The United States has incorporated populations through voluntary immigration, involuntary immigration, and conquest. Saying it is a nation of immigrants obscures the latter two types of population incorporation. Even voluntary immigration includes some people who lack rights: contract workers, indentured servants, braceros. When people compare today’s immigrants to previous generations, they are generally using the model of white European voluntary immigrants as the comparison. The law privileged white European immigrants from the beginning.
Immigrants of color share many characteristics with those forcibly incorporated into the country, including Native Americans, African Americans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. Scholars of ethnic studies have used the terms “internal colonialism” or “colonized minorities” to explain the way people of color have been incorporated into the United States. Latin American and Asian immigrants are entering a society that has historically defined itself against their ancestors, and through the conquest of their ancestors. Customs, beliefs, and laws that constructed people of color as subject peoples rather than potential citizens, to be admitted or excluded according to the needs of U.S. employers, have extended into the twenty-first century.
The United States came into existence through a process of English conquest of lands inhabited by Native Americans. From the first English settlement until 1898, the ideology of conquest, and of the fitness of English and English-descended people to rule over others, was virtually unquestioned among the country’s leaders. Commentators in the 1890s spoke unashamedly of the unique capacity of the “Anglo-Saxon race” for self-government, and its need for expansion. “The Anglo-Saxon race,” a columnist for the Atlantic Monthly wrote in 1898, “now holds the foremost place in the world … It stands for the best yet reached in ideas and institutions, the highest type of civilization … Our own best interests imperatively demand that we should maintain the Anglo-Saxon race in the occupation of every foot of land which it now justly holds anywhere on the globe, and that wherever we can do so righteously, we should endeavor to increase its influence and its possessions.”1
Historian and philosopher John Fiske spoke for many when he emphasized the English nature of the United States. “The indomitable spirit of English liberty is alike indomitable in every land where men of English race have set their feet as masters,” he wrote. “The conquest of the North American continent by men of English race was unquestionably the most prodigious event in the political annals of man kind.” The American Revolution “was not a struggle by two different peoples,” rather “it was sustained by a part of the English people in behalf of principles that time has shown to be equally dear to all.” The American Revolution, in fact, “made it apparent to an astonished world that instead of one there were now two Englands, alike prepared to work with might and main toward the political regeneration of mankind [emphasis in original].”2
Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to migrate—in fact, because it was the superior race, its migration would be the salvation of every part of the world it moved to. It was not migrating to assimilate, it was migrating to dominate. In the words of Josiah Strong, secretary of the Congregational Home Missionary Society, in his influential 1885 book Our Country, the Anglo-Saxon had “an instinct or genius for colonizing. His unequaled energy, his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence, made him a pioneer. He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries.” As “the highest civilization—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind,” the Anglo-Saxon race “will spread itself over the earth.
“This powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can any one doubt that the results of this competition of races will be the ‘survival of the fittest?’ ”3 Anglo-Saxons, then, were supposed to migrate, and to conquer everyone in their path. Non-Anglo-Saxons were supposed to stay put and be conquered—unless Anglo-Saxons decided to move them around to serve as a labor force.
Anglo-Saxonism justified U.S. imperial expansion; it also nurtured racism against the southern and eastern European immigrants who were entering the United States at the same time. These racisms were intertwined, though not identical. European immigrants were “in-between,” identified in “semi-racial” ways. Italians were called “guineas”—in a derogatory reference to their supposed closeness to Africa; “Huns” and Slavic peoples were suspiciously Asiatic. Between the 1910s and the 1930s, however, all of these people “became white”—as part of the same process that reiterated the exclusion of those who could never be white.4
When the national origins quotas for immigration were implemented in the 1920s, the Western Hemisphere was conspicuously left out of the calculations. Not because Mexicans were considered potential members of U.S. society—quite the contrary. Mexicans were omitted from the exclusionary legislation because industry and agriculture in the Southwest depended on their labor, just as it depended on their less-than-full-citizen status.
Mexican Americans were first incorporated into the country with the annexation of Texas in 1845, and then under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848 and granted the United States 55 percent of Mexico’s territory. Prior to the reforms of the 1860s, citizenship was still reserved for whites. Yet Guadalupe Hidalgo offered citizenship to Mexicans living in the newly acquired territories. What was the logic for granting citizenship to these newly conquered peoples?
