Undocumented

US citizens often wonder why immigrants in the United States don’t “do it the right way” and obtain proper documents to authorize their entry and presence in the country.¹ They believe—usually erroneously—that their own ancestors obtained proper visas prior to coming to the United States and also know that if they intended to travel or move to another country, they would assemble their documents before attempting to travel.

When you get your US passport in the mail, it comes with a flyer that says “With Your US Passport, the World Is Yours!” Holders of the US passport are accustomed to simply arriving at the border of another country, showing their passport, and easily crossing. Rarely, they have to apply for a visa in advance. If they pay the fee and fill out the application correctly, the visa is routinely granted. Holders of US passports tend to believe that freedom to travel is their birthright, a view reinforced by the literature that comes with their passports. For the cost of a plane ticket, and occasionally a small visa fee, they can leave the country they were born in any time they want.

For most of the world’s population, though, freedom to travel is a distant dream. They can’t leave the country of their birth because, instead of that magical ownership of the world that comes with a US passport, they are citizens of countries in Africa, Latin America, or most of Asia. Many of them are also poor and people of color. They can’t leave their countries because no other country will let them in. Least of all, the United States. In today’s global apartheid, whole countries—almost all of them in the First World—shut themselves off to travelers, while assuming that their own citizens have the right to travel anywhere they choose. Meanwhile, the citizens of other countries—mostly in the Third World—are imprisoned in the country they are born in, because of the restrictions established by those richer and more powerful.

From the comfort of their First World homes, many citizens of the United States assume that anyone can get a visa to travel legally to any country. If someone comes to and/or lives in the United States without proper documentation, they assume it must be because they simply failed to follow the correct procedure. If only there were such a procedure to follow.

I’ve even heard a Massachusetts state legislator express this assumption in a hearing on the question of allowing undocumented students to be considered state residents for the purpose of paying in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities. He interrogated a panel of students, members of the Student Immigrant Movement who had come to testify in favor of the bill. All were undocumented, and each one explained how and why he or she had ended up with that status.

“What’s your status now?” the legislator asked them. “I’m undocumented,” one Brazilian student answered, bewildered. “Why don’t you start the process to become a citizen?” he continued. “I can’t,” she explained. “Why not?” he asked, revealing his profound ignorance of immigration law. Just as the law forbids most residents of the Third World to travel here—by requiring visas, but refusing to grant them—it also forbids virtually all people who are undocumented to regularize their status.

Structural factors, mostly related to the economy and labor needs, have shaped migrations for centuries. Some of the largest sources of out-migration to the United States today were recipients of in-migration only a few generations ago. The Caribbean islands in particular fall into this category. Other places that now send large numbers of migrants to the United States have long histories of temporary, seasonal, and permanent out-migration. Mexico stands out in this regard.

Since the nineteenth century, nation-states have increasingly attempted to regulate migration and control freedom of movement across often newly established borders. US immigration policies have changed frequently, creating a mesh of regulations and statuses that even immigration lawyers and scholars find confusing.

Until 1890, there was no national immigration system or agency in the United States. Individual states enforced existing immigration laws until the establishment of the federally operated immigration inspection station at Ellis Island in 1892. Certain categories of people became excludable starting in 1875, and in 1891 the law provided for deportation of an immigrant who became a public charge within a year of arrival or was found to belong to a prohibited or excluded group—like Chinese contract workers, prostitutes, convicted criminals. After a year, though, those who had entered “illegally”—that is, in violation of the laws that excluded them—could no longer be deported. The 1903 Immigration Act extended these periods of potential deportability to two years for becoming a public charge, and three years for belonging to an excludible class. In 1917, this was extended to five years.²

It’s important to note that so-called illegal entry, up until this time, referred to entry by persons belonging to a class of people who were unilaterally denied entry: it had nothing to do with the way a person entered. It was the 1907 Immigration Act that first made entering without inspection itself a violation of the law. The 1907 act formalized the inspection procedure, requiring every would-be immigrant coming in by sea to pass through inspection, and made it a misdemeanor for a ship owner to bring in anybody belonging to an excluded class.³ The act did not apply to Mexicans. Inspection was for immigrants, and immigrants were defined as people who arrived by sea, not Mexicans, who crossed the southern border to work. Likewise, Mexicans were exempted from the literacy requirement and head tax imposed on immigrants in 1917, as long as they were coming to work in agriculture. Mexicans weren’t even required to enter through an official port or inspection point until 1919.

For Europeans, a passport was first required for entry in 1918, but even then, it was only for identification. Would-be immigrants did not need to obtain prior permission in their home countries before traveling to the United States, and they couldn’t be deported for entering without inspection until 1924.⁴ In 1929, entry without inspection became a misdemeanor, punishable with fines and jail time.⁵ But there were still exceptions for Europeans.

A new process called registry for noncitizens who had entered without inspection prior to this time allowed them—if they were otherwise (i.e., racially) eligible to citizenship—to regularize their status if they could demonstrate “that they had resided in the country continuously since 1921, were not otherwise subject to deportation, and were of ‘good moral character.’”⁶ In practice, the registry helped Europeans who had evaded the 1919 inspection requirement. The registry system set a precedent—that a period of residence outweighed the technicalities of inspection, or lack of inspection, upon entry. Later laws like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and the twenty-first-century proposals for a path to citizenship would revive that idea.

