Early US border enforcement control efforts
A century ago, the US-Mexico border was relatively "open”. That is, throughout the 19th century and until the proclamation of the closing of the frontier by the US Census in 1890, there was little enforcement of immigration controls at or between official points of entry. It is remarkable that the border remained largely "unprotected” both before and after the hostilities of the US-Mexican war, which ceded nearly half of Mexico’s territory to the US under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Even after that conflict, efforts to secure the newly acquired territory were sporadic and disjointed. Occasional patrols were formed by the US military, local law enforcement authorities, and white vigilante groups that clashed intermittently with the original Native American inhabitants, conquered Mexican settlers, and Chinese and Japanese immigrants drawn to the Southwest as agricultural workers (Lytle Hernandez, 2010). However, by and large, the border was a vast, open territory subject to relatively little state control over the course of the 19th century.
As Kelly Lytle Hernandez (2010) observes, the first concerted federal immigration enforcement efforts between points of entry were introduced in 1904, when the US Immigration Service organized mounted patrols of immigration inspectors, primarily in an effort to prevent the entry of Chinese immigrants barred from entry to the US.6 Racist fears and moral panic over the “Yellow Peril” proliferated in the US, Europe and Russia during the late 19th century, owing to the waves of Chinese migrants displaced by wars and invasions by colonizing powers (Lusk, 1907; Buell, 1923). Drawn into the highly exploitative "coolie” trade, these oft-indentured workers became a key part of the labor force during the first wave of globalization (Stewart, 1954; Crawford Campbell, 1924; Valentine Daniel, 2008). Like immigrants today, there was little appreciation for the contributions of Asian migrant laborers to the building of Western prosperity.
Rather, they were hated, harassed and sometimes lynched or massacred due to the racial prejudices and economic animosities caused by labor market displacement among the white working poor (Boswell, 1986; Saxton, 1971).
Indeed, in an effort to stem unwanted Chinese immigration, early mounted patrols were deployed in El Paso, Texas, though at first they had little manpower and few designated resources.7 With the passage of the national origins quotas established by the Immigration Act of 1924, Congress immediately approved the Labor Appropriation Act of 1924 that created the US Border Patrol (USBP) to prevent the entry of immigrants between ports of entry.8 The new agency was housed within the Immigration Bureau of the Department of Labor, appropriated a budget of $1 million and charged with a mandate to enforce US immigration laws along the northern and southern land borders. Later, Congress passed the Aliens and Nationality Act of 1925, which granted the agency broad powers to detain or arrest aliens in order to enforce immigration laws along a 2,000-mile border that had heretofore been largely unguarded.
At its outset, USBP had fewer than 500 poorly trained and ill-equipped inspectors. While some were drawn from the Texas Rangers and from Mounted Patrol units, the vast majority came from non-law enforcement backgrounds (Lytle-Hernandez, 2010). These new USBP inspectors were literally handed a gun and a badge, but had no standardized uniforms until 1928 or official training academy until 1934.9 Most inspectors patrolled the border by horseback; inspectors provided their own horse and gear, while the federal government provided feed.10 From these inauspicious beginnings, the USBP grew relatively quickly as US concerns about border security grew as a result of the enforcement of Prohibition, the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War.11
Meanwhile, the demand for the USBP’s sendees grew amid the concerns of the prohibition era, the collapse of the US economy led to a backlash against Mexican immigrants and even US citizens of Mexican descent, as many as a million of whom returned home or were involuntarily “repatriated” due to the lack of jobs.12 By 1940, when the agency was transferred from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice, its personnel grew from 916 to over 1,500 inspectors.13 The war introduced new responsibilities for the agency, as inspectors were detailed to supervise internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent and to assist in the detection of airborne and maritime enemy invaders in border states.
The end of the Second World War re-focused the agency on immigration control with a new intensity at the height of the Bracero Program, a guestworker program that provided special visas for manual and agricultural laborers beginning in 1942 (Public Law 78). The program was initiated to address the shortfall in manual labor caused by the war effort but persisted for years afterwards due to the demand from employers for relatively cheap manual labor. Over the course of the 22 years during which that program was in place, nearly 4.5 million Mexican and Central American workers were admitted to the US on a temporary basis. Although the Bracero Program was tarnished by deplorable treatment and labor conditions for these workers, it was the result of a bi-national
Escalation of US-Mexico border enforcement 31 agreement between the US and Mexican federal governments. As such, it provided for certain protections and employer responsibilities, including standardized wages, housing, health services, a pension upon repatriation and payment of transportation costs from the home country. Unfortunately, though, the number of visas available under the Bracero Program was insufficient to match the supply of willing laborers and the demand from employers, and millions of undocumented workers continued to flood into the US labor market during the 1940s and 1950s.14
Another problem was that the program required laborers to be assigned to a sponsoring employer, and large numbers of Mexicans entered the country without proper permission and/or violated the terms of the program by seeking employment with employers other than the ones who sponsored them. By the end of the Truman administration (1945-53), there were significant concerns over the growing number of undocumented immigrants, as well as increasing frictions with Mexico over the poor treatment of workers enrolled in the program. In 1951, the Mexican government temporarily suspended its participation in the program, a change in policy that was ignored by many US employers and Mexican migrants, who continued to enter the country illegally and fueled a sizeable increase in undocumented immigration. The USBP responded by diverting personnel from the Canadian border, assigning specialized units to deport undocumented immigrants in both border and interior states, and employing boats and airlifts to repatriate tens of thousands of immigrants to the Mexican interior (CBP, 2010).
For the Eisenhower administration (1953-61), the surge in undocumented immigrants was a political opportunity to crack down under “Operation Wetback”. The total number of undocumented immigrants deported under the program is disputed, but certainly hundreds of thousands and perhaps over a million people were returned to Mexico. In conducting the operation, the USBP employed mass roundups in large swaths of territory both to detain and encourage undocumented immigrants to flee back into Mexico. Thus, in addition to those removed by USBP sweeps, tens of thousands of Braceros and undocumented laborers also likely returned “voluntarily” to Mexico, and people of Mexican descent were regularly harassed throughout the southwest (including an unknown number of wrongly deported US citizens).15 As a result, Operation Wetback firmly established the reputation of the USBP for discriminatory treatment and occasional brutality against immigrants, and specifically Mexicans.16
At the same time. Operation Wetback greatly expanded and consolidated the USBP’s role as a critical mechanism for border enforcement. The role of the USBP arguably became even more significant following the termination of the Bracero Program in 1964, which was followed by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. In addition to creating new country quotas - not based on the discriminatory criteria of the 1920s - the new immigration regime also thereby eliminated special exemptions from such quotas that existed previously for Mexican and Central Americans. With an end to special guest worker visas and new caps on immigration from these countries, the phenomenon of undocumentedimmigration proliferated during the late 1960s and 1970s. This provided ample work for Border Patrol agents to continue and intensify its immigration enforcement efforts along the border.17 By the 1980s, continued concerns about undocumented immigration and the passage of IRCA in 1986 dramatically expanded the ranks and resources available to border enforcement agencies.
