The Birth of the Illegal Alien

WHEN THE Hart-Cellars Act was passed in 1965, neither the dependence on Mexican labor nor the need of Mexican nationals to find jobs disappeared. As sociologist Donald S. Massey notes, the 4.5 million Mexican migrants admitted under the Bracero Program had led to the development of closely connected social networks linking communities in Mexico to jobs and employers in the United States. When the program ended and opportunities for legal entry disappeared, the “massive inflow from Mexico simply reestablished itself under undocumented auspices.”1 In essence, the Act transformed legal migrant workers into “illegal immigrants.” Writes historian Aviva Chomsky:

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.… 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.2

According to Chomsky, the number of Mexican migrants in the country without a green card rose from 88,823 in 1961 to over a million a year by the mid-1970s, abetted by the “leniency” of U.S. authorities at the time, who made it “rather easy to cross the border.” It was at this time, writes Massey, that magazine articles began to proliferate with a Mexican “threat narrative,” characterized by two distinct themes:

On the one hand, migrants from the south were portrayed as a brown “flood” that would “inundate” American culture and “drown” its society. On the other hand, undocumented migrants were portrayed as “invaders” who “swarmed” across the border in “banzai charges” to overrun “outgunned” Border Patrol agents who fought vainly to “hold the line” against the “alien invasion.” As the Cold War climaxed, the war on drugs accelerated, and the war on terror came to dominate public rhetoric, martial metaphors overtook marine metaphors.3

A decade after Hart-Cellars passed, the rise in undocumented workers, while largely unseen in the day-to-day lives of average Americans, was sensationalized in the mainstream media, leading to calls for the government to “do something” about these foreign invaders.

In December 1974, the cover of American Legion Magazine depicted the United States as being overrun by “illegal aliens,” replete with images of Mexicans storming across the U.S.–Mexico border, breaking down a sign that reads “USA Border” and another one reading “Keep Out.”4 The Commissioner of the I.N.S, General Leonard Chapman, in 1976, published an article in Reader’s Digest, “Illegal Aliens: Time to Call a Halt!”, alleging that the agency was “out-manned, under-budgeted, and confronted by a growing, silent invasion of illegal aliens” that threatened to become a “national disaster.”5 In 1977, U.S. News and World Report featured the cover headline: “Border Crisis: Illegal Aliens Out of Control?”, which asserted that Mexicans were abusing welfare, displacing citizens from jobs, and taking to crime, referring to Mexican immigrants as “invaders” and stating that the “U.S. has lost control of its borders.” Two years later, the same magazine estimated that by the year 2025, undocumented immigrants might account for 10 percent of the population.6 A 1977 Time magazine article, described the alleged crisis in ominous, military terms:

The U.S. is being invaded so silently and surreptitiously that most Americans are not even aware of it. The invaders come by land, sea and air. They fly commercial and private aircraft; they jump ship or sail their own boats; they scale mountains and swim rivers. Some have crawled through a mile-long tunnel; others have squeezed through the San Antonio sewerage system. No commandos or assault troops have shown more ingenuity and determination in storming a country that tries to keep them out.7

In the late 1970s, widespread dissatisfaction with President Carter, in no small way attributable to his handling of the Mariel refugee crisis, and outrage over the perceived inability of the INS to control the borders reached a crescendo during the Iranian hostage crisis, when the nation learned that the agency did not even know how many Iranian students were living in the U.S. Additionally, Carter was under strong pressure from labor unions, as well as the NAACP, which viewed illegal aliens as taking jobs from Americans, particularly Black Americans.8 Looking for solutions, in the late 1970s, Carter asked the National Commission for Manpower Policy for a study as to whether the H-2 temporary-worker program, created in 1953, should be expanded in order to offer employers an alternative to hiring illegal workers. In May 1979, the commission’s chairman advised Ray Marshall, Carter’s Secretary of Labor, that he was “strongly against” it, stating that cheap foreign labor was “addictive,” it would not slow unauthorized immigration, and that a program bearing any resemblance to the Bracero Program would be “vehemently opposed” by Mexican Americans.9

Carter ended his term without taking any decisive action, although he did have a role in establishing a joint presidential-congressional commission, the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP). However, SCIRP’s report, which recommended closing the “back door” to undocumented immigration while “slightly” opening the front door to accommodate more legal immigration, was completed after Carter’s term of office and was handed over to the new president, Ronald