the country will be a citizen, although Native Americans are still excluded. Citizenship by birth is designed to rectify the injustices created by hundreds of years of enslavement and forced transport of Africans. People of African nativity and African descent are now granted the right to become citizens, and the new naturalization law is to be written with precisely that wording: people of African nativity and African descent are able to become citizens, but nobody else is. So now, in 1870, in order to become a citizen, you must be a white person or a person of African nativity or descent ...
People who are immigrating to the United States in the 1870s are primarily Europeans, Chinese people, and Mexicans ... After citizenship by birth is implemented in 1868 with the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress is facing the logical impossibility which is that people who are racially excluded from citizenship are coming to the country as they always have been, but now, their children are going to be citizens by birth and Congress doesn't want that."**
‡ In 1870, the Page Act prohibited immigration of women from China.
‡ In 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all immigration from China.
"At the same time that all of this is happening, no restrictions are placed on Mexican immigrants, and this is because Mexicans are used differently by the country; they’re used as temporary, disposable workers. The idea is that we can’t have Asians coming because they’ll have babies who will be citizens by birth, so instead we’ll rely on Mexican labor because we can deport them before they will have children. It is a lot easier to deport Mexicans than it is to deport anyone else."**
‡ Between 1880 and World War I, about 25 million Europeans immigrated to the United States. They did not have visas or passports. There were no illegal immigrants from Europe because there was no law making immigration illegal for Europeans.
‡ The Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 prohibited anarchists from entering the United States. It also banned epileptics, polygamists, and beggars.
‡ In 1917, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act prohibited all immigration from anywhere in Asia, effectively banning one-half of the world’s population.
‡ In 1921, the Quota Act limited European immigration for the first time. Immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, including Mexicans, were still allowed unlimited entry. Asians were still barred. Africans were not mentioned, because no Africans wanted to come to the United States.
‡ Prior to 1924, the border between Mexico and the United States was open and unmonitored. But in 1924, the Labor Appropriation Act closed the US-Mexico border for the first time, and created the Border Patrol in an effort to stop alcohol and Chinese people from crossing the border. Mexicans were still welcome as workers.
‡ In 1930, with the Great Depression virtually eliminating the demand for Mexican labor, the deportation of millions of Mexicans was begun. Unemployment during the Great Depression occurred when hardly any immigrants were coming into the country.
‡ In 1940, the Alien Registration Act provided for the deportation of noncitizens accused of “subversive” activities.
‡ In 1941, Japanese-Americans were declared “enemy aliens,” and by 1945 approximately 120,000 of them had been sent to concentration camps in California.
‡ In 1942, the Bracero Program was established, which formalized the already-existing policy of using Mexicans as cheap, temporary workers while legally denying them rights that were illegal to deny citizen workers. Upon arrival in the US, Bracero workers were sprayed with DDT.
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Men are fumigated with DDT at the reception center in Texas, 1956. Leonard Nadel photograph. Courtesy of Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
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‡ In 1952, immigration was prohibited for Communists, anarchists, and homosexuals.
‡ In 1954, Operation Wetback (that was the official name) deported approximately one million Mexican workers who were not officially documented as Braceros.
‡ In 1964, the Bracero Program was abolished, making legal Mexican workers suddenly illegal.
‡ In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act established a uniform immigration quota of 20,000 per country, with preference given to those with relatives who are US citizens. Mexico instantly overflowed its quota because hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were already working in the US, as they had been since the 1800s. For most Mexicans, immigrating to the US legally suddenly became impossible. But the US economy still demands rightless non-citizen Mexican workers, most of whom are forbidden by US law to immigrate legally.
"Until 1965, there were no restrictions on Mexican migration. It was assumed and built into the law that Mexicans would be deported, but there were no restrictions on Mexicans coming. It was acknowledged that their labor was necessary and that the country did not want them to be citizens, and so, it would deport them. And there were mass deportations of Mexicans not on the basis of illegality because that wasn’t the issue, but simply on the basis of being Mexican ... But in 1965, the immigration laws also were completely overhauled and instead of a discriminatory system that treated people differently based on their race, the new system claimed to treat people from every country equally and not to discriminate. And thus, for the first time, numerical restrictions were placed on Mexican migration into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people were crossing the border in order to work and were then either leaving voluntarily or were deported in the end, and all of a sudden, Mexico, for the first time, is given a restriction of 20,000 people a year. This is when forms of immigration, forms of migration, forms of border crossing that had been happening for years, suddenly become termed 'illegal immigration.' ... Now, illegality is the rationale for that system, but that system isn’t really that different than the system that has existed for years—of bringing Mexicans into the country and then deporting them. It’s just that before 1965, it was justified on the basis of race, and now it’s justified on the basis of illegality which was created solely for Mexican workers."**
‡ In 1994, Operation Gatekeeper militarized the US Border with Mexico and was expanded in 2005 with the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, and with the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Illegal immigration increased dramatically. Instead of coming and going, now people come and stay because it's too dangerous to go back across the border.
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* D.J. Haze is a rapper, citizen journalist, and Mexico-Firster. His great-grandfather, Stylus Vic, made history during the Great Depression by scratching 78-rpm records using the heavy-ass tonearm of a Victrola phonograph.
** "An Interview With Aviva Chomsky," The Politic.