The 1924 Immigration Act created what was called the “quota system,” putting numerical limits on immigration (still conceived as European immigration) for the first time. Immigrants from Europe now had to comply with quotas established based on the proportion of immigrants from that country already present in the United States. Non-Europeans didn’t get quotas. The Bureau of Labor Statistics explained the intent of the law: “Immigrants of New World countries or their descendants, aliens ineligible to citizenship or their descendants, the descendants of slave immigrants, and the descendants of American aborigines were specifically excluded from the national-origins plan. In a broad sense, therefore, the problem was to find the extent to which the various countries of Europe, as now constituted, had contributed to the white population of the country.”⁷ For the first time, Europeans could be excluded, not on the basis of their individual characteristics, but because of the country they came from. Somewhat paradoxically from today’s perspective, Mexican labor migration was unaffected by the restrictive law.

Most Europeans who arrived in the United States prior to 1924 did pretty much what immigrants from Mexico and Central America did a few decades later: they gathered their families and their belongings, put together the money they needed for the trip, and embarked on their journey. They didn’t “do it the right way,” wait in line, or follow a legal process, because there was no line or process.

The records of Ellis Island are filled with the stories of individuals like Irving Berlin, who went on to become an iconic American songwriter, author of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” and “God Bless America.” The family of Israel Baline, age five, fled their home in Russia after their village was attacked in a pogrom and their house burned to the ground. They traveled “illegally” because, in 1893, Russia (unlike most countries at the time) required a passport for travel and exit; they “smuggled themselves from town to town and country to country” until reaching Antwerp, Belgium, where they boarded a ship bound for New York. On the ship’s manifest, their last name was changed from Baline to Beilin, so they entered the United States under a false name. (The name “Irving Berlin” was introduced by a printer’s error when Israel produced his first album at age nineteen.)⁸ Since the United States had only minimal entry requirements for Europeans at the time, family members were given a medical inspection by the US Public Health Service to determine whether they had any infectious disease and a legal inspection to determine whether they were likely to become public charges. Only about 2 percent of would-be immigrants were rejected as a result of these inspections.

Mae Ngai argues that with so few restrictions on immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “there was no such thing as ‘illegal immigration.’ The government excluded a mere 1% of the 25 million immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before World War I, mostly for health reasons. (Chinese were the exception, excluded on grounds of ‘racial unassimilability.’) The statutes of limitations of one to five years meant that even those here unlawfully did not live forever with the specter of deportation.”⁹

The 1924 law, in addition to establishing the quota system, created the concept of illegality by making entry without inspection illegal, and making deportability permanent by eliminating the statute of limitations. Before 1924, what made a person deportable was his or her membership in an excluded class; furthermore, after the person had been in the country for a period of time, his or her presence became legal despite prior excludability. Now, a person who entered without inspection could be, technically, “illegal.”¹⁰

Still, there were many ways for Europeans who didn’t “follow the rules” to become legal. The 1929 registry law helped those who entered before 1921. Between 1935 and the late 1950s, European immigrants without documentation were allowed to adjust their status by reentering through Canada to obtain legal permanent residency. After 1940, immigrants who could show that their families would suffer “serious economic detriment” could have their deportation suspended. All of these provisions applied only to European immigrants, since they were the only ones allowed to immigrate under the 1924 exclusions. (Mexicans were still crossing the border easily, but they were not considered immigrants.) Some two hundred thousand Europeans without documents were able to legalize their status using these means.¹¹

In 1965, the United States abandoned the differential quota system, replacing it with a new one that imposed equal quotas on all countries. This meant that, for the first time, Western Hemisphere migrants—primarily Mexicans—were classified as immigrants. This change essentially created illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America, but without all of the loopholes and exceptions that had allowed Europeans to adjust their status.¹²

Donna Gabaccia’s research shows that media references to so-called illegal immigration closely followed restrictive legislation.

The earliest references are to “illegal immigration,” which referred to the movement of workers from China; they appeared immediately after passage of the 1882 Chinese exclusion. With the exclusion of all Asians and the restriction of southern and eastern European migrations in the 1920s, “illegal immigrant” became an intermittent fixture in the pages of New York Times, where it usually meant stowaways, persons who “jumped ship,” or the “immigrant bootleggers” who supposedly smuggled in workers and “immoral” women. Only after World War II (and a brief period when most stories about “illegal immigrants” focused on European Jews entering the British mandate in Palestine) did the term—understood by then to mean “wetbacks” crossing the Rio Grande—become attached firmly to workers from Mexico. And only after 1965 did the term become common in a wide array of writings by journalists, scholars, and Congressional representatives.¹³

Today, of course, the term “illegal immigrant” has become common currency. The rest of this chapter will look at two of the largest sources of undocumented immigrants in the United States today, Mexico and Guatemala. It will ask how people from those countries came to migrate to the United States, and how and why their migrations have become illegalized.

The undocumented population in the United States increased rapidly between 1965, when the first restrictive measures were passed against Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, and the beginning of the twenty-first century. By 1980, there were from 2 to 4 million undocumented immigrants in the country, rising to 8.5 million in 2000 and reaching a peak of almost 12 million in 2007.¹⁴

Notably, over half of those undocumented in 2011 had arrived between 1995 and 2004, with only 14 percent arriving between 2005 and 2011.¹⁵ Thus, most undocumented people have been in the country for quite a while. The rise in the undocumented coincided with an even greater rise in the overall Hispanic population in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1970, the 9.6 million Hispanics in the United States made up 4.7 percent of the population. Four decades later, the Hispanic population had jumped to 50.5 million or 16 percent of the population.¹⁶

Most of these have consistently been Mexicans. Estimates for the undocumented Mexican population rose from 1.13 million in 1980 to 2.04 million in 1990 and 4.68 million in 2000, rising to a high of 7.03 million in 2008 before stabilizing and declining to 6.8 million in 2011. The Central American undocumented population also rose after 1980, reaching 570,000 Salvadorans, 430,000 Guatemalans, and 300,000 Hondurans in 2008. For Central Americans, the numbers continued to increase after 2008: in 2011, there were 660,000 from El Salvador, 520,000 from Guatemala, and 380,000 from Honduras. Together, Central Americans and Mexicans made up three-quarters of the growth in the undocumented population between 1980 and 2008.¹⁷

Moreover, a significant proportion—over half—of Mexicans and Central Americans who are here are undocumented. Fifty-eight percent of Mexicans, 57 percent of Salvadorans, 71 percent of Guatemalans, and 77 percent of Hondurans are undocumented. “Never before have so many people been outside the law and never before have the undocumented been so concentrated within such a small number of national origins,” wrote Douglas Massey and Karen Pren.¹⁸ Mexico and Central America are thus key pieces in the puzzle of undocumentedness in the United States.

With this big picture in mind, we must start to untangle the history of undocumented migration from Mexico and Central America.

The largest group of undocumented people in the United States today comes from Mexico. Many are from the central-western Mexican states that have been sending migrants northward for over a century, although increasingly migrants hail from heavily indigenous regions in the south of the country that had seen little out-migration before the 1990s. Almost 60 percent of the undocumented, over 6 million people in 2010, were Mexican. Other Latin Americans make up another 23 percent.¹⁹ Mexicans also make up the largest foreign-born population in the United States, with about 29 percent of the foreign-born or 12 million people.²⁰ As noted above, over half of Mexicans in the United States are undocumented.

Surveys taken of Mexican migrants in Mexico (i.e., having returned from the United States) show another side of the story: that lots of undocumented people return home after being in the United States. The Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University and the University of Guadalajara surveyed eighty thousand return migrants from twenty-one Mexican states, as well as migrants from those communities who have settled in the United States. In Mexico, the interviews show that 83 percent had entered the United States illegally on their first trip, and 73 percent on their most recent trip. In the United States, 77 percent responded that they had entered illegally on their first trip, and 56 percent that they entered illegally on their most recent trip. (The last response may be skewed by individuals reluctant to reveal current illegal status.)²¹

To understand why and how so many Mexicans have come to be undocumented, it’s crucial to examine the history.

The border that divides the United States from Mexico, and that large numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans cross each year without authorization, was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and adjusted by the Gadsden or La Mesilla Purchase of 1853. Much of the US Southwest used to be Mexico. The first Mexicans in the United States did not cross any border; rather, the border crossed them.

Until 1924, the new border between the United States and Mexico was virtually unpoliced, and migration flowed openly. Mexicans worked in the mines and railroads of the Southwest and migrated to the factories and urban centers in the Midwest. In 1908, US Bureau of Labor Statistics researcher Victor Clark reported that, while “complete statistics of those who cross the frontier are not kept,” an estimated sixty thousand to one hundred thousand Mexicans crossed each year to work in the United States. “Except in Texas and California, few Mexicans become permanent residents, and even in those two states, a majority are transient laborers who seldom remain more than six months at a time in this country.”²²

The many laws that were passed to try to control immigration from the Civil War on did not apply to Mexicans, because Congress did not consider them immigrants or potential immigrants at all. In agriculture, Clark explained, “the main value of the Mexican . . . is as a temporary worker in crops where the season is short. . . . Mexicans are not likely to be employed the year round by small farmers, because they are not entertained in the family like American, German, Scandinavian, or Irish laborers of the North. Yet they do not occupy a position analogous to that of the Negro in the South. They are not permanent, do not acquire land or establish themselves in little cabin homesteads, but remain nomadic and outside of American civilization.”²³

Railroads played a crucial role both in moving Mexicans to the border and into the United States and in creating a demand for Mexican labor. Mexico’s nineteenth-century rail system was “designed, planned and constructed by Americans” and extended US lines into Mexico to facilitate the transport of US manufactured goods into Mexico. Thus, decisions about Mexico’s economy and infrastructure were made in the United States, for the benefit of US capitalists. The railroads also helped bring Mexicans to, and across, the border.²⁴

As US capital moved south, it drew southerners northward. Railroad concessions displaced over three hundred thousand peasants in Mexico’s central plateau, creating one pool of potential migrants. Many of them were recruited to work in new American enterprises in the north of the country. Some went to work on the railroad itself; others in new American-owned mining and oil operations. Mexico’s demographic patterns were fundamentally, and irrevocably, altered with this shift of population to the North.²⁵ In Arizona, as the copper mines boomed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, they sent labor contractors to scour Mexico for workers being displaced from their lands. The first Mexican mineworkers in Arizona were Sonorans who crossed the border, but they were soon joined by central Mexicans who traveled north along the new rail lines.²⁶

Victor Clark described how the railroads contributed to the creation of a migrant labor force and the long-term social and cultural changes that the railroads and the migrations brought:

In Mexico railways have given both the opportunity and the inducement to emigration. Needing unskilled labor for their construction and maintenance, they drew among the agricultural population along their lines, at first for a few days or weeks of temporary service between crops and later for more extended periods. At first the true peon was averse to leaving his home, and would not work where he could not sleep under his own roof, but gradually he became bolder and more worldly-wise and could be prevailed upon to work for a month or so a hundred miles or more up and down the line. He became accustomed to having silver in his pocket occasionally and found it would exchange for things he had not heretofore thought of having for his personal use. He became attached to cash wages in about the same degree that he became detached from his home surroundings. Employers in the more primitive parts of Mexico say that at present the people will not work for money so long as they have food in their cabins. When they first leave home they will work only long enough to provide themselves with food and shelter for a few days in advance. But the railways, bringing a greater variety of wares at lower prices, have made possible the attractive shop of the railway town, and this market for money has made the latter a more desirable commodity in the eyes of the peon. . . . The railways have thus attracted labor and have held it more and more permanently from a constantly widening area along their lines. A general officer of the National Railroad of Mexico stated that his company had brought north about 1,500 laborers to work on the upper section of the road within a year, and that practically all of them had ultimately crossed over into Texas.²⁷

US aid and investment, then, directly uprooted Mexican peasants, recruited them into a migrant labor stream, and initiated the social and cultural changes that led them to leave their homes and work for cash in distant lands. It was US influence deep inside Mexico that set into motion the process of out-migration.

By 1933, economist Paul S. Taylor found that a tradition of migration had become well established in the Mexican sending community of Arandas in Jalisco. The ongoing migration, he wrote, was “but a modern and expanded phase” of a process that had begun decades before.²⁹

First, the railroad arrived. The Mexico City–El Paso rail line, which passed through Jalisco, recruited workers from the adjacent countryside. Then US railroad and mining companies began to send employment agents into Mexico’s interior to contract potential migrants and deployed station agents on the border to recruit arriving workers.

The earliest migrants from Arandas had heard rumors about the availability of work in the United States from former prisoners, local men who had been arrested and sent to fight in ongoing military campaigns against the Yaqui Indians in Sonora. They traveled by rail to El Paso, where an employment agency contracted them for railroad work in Independence, Kansas. On their next venture, agents in El Paso sent them to Fresno, California, again to work on the railroad.³⁰

Mexican employment agents also visited Arandas to recruit laborers. One former migrant told Taylor that a railroad construction recruiter offered him free passage to the border.³¹ “In 1913, an agent [Mexican] from the Santa Fé railroad came to Arandas and took three or four of us by auto to the railroad, and north. I did not pay anything to go to the frontier; they paid all,” one source from the village told Taylor, adding that “American contratistas, representing railroads and mines, had been all through the region twenty-odd years ago.”³²

Taylor emphasizes that the migration was spurred by US actions. When Congress passed the Literacy Act for immigrants in 1917, railroad, agricultural, and mining corporations raised a howl of protest and insisted that an open border was essential in order to obtain the labor they needed.³³ In response, Congress quickly exempted Mexicans from the literacy requirement. Migration ebbed and flowed directly in response to employment demands in the United States.³⁴ When they needed workers, employers turned to Mexico. When they didn’t—as in 1929, when Depression-era unemployment began to rise—the State Department instructed consular officers to increase their enforcement of the “likely to become a public charge” restriction on would-be immigrants and refuse to grant entry visas to Mexicans unlikely to find work.³⁵

Emigrants from the small community of Arandas worked in twenty-four states in the United States by the 1930s, and in a wide variety of industries ranging from automobile factories to agriculture to coal mining, though the railroad was by far the largest employer.³⁶ Most came to the border without papers and were automatically granted entry. After 1928, the American consular service began to encourage prospective migrants to obtain permits from a consulate before arriving at the border, though this was still not required.³⁷

Some also crossed without inspection, either paying a small sum to a professional or simply wading across the river at a spot distant from any border post. By 1931, though, the word had spread that the consular service was not granting papers, that deportations were rising and employment contracting.³⁸

Although the 1924 law did not include any restrictions on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, it did create a new border police force, the Border Patrol. In the early years, according to historian Aristide Zolberg, “its mission was to prevent the entry of alcohol rather than people, so that in effect, the border remained an informal affair.”³⁹ The force also sought to deter prohibited Chinese attempting to enter through Mexico.

Was it a paradox that the Border Patrol was created in the 1920s, just when agribusiness, with its need for migrant labor, was rapidly expanding in the Southwest? Several scholars argue that in fact the system worked well for farmers who needed migrant workers. Mexican workers could still cross the border easily, but because they became more deportable, the new laws also made them more exploitable. “Agribusinessmen kicked, winked, screamed, lobbied, and cajoled for border patrol practices that allowed unrestricted access to Mexican workers while promoting effective discipline over the region’s Mexicano workforce.”⁴⁰ Deportability was part of that discipline. Local officials served farmers’ interests by carrying out deportation raids in cases of union organizing or, sometimes, just before payday.⁴¹

The need to patrol the border was mitigated in some ways by the fact that the (mostly) men who crossed into the United States carried the border with them, even before the Border Patrol was created. Many had worked under segregated conditions for US enterprises inside Mexico. In Mexico, workers did “Mexican work” and received a “Mexican wage”; they lived in segregated housing.⁴²

These segregated conditions were replicated in the United States. “Recruited laborers whether destined for northern Mexico or for the United States, travel in parties, under a boss, or ‘cabo’ who holds the tickets,” wrote Victor Clark in 1908. Then, after “crossing a virtual open border, Mexican workers were again housed in company towns, confined to ‘Mexican work,’ treated to dual wages, and segregated socially . . . the workers’ experiences in Mexico continued in the United States.”⁴³

Thus, the most important border was the internal or racial one that kept Mexicans and Americans socially separated from each other, even as they labored in a single, integrated economy on both sides of the political boundary that separated the countries. Gilbert González concludes that “rather than interpreting segregation as a means of keeping people out of the ‘mainstream’ or of ‘marginalizing’ them to the social and economic periphery, segregation was the method of integrating Mexican immigrants and their families into the heart of the American economy. . . . Segregated settlements brought a variation of the border to the employers’ doorsteps.”⁴⁴

Mexican workers’ theoretical deportability became real in 1929, as the country entered the Great Depression. On the pretext that they were likely to “become a public charge” as employment opportunities evaporated, both Mexicans and Mexican Americans were rounded up for deportation. A “frenzy of anti-Mexican hysteria” justified roundups of entire Mexican neighborhoods and hundreds of thousands were deported with little attention to legal niceties.⁴⁵

With the ending of the Depression and the coming of World War II, agricultural interests confronted a new labor shortage. The US government responded with the Bracero Program, administered jointly by the US and Mexican governments from 1942 to 1964, which recruited millions of Mexicans to migrate north for a season or more.⁴⁶ Over the period, 4.5 million contracts were signed, representing some 2 million workers (many went more than once). The program cemented US agribusiness’s reliance on migratory Mexican workers to the present day.

The four central-western states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Zacatecas comprised 45 percent of the participants. “Here,” argues historian Michael Snodgrass, “is where a culture of Mexican migration first took root in the early twentieth century.” Because of demand from both would-be migrants and local officials, the Mexican government established its processing centers in Guanajuato and Jalisco. Workers from “depressed mining villages and drought-stricken farm towns” flocked to the program.⁴⁷

Alongside Bracero migrants, others from the same region migrated on their own, undocumented, but not unwelcome. “It was easy then,” Snodgrass explains. “When he headed north for the first time in 1955, the first English expression that Gerardo López learned was ‘go ahead,’ the words a Border Patrol agent spoke while encouraging his entry.”⁴⁸ Aristide Zolberg, who was stationed in El Paso for military service in the mid-1950s, commented that “informality” prevailed regarding border crossings. “You were more likely to be stopped crossing the Juarez Bridge if you looked like an American in military service than like a Mexican seeking work.”⁴⁹

Former migrants from the highlands of Jalisco recalled that the program resurrected networks that had been established in the 1920s, only to be temporarily interrupted in the 1930s. Other parts of Jalisco, like the sugar region, had no prior history of migration. Now, though, union leaders began to demand Bracero contracts for their members during the tiempo muerto from May to December, which conveniently coincided with California’s harvest season. Thus, new areas were drawn into the “culture of migration.”⁵⁰ Remittances became Mexico’s third-largest source of foreign exchange by the 1950s. While renewing old flows and creating new ones, the Bracero Program also redefined the destinations of Mexican migrants: now almost all of them were recruited directly into farm labor.⁵¹

The program also deepened the structures and culture of migration, including extralegal migration, in western Mexico.⁵² A whole industry of smugglers or “coyotes” emerged, who worked with US-based labor contractors to supply undocumented workers to farmers.⁵³ Some famers preferred to avoid the bureaucracy and protections involved with the official system. Others lived in states like Texas that the Mexican government blacklisted from the program because of labor violations. By the time the program ended in 1964, it had outlived its demand because the extralegal system that had grown alongside it had grown large and strong enough to fulfill the country’s farm labor demand.⁵⁴

Legal scholar Daniel Kanstroom argues that the program legitimized “a particularly instrumentalist view of Mexican immigrant workers.” Employers, the law, and the population in general had long seen Mexicans as different from other immigrants—as essentially temporary and disposable. The Bracero Program institutionalized this position for the post–World War II period. Mexicans in the United States were automatically assumed to be temporary and perhaps without papers. In other words, Mexicans’ status was inherently “legally tenuous.”⁵⁵

The Bracero Program was also accompanied by a “massive bilateral deportation policy” that increased deportations to some seven hundred thousand by the early 1950s. “The wetback is a person of legal disability who is under jeopardy of immediate deportation if caught. He is told that if he leaves the farm, he will be reported to the [Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which] will surely find him if he ventures into town or out onto the roads,” reported the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor in 1951.⁵⁶

Still, both farmers and government tacitly admitted that the line between legality and illegality was a fine one, and that “wetbacks” were an essential component of the system.⁵⁷ In one incident in early 1954, as workers massed on the border seeking to cross in Mexicali, the INS urged them to the edge of town, where they crossed “illegally.” “Instead of sending them back to Mexico, however, US Border Patrol officials trotted them to the US side of the official crossing and directed them to touch a toe onto the Mexican side. . . . When this was done, US Labor Department officials gave the migrants contracts to sign, which completed their transformation from illegal immigrants to guestworkers.”⁵⁸

Just a few months later, the Eisenhower administration initiated Operation Wetback, a massive, military-style sweep of Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods aimed at deporting en masse those deemed to be in the country “illegally.” Over a million were deported. Like the deportations of the 1930s, Operation Wetback snared many individuals, including US citizens, simply for being ethnically Mexican.

Attorney General Herbert Brownell distinguished between “the illegal Mexican migrants known as ‘wetbacks,’ and the legal Mexican nationals known as ‘braceros.’ . . . The illegals, who cross the border furtively in violation of the laws and regulations of both the United States and Mexico cause serious social and economic problems for the United States.”⁵⁹ Yet the operation illustrated the symbiotic relationship between the Bracero Program and undocumented workers. Even as it was being carried out, Bracero recruitment continued unabated, and the INS offered numerous methods for farmers to legalize the workers they needed, a process termed “drying out the wetbacks.”⁶⁰ As Kanstroom points out, “The remarkably symmetrical relationship between labor recruitment and the deportation system is illustrated by the fact that, up to 1964, the number of braceros, nearly 5 million, was almost exactly the same as the number of deportees.”⁶¹

After Operation Wetback, deportations dropped again as the number of Bracero-contracted workers grew alongside the number of work-permitted or green-card entrants. The green card had its origins in the Alien Registration Act of 1940 in the context of World War II, requiring all noncitizens to register at a local post office, which would then mail them the card. The Security Act of 1950 created the green card as we know it today. Still, for Mexicans, since there were no numerical restrictions, “obtaining residency [i.e., the green card] required little more than a letter verifying employment and a trip to a US consulate.”⁶² During the 1960s and early 1970s, some forty thousand Mexicans living south of the border held green cards that enabled them to commute to work in the United States.

During the two major waves of deportation/repatriation of Mexicans before 1965—during the Depression of the 1930s and in the mid-1950s—undocumentedness as we know it today was not the rationale used to justify deportation. As entry to the country was restricted on the grounds of indigence or the probability of becoming a public charge, the vague “likely to become a public charge” accusation was harnessed to justify the deportations of Mexicans during the Depression.⁶³ During the 1950s, many people mounted arguments against both illegal immigrants—then accorded the insulting moniker wetback—and the Bracero Program, regardless of the fact that one was technically legal and the other illegal. Even as Operation Wetback targeted the supposedly illegal, the INS offered multiple methods for legalization. Mexican American organizations like LULAC and the American GI Forum campaigned equally against both the Bracero Program and the “wetback tide,” both of which they believed to be harmful to the efforts of Mexican Americans to assimilate into white US society.⁶⁴

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 for the first time ever placed numerical limits on Mexican migration, just as the Bracero Program was being shut down. Suddenly, legal migration for Mexicans, after so many years of being encouraged, was closed off. But the demand for Mexican labor, and Mexican workers’ need for jobs, continued. A smaller guest-worker program, the H-2 program, remained and was expanded over the following decades, but came nowhere near to filling the demand.

The abolition of the Bracero Program was supposed to create better, more equal treatment for Mexicans in the United States, in keeping with the civil rights movements of the era, including a growing farm-worker movement. It failed miserably. Unlike the European countries, which legalized their guest workers when they ended similar programs around the same time, the United States simply illegalized its Mexican workers. “In essence, in 1965 the United States shifted from a de jure guestworker program based on the circulation of bracero migrants to a de facto program based on the circulation of undocumented migrants.”⁶⁵

The visa cap for Mexicans was far below the number who had been migrating as braceros in previous years. Thus, the law “intensified the institutional framework that further enabled the codification of Mexicans as ‘illegals.’” And the newly created problem of illegality became the rationale for a huge increase in apprehensions and deportations.⁶⁶ The number of Mexican migrants who lacked the green card and were therefore deportable rose from 88,823 in 1961 to over a million a year by the mid-1970s.⁶⁷

Still, writes Oscar Martínez, “because of leniency on the part of US authorities at the time, undocumented commuters found it rather easy to cross the border.”⁶⁸ As the Mexican government pointed out, many of the undocumented were part of a “seasonal, temporary, and circular” migration.⁶⁹ With the “relatively open” border between 1965 and 1985, “85 percent of undocumented entries were offset by departures, yielding a relatively modest net increment to the US population.”⁷⁰ Still, Douglas Massey wrote that “never before have so many immigrants been placed in such a vulnerable position and subject to such high levels of official exclusion and discrimination.”⁷¹

The US government acknowledged the contradictions of this new situation in 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) allowed Mexicans in the country illegally to regularize their status. The concept was not new; earlier European immigrants became exempt from deportation and were allowed to become citizens after they had established roots in the country. Some 2.3 million Mexican immigrants (and 700,000 non-Mexicans) were able to become legal under the IRCA’s provisions.⁷² To do so, though, they needed documents: documents proving their continuous presence in the country since 1982, or documents demonstrating that they had been involved in seasonal agricultural work. A small industry grew manufacturing false documents. The ever-fuzzy line between legal and illegal remained, as many were able to legalize illegally with fraudulent documents.

When the IRCA was passed, the Department of Agriculture estimated that some 350,000 undocumented migrants were working in agriculture and would be eligible for Seasonal Agricultural Worker (SAW) status. However, some 1.3 million applied—almost as many as applied for status under the four-years-of-continuous-residence provisions. In California, with an estimated two hundred thousand undocumented agricultural workers, some seven hundred thousand applied. By early 1992, the INS had approved 88 percent of these applications, or over a million nationwide.⁷³ But independent studies carried out in Mexico, among migrants who had applied for the SAW provision, showed that only 60–70 percent of those who applied were actually eligible.⁷⁴

Thus, the IRCA contributed to what could perhaps be called illegal legalizations—people using false documents attesting to their status as agricultural workers to apply for, and obtain, legal status in the United States—and what Philip Martin called “documented illegal aliens.” In an article in the New York Times, Robert Suro claimed there had been “fraud on a huge scale.”⁷⁵ Yet fraud or no fraud, people became officially legal. Moreover, the whole process may have actually spurred further undocumented immigration by “spreading work authorization documents and knowledge about them to very poor and unsophisticated rural Mexicans and Central Americans, encouraging first-time entrants from these areas.”⁷⁶

The 1986 law also for the first time made it illegal to employ a worker without proper documents. Employer sanctions created an enormous and costly illegal infrastructure that migrants had to navigate to obtain false documents in order to work, but did little to reduce the numbers of undocumented workers. Moreover, the law left employers virtually immune to prosecution, and with even greater ability to exploit their now more legally vulnerable workers.⁷⁷

The 1986 IRCA was ostensibly aimed at ending illegality by legalizing many resident Mexicans and discouraging new arrivals through increased border controls and employer sanctions that criminalized work. However, it had exactly the opposite effect. Mexicans who obtained legal status under the amnesty were able to leave the more marginalized sectors of the labor market. But these traditional sectors, like agriculture, plus newly emerging sectors (discussed in Chapters 5 and 6) only increased their demand for workers. Some developed new strategies of subcontracting to evade the law. Meanwhile undocumented migrants, once in the country, began to extend their stays and send for their families, since the long-standing circular migration patterns were disrupted by the border militarization.⁷⁸

Until the 1990s, what migration scholars call the “traditional” or central-west region of Mexico, including Jalisco, had been the source of the majority of migrants.⁷⁹ Since the 1990s, the proportion from that region has shrunk considerably and that from the south-southeast region has increased. Migrants from the traditional sending regions were primarily Spanish-speaking mestizos.⁸⁰ Since the 1980s, though, a series of blows, including the 1982 peso crisis, the debt crisis that followed it, and neoliberal restructuring in the 1990s and components of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, have severely affected indigenous communities in southern Mexico. Over a million families lost their land as a result of these changes. The result was that new areas started their own massive out-migration to the North, greatly diversifying the Mexican population in the United States.⁸¹

One family’s story can illustrate the various and contradictory ways that people become illegal in the contemporary United States. Consider the case of the Hernández Cruz family of Irapuato, Mexico. The father, Juan Miguel Hernández Pérez, began the family’s migration tradition in the middle of the century, when he was recruited to work in the Bracero Program. But if the program created a legal means to initiate a migrant stream from 1942 to 1964, the termination of the program did not end either the demand for migrants’ labor nor their desire to work in the United States. When Juan Miguel’s son Juan Hernández Cruz left Irapuato to work in the fields of California in 1981, “he was following his father’s footsteps but, unlike his father, who had been a registered worker under the Bracero Program, Juan would be crossing as an unauthorized migrant.”⁸²

Juan Hernández Cruz’s younger sister, Samantha, followed her brother in 1988, bringing their seriously ill mother with her. First they tried to enter without inspection, crossing “through the back hills of San Ysidro many times without success.” Finally, “the coyote suggested they get false papers instead. . . . By using someone else’s papers, altered to include their photos, they found it easy to cross via the San Ysidro US Port of Entry.”

Meanwhile, Juan was working to regularize his and his sister’s status using the Seasonal Agricultural Worker provision of the 1986 IRCA. “Through friends, they were connected with a farmer in the United States who signed all the documents they required for $800 each. They both received a letter that they had worked on a farm for the required number of years and were both granted permanent residency.”⁸³ Legally, but on the basis of false documents.

The ins and outs of this family’s immigration history are more typical than unusual for Mexican migrants. Their story, and the long history behind it, helps to explain why Mexicans supposedly choose to come to the United States “illegally.” From the railroads, to the various maneuvers in US immigration policy over the past century, to the current neoliberal regime in Mexico, structural factors have created what is today called Mexican illegality.⁸⁴

Central Americans, coming primarily from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, comprise the second-largest group of undocumented people in the United States. My focus here is on one group of Central Americans, indigenous rural Mayans from Guatemala’s highlands. The history of today’s Mayan migration to the United States began over five hundred years ago.

While we have little evidence about Mayan migration patterns prior to the Spanish conquest in the 1500s, patterns of coerced and voluntary migration clearly characterized the colonial period. The Spanish concentrated the indigenous in new communities to better implement political, religious, and economic control. They imposed various systems of coerced labor that forced people out of their communities for weeks or months at a time to work in colonial mines, plantations, and factories. Mayans also fled from their communities to avoid forced labor demands.⁸⁵

The coffee plantation system that grew in Guatemala after independence led to new forced labor demands and displacements. Historians have documented the fearful violence involved with dispossessing large numbers of indigenous peoples from their lands and forcing them into labor on the new plantations. They estimate that one in five of the highland Indian population migrated seasonally to work in the coffee fields in the 1880s.⁸⁶ The numbers increased after the overthrow of the brief revolutionary experiment in the 1950s: Christopher Lutz and George Lovell calculate some two hundred thousand Mayan labor migrants a year in the 1950s, three hundred thousand in the 1960s, and five hundred thousand in the 1970s.⁸⁷

Guatemalan Indian activist Rigoberta Menchu described her initiation into migration to coffee and cotton plantations as a child. Migration to work was simply a fact of life, not to be questioned.

From when I was very tiny, my mother used to take me down to the finca, wrapped in a shawl on her back. She told me that when I was about two I had to be carried screaming into the lorry because I didn’t want to go. . . . It sometimes took two nights and a day from my village to the coast. . . . By the time we got to the finca we were totally stupefied; we were like chickens coming out of a pot. We were in such a state, we could hardly walk to the finca. I made many trips from the altiplano to the coast, but I never saw the countryside we passed through. . . . I saw the wonderful scenery and places for the first time when we were thrown out of the finca and had to pay our own way back on the bus . . . .

I remember that from when I was about eight to when I was about ten, we worked in the coffee crop. And after that we worked on the cotton plantations further down the coast, where it was very, very hot. . . . That was our world. I felt that it would always be the same, always the same. It hadn’t ever changed . . . .

The lorries belonged to the fincas, but they were driven by the recruiting agents, the caporales. These caporales are in charge of about forty people, or more or less what the lorry holds. When they get to the finca, the caporal becomes the overseer of this group. . . . The overseers stay on the fincas. . . . They are in charge. When you’re working, for example, and take a little rest, he comes and insults you. . . . They also punish the slow workers . . . .⁸⁸

Every finca in Guatemala has a cantina, owned by the landowner, where the workers get drunk on alcohol and all kinds of guaro, and pile up debts. They often spend most of their wages. They drink to get happy and to forget the bitterness they feel at having to leave their villages in the Altiplano and come and work so brutally hard on the fincas for so little.⁸⁹

Menchu’s testimony suggests that, like the Mexican peasants described earlier, Guatemalan highlanders were not seeking to leave their homes to work for pay. It took generations of forced recruitment to create this migration tradition.

Interestingly, human rights advocate Daniel Wilkinson found that the Mayan descendants who live on the plantations today know little of the violence that went into the making of this history. “People knew where their families had come from, but they didn’t know—or didn’t care to recall—much more about what had brought them to the plantations.”⁹⁰ Wilkinson, like others who study Guatemala, emphasizes the silences that surround people’s understanding of their realities. Decades—or centuries—of genocide and terror have shaped the culture of Guatemala’s highland indigenous communities. People may have few tools to understand the forces behind their oppression, and they have learned over and over that trying to protest or change their situation only invites further repression.

The civil war—or more accurately, dirty war—against highland Maya communities during the 1970s and ’80s was one result of people in the highlands trying to challenge their poverty and dispossession. It led to the destruction of hundreds of villages, and perhaps a million internally displaced and one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand refugees who fled the country, many across the border to Mexico. Others were forced from their homes into model villages under army control.

Thus, historians of the Maya have argued that migration has been a “ubiquitous feature of Maya life” that became central to Mayan history and identity. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, and in accelerated ways since the 1800s, political, legal, military, and economic structures have directly enforced migration or simply made it impossible to survive without it.⁹¹

“An absent community or family member may be in one of several places: on the coast picking coffee (returning home within a month, with wages); in the capital working as a domestic, merchant, or worker (sending money home to the family, returning periodically or permanently, such as after a stint or a marriage proposal from home); in another municipio selling firewood, animals, or agricultural products (returning once or twice a month for business and domestic activities); and, increasingly, allá lejos (in the United States), sending US dollars home on a regular basis.”⁹² Both in its structural aspects and in its cultural aspects, today’s migration is just a new phase in a process that is rooted in hundreds of years of history.⁹³

Among the undocumented Mayans of Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia Foxen found a very different conception than what most citizens understand about illegality. Rather than imagining themselves as autonomous individuals making a decision to break the law, they, like Rigoberta Menchu, understand their migration as a requirement imposed upon them by outsiders, which they have no right or opportunity to question.

The coyotes that offer to take them across the border may be considered smugglers under US law, but to the Mayans Foxen studied, they were no different from the labor contractors who had been forcibly recruiting them—legally—for generations. Instead of going to the Pacific coast to work on plantations, now they were being sent to la costa del Norte to work in jewelry factories. One woman told Foxen that “the coyote is the same as the contratista (labor contractor) on the coast: he should know when there is work over there, and should not be sending people if there is no work.” Others told her that they went to Providence “because that is where the coyotes sent them.”⁹⁴ In many cases, contratistas themselves became coyotes, relying on their existing networks and standing and just expanding their geographic scope.⁹⁵ “As did their forefathers centuries ago,” Lutz and Lovell write, “Guatemalan Mayas continue to migrate in order to survive.”⁹⁶

Once in the United States, understandings and worldviews shaped by their history in Guatemala continue to inform immigrants’ understanding of their current realities. One Mayan in Providence explained to Foxen that “the migra here, it is like, as they said, the guerrillas over there. . . . If la migra is looking for one of us, we all run, run escaping, it is like the guerrilla.” Likewise in Guatemala, one campesino (peasant farmer) told her that “he had heard that the INS had not yet arrived in Providence, though they were said to be close (thus likening them to the army or guerrillas).”⁹⁷

Foxen also notes a “total confusion surrounding understandings about the legality and illegality of different types of documentation” that stems from the population’s long history of the law being used against them.⁹⁸ Some of her informants had paid hundreds of dollars to a notario for a temporary work permit. These notarios often had no legal credentials, but played on a semantic confusion, since in Latin America the term often refers to a lawyer. The notarios would file a fraudulent asylum application, which would nonetheless entitle the migrant to a temporary, legal work permit, until their asylum hearing, which would generally result in deportation. Foxen encountered frequent references to people obtaining “papeles legalmente falsificados”—legally falsified documents—a further example of the impenetrable character of the law from the perspective of the immigrants.⁹⁹

Describing his experience as a court interpreter for Guatemalan migrants after an immigration raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, Erik Camayd-Freixas explained that workers there had simply followed recruiters’ and employers’ instructions, and had not knowingly chosen to break any law.

“Do you know what this number is?” asked the lawyer, pointing to the social security number on his I-9 employment form. “I don’t know,” said the man. “Who put it there?” “At the plant, they helped me fill out the papers ’cause I can’t read or write Spanish, much less English.” “Do you know what a social security number is?” the lawyer insisted. “No,” said the man. “Do you know what a social security card is?” “No.” “Do you know what it’s used for?” “I don’t know any of that. I’m new in this country,” said the man, visibly embarrassed.¹⁰⁰

Like their ancestors and their contemporaries, these migrants had simply gone where the recruiters had taken them to work.

A New York Times reporter interviewed Guatemalan and other Central American migrants on Mexico’s southern border in early 2013. “Few had even heard about the debate to overhaul immigration laws and possibly open a pathway to citizenship for immigrants living illegally in the United States,” he commented. “Instead, the prevailing force seems to be deteriorating conditions at home.”¹⁰¹

For at least five hundred years, Guatemala’s highland Mayan populations have been buffeted, or coerced, by the winds of the global economy. They have been slaughtered, displaced, massacred, and enslaved. They have had to leave their homes and their families to do the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest work for the benefit of others. They have been discriminated against socially and legally. For centuries, they have been forced to migrate and suffered poor working conditions and legalized discrimination. Their migration to the United States is only the latest phase of this long history. Their technical illegality in the United States is but a small part of a system that has worked to control their movement and their labor for hundreds of years.

Choosing to Be Undocumented