For one thing, annexation carefully encompassed the least populated areas of Mexico and stopped where the population started to increase.5 There were some 80,000 to 100,000 Mexican nationals in the territory taken in 1848, in addition to uncounted numbers of Native Americans.6 In the racial worldview of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors, Mexicans were an anomaly: not white, not black, not Indian, not Asian. By being granted citizenship, Mexicans were tacitly accepted as white, even though they had just been conquered under the rationale of Anglo-Saxon expansion and Manifest Destiny. “The whole race of Mexicans here is becoming a useless commodity,” wrote the Galveston Weekly News in 1855. Lynchings, vigilante justice, and land dispossession confirmed the racialized way in which Anglos viewed Mexicans.7
Official confusion about Mexicans’ racial character was compounded in the 1920s, when people of Mexican descent who came to the United States as immigrants were even allowed to naturalize (unlike Asians). In 1929 the secretary of labor explained, “The Mexican people are of such a mixed stock and individuals have such a limited knowledge of their racial composition that it would be impossible for the most learned and experienced ethnologist or anthropologist to classify or determine their racial origin. Thus, making an effort to exclude them from admission or citizenship because of their racial status is practically impossible.”8
Mexican Americans learned, as African Americans did several decades later, that even citizenship was no guarantee of equal rights. Socially and legally, these new citizens who were not Anglo-American occupied a distinctly second-class status. Like African Americans, Mexican Americans were barred from jobs, from schools, from public facilities, from land ownership, from residential areas. As David Gutiérrez writes, “within two decades of the American conquest it had become clear that, with few exceptions, Mexican Americans had been relegated to a stigmatized, subordinate position in the social and economic hierarchies.”9
Strange as it seems, prior to the 1920s the new border between Mexico and the United States was open and unmonitored. “Immigration” and the laws governing immigration referred to those who arrived by sea in New York or California. White U.S. citizens had been migrating—undocumented—to Texas and other parts of Mexico since the early 1800s. In fact it was Anglo immigrants in Texas who rebelled against the Mexican government to declare the independent Texas Republic, and U.S. citizens who crossed into Mexico without permission who fought the Mexican-American war.
The Anglo-Americans who immigrated to Mexico clearly saw themselves as colonizers, and their goal as conquering, not assimilating into, their new homeland. “Texas should be effectually and fully Americanized,” wrote Stephen Austin in 1835, “in language, political principles, common origin, sympathy, and even interest.”10
The development of mining, agriculture, and railroads in the Mexican north and the U.S. west was a linked venture: U.S. capital operated on both sides of the border, and Mexicans moved back and forth rather fluidly. A transborder railroad completed in 1890 further facilitated movement.11 “Immigration inspectors ignored Mexicans coming into the southwestern United States during the 1900s and 1910s” because the U.S. government “did not seriously consider Mexican immigration within its purview.” Only beginning in 1919 did Mexicans have to formally pass through an immigration station and request permission to enter.12
Labor recruitment in Mexico was not inhibited by the 1885 Contract Labor Law prohibiting foreign recruitment, which, like other restrictive measures, was aimed primarily at Europe and China. In fact, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the prohibition on contract labor led employers to actively recruit Mexican workers deep in the interior of Mexico for the first time. Now Mexican workers in the United States did not come just from the already fluid, integrated border region. A true migrant stream from the interior of Mexico into the interior of the United States, including areas of the Midwest like Kansas and Chicago, was established.13
The 1917 Immigration Act, which imposed a literacy requirement and a head tax on immigrants, also created explicit provisions for Mexicans to be exempted from these so that southwestern agricultural interests could continue to import them as temporary workers. It was the first “guest worker” program, and it illustrates the tangled network of immigration legality. It remained in place until 1922.14 Puerto Rican labor migration was also strengthened in 1917, with the unilateral granting of U.S. citizenship to inhabitants of the island.
Although the 1924 national quota law did not place a numerical restriction on Mexican immigration, it made a fundamental change in the way immigration was to be dealt with. Instead of a basically open border and welcoming attitude toward immigrants—including Mexicans, who were considered nominally “white” and therefore eligible for citizenship—the 1924 law closed the border and demanded that every potential immigrant be scrutinized. It created two new things that now seem to be a natural part of our immigration policy: the Border Patrol and deportation. In the process, it also created the category of the “illegal immigrant.”
Prior to 1924, immigrants could be deported for committing certain crimes, but with an open border there was no such thing as illegal entry or an “illegal” immigrant. The 1924 law made “unlawful entry” a crime and created a new police force, the Border Patrol, to prevent and punish it. Suddenly, there was a new legal category of people in the country: not citizens, not immigrants. They were people entirely without rights. And almost all of them were Mexican—those people without a race who couldn’t be denied citizenship or excluded on a racial basis. Now there was a new rationale for excluding them.
Racial exclusions from citizenship were removed in 1952, and Congress revised the national origins quotas in 1965. Legalized segregation and second-class citizenship based on race were also dismantled at the federal level in the 1950s and ’60s. But the Border Patrol, the policy of deportation, and the concept of the “illegal immigrant” were here to stay.
