Labor
In this section we explore changing labor markets and growing differentiation between categories of workers as skilled and unskilled. Immigration policies increasingly privileged the migration and settlement of workers with education, credentials, and specializations in fields viewed as enhancing the United States’ drive to lead the world in technical and scientific innovation in industry, armaments, and space. Concurrently, while demands for laborers viewed as unskilled remained high, temporary labor programs restricted their protections and access to citizenship, particularly for those from south of the US-Mexico border.
American fears of unfair competition and unfree labor never completely disappeared. However, the demands for educated and trained workers suitable for employment in research, development, and other professional and white-collar sectors steadily grew in influence in the years leading to the passage of the 1965 immigration act. Economic competitiveness in the nineteenth century required stable access to large numbers of inexpensive farm and manufacturing workers, but by the mid-twentieth century, scientific and technological innovation required well-educated and credentialed “knowledge workers” who became critical commodities. Albert Einstein, who immigrated in 1933, can be considered an early example of this kind of high-value immigrant.
After World War II, the US Congress developed a growing array of immigration policies and administrative processes that guaranteed access to a wide range of workers but also produced differential statuses and rights among immigrants based on the kind of labor they performed. These new policies and administrative procedures aligned immigration controls even more closely with the interests of economically motivated constituencies and relied on the collaboration among the US Departments of Labor, Commerce, State, and the immigration bureaucracy.
International competition for the most elite of so-called “skilled” workers, determined on the basis of credentials such as education, training, and acquired expertise in particular fields, resulted in legal accommodations that facilitated their entry and access to permanent residency and citizenship. In contrast, “unskilled” workers were often restricted to temporary visas, which limited their chances for permanent residency, citizenship, and even family unity. These emerging systems of privileging certain categories of workers, while institutionalizing lesser rights and status for others, informed preferences and procedures articulated in the 1965 Immigration Act in ways that have become naturalized in the twenty-first century with programs such as the H-1B visa allotments and greater consideration given to educated and entrepreneurial elites as well as investor categories of immigrants.
Heather Lee’s “Hunting for Sailors: Restaurant Raids and the Conscription of Laborers during World War II” showcases an effort by the US Immigration Bureau to discipline unruly workers to serve employer interests. In 1943 the US government acted at the behest of its English ally—a stark case of international cooperation—to retrieve Chinese sailors who had escaped dire conditions on British vessels by jumping ship in New York. Lee’s richly detailed account links the imperial legacies of racialized views of Chinese that produced their lower wages and work assignments aboard British ships with the wartime exigencies that justified US intervention on behalf of its ally. It also highlights the networks and communities that enabled the Chinese sailors to find new employment in restaurants and to effectively disappear despite the efforts of two governments seeking to exert immigration controls.
Ronald Mize’s “The State Management of Immigrant Labor: The Decline of the Bracero Program, the Rise of Temporary Worker Visas” describes the expanding use of temporary visas that institutionalized the marginalization of “unskilled workers,” particularly through the bracero and H-2 programs during the 1950s and early 1960s. After the Bracero Program terminated in 1964, legislators retained “H-2” programs in the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act and dramatically expanded them beyond agriculture in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act to include H-2A temporary agricultural workers and H-2B seasonal and unskilled nonagricultural workers. Legally ineligible for permanent status and eventual citizenship, temporary workers had limited claims on the United States. In many instances, their disposability was accentuated by the proximity of their homelands, such as Mexico and the Bahamas, to the United States which made it easier to expel them once they completed their labor terms.
In “Japanese Agricultural Labor Program: Temporary-Worker Immigration, US-Japan Cultural Diplomacy, and Ethnic Community Making among Japanese Americans,” Eiichiro Azuma explores the international, intragovernmental, and intra-ethnic conflicts and compromises that converged to implement a program for the employment of temporary Japanese laborers in California by Nisei farmers between 1956 and 1965. Azuma’s chapter demonstrates the remaking of racial criteria as barriers to immigration and the clout of agricultural organizations in lobbying for access to foreign laborers. As Mexican workers grew in militancy and assertiveness after World War II, Nisei citizen farmers sought alternatives in the form of youths from Japan brought on a temporary basis, assuming that Japanese newcomers would be easier to control due not only to their lack of access to legal residency but also because of their shared cultural background. Yet this also meant that Nisei farmers came to construct a new ethnic identity separate from Japanese workers on the basis of citizenship status. These intra-ethnic tensions at times undermined the negotiations between the United States and Japan. Competing priorities on the part of various government agencies representing agriculture, labor, immigration, and foreign relations, as well as lobbying on the part of prospective employer groups, also made negotiations difficult. That this program overcame so many obstacles to run for a decade, and yet has left so few traces on the Japanese American community, historical memory, or scholarship, underscores both the concerted will to develop access to temporary agricultural workers and the determination to see the workers depart when their terms of employment ended.
In contrast, the German and Austrian scientists and engineers featured in Monique Laney’s “Setting the Stage to Bring in the ‘Highly Skilled’” were readily allowed to shed their former ties to Nazi Germany and become American citizens as bearers of highly valued knowledge and experiences seen as crucial to the US competition against the Soviet Union for technological supremacy in armaments and the space race. Although exceptional at its time, “Project Paperclip” presaged a broader shift in policy toward a system privileging skilled immigrants. At the end of World War II, the allied forces searched for and captured thousands of German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technicians who specialized in aerodynamics, rocketry, chemical weapons, medicine, and other fields, bringing more than five hundred to the United States under a military operation. While the project initially provided temporary employment, after which the specialists were to return to Europe, Congress soon developed procedures to enable them to become permanent immigrants after protracted negotiations among the Departments of War, Commerce, Labor, and Justice. National security and the intensifying Cold War were the driving rationalizations for these legal accommodations. “Project Paperclip” and other programs that facilitated resettlement by technical and scientific experts reveal the shifting priorities and administrative practices that privileged immigrants with “special skills” that remain in effect today.