Mexicans became the ultimate subject labor force, especially for seasonal agricultural work. Employers, and the government, could perfectly control the labor supply, first opening the gates and then closing them, deporting workers when the season ended or when the depression began. Over 400,000 people of Mexican origin were deported during the early 1930s, some 60 percent of them U.S. citizens.15
The 1942 bracero program reaffirmed the role of Mexicans as workers to be imported and exported according to the needs of U.S. agribusiness rather than as humans with rights. A similar program, the British West Indian Program, brought temporary workers from the Caribbean to work in agriculture on the East Coast from 1943 to 1952. The 1952 immigration overhaul created yet another method for bringing in temporary workers: the H-2 program, which allowed for the contracting of temporary agricultural workers. The H-2 program was later divided into H-2A for agricultural workers and H-2B for other temporary, seasonal workers and continues in existence to this day. Because West Coast growers already had other systems in place, the H-2 program was used primarily by East Coast agriculture. In 1999, almost half of the nearly 30,000 H-2B visa entries worked in the Southeast, mostly in tobacco. The top states using the program were North Carolina (by far the largest, with over 10,000 H-2 workers), Georgia, and Virginia.16
Initially, the H-2 program brought workers primarily from the Caribbean. Interestingly, it was implemented just as British West Indians were excluded from actually immigrating under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The INA specifically stipulated that residents of Britain’s colonies would not be considered eligible as immigrants under the quota assigned to Great Britain—even though they were British. It was an eerie recapitulation of the rationale of slavery: we want black people to come here to work, but we won’t consider them potential citizens.
“Operation Wetback” in 1954, in which over a million Mexicans were deported, provides another example of the dueling logic of U.S. attitudes toward Mexicans. It occurred in the midst of the bracero program, which was bringing about 200,000 Mexicans a year into the country as guest workers. The deportations meant that there were fewer workers available for agriculture, and that more were recruited as braceros—about 300,000 in 1954, and 400,000 to 450,000 a year in subsequent years.17 Deportations and recruitment served the same purpose: they provided workers, but ensured that the workers remained “aliens” without rights. And they reinforced the notion that citizens and people with rights were white people.
Operation Wetback occurred in the same year that Brown v. Board of Education marked the resurgence of a movement for rights for black people—a concept that had been experimented with during Reconstruction and then submerged for several generations. As in the past, the tentative expansion of rights for some was accompanied by simultaneous repression, making it clear that the concept of rights was still an exclusionary one.
When the bracero program (which served mostly the Southwest) was ended in 1964, the demand for cheap, exploitable, temporary workers didn’t evaporate—in fact it was increasing, due to the structural changes in the economy described earlier. Over its twenty-two-year life, the program had brought some five million Mexican workers into the country.18 So a new category for filling that demand emerged: workers who were deemed “illegal.”
They may have been crossing the border legally to do agricultural work for decades. Their employers were still recruiting them, and they still needed the work. But with the stroke of a pen, they lost even the meager rights offered under the bracero program. Suddenly, they were “illegal.” It seemed the United States couldn’t live with imported Mexican workers, and couldn’t live without them.
The civil rights impulse that was restoring or extending some rights to black citizens, and creating national unease with the guest-worker program, ended at the bounds of “legality.” Agribusiness could live with civil rights, as long as it could also be assured of a workforce without rights. The AFL-CIO and even, for a time, the United Farm Workers union, went along with the notion. As long as popular opinion accepted the division between “legal” and “illegal,” the social structures of inequality—and the profits they facilitated—could continue.
Starting in the 1990s, the numbers of workers brought in on the H-2 program rose sharply, and recruitment shifted from the Caribbean to Mexico. By 1999, 96 percent of H-2 workers came from Mexico.19 In the well-established pattern, recruitment programs set off a stream of migrants: precisely those states that were bringing in large numbers of temporary workers from Mexico in the 1990s began to see increases in permanent migration in the 2000s. By 2004 these three recent destinations for immigrants were each estimated to have from 200,000 to 300,000 undocumented immigrants.20 Between 1980 and 1990, the foreign-born population rose from 1.3 percent to 1.7 percent in North Carolina, 1.7 percent to 2.7 percent in Georgia, and 3.3 percent to 5 percent in Virginia.21 By 2003, the foreign born had reached 6.2 percent in North Carolina, 7.9 percent in Georgia, and 9.2 percent in Virginia.22 By 2005, the proportions were 7.0 percent in North Carolina, 8.8 percent in Georgia, and 9.7 percent in Virginia—and they ranked fourteenth, ninth, and eleventh, respectively, in numbers of immigrants by state.23
Today’s immigrants, then, are heirs to a long history of immigration and expansion that has incorporated people into the country’s population in a distinctly unequal manner. Today’s immigrants are still immigrants, like the Europeans of a century ago. But they are also Asians and Latinos, whose history in the United States has been one of exclusion and conquest. Both of these intertwined histories structure the ways in which today’s immigrants come to, and are received by, U.S. society today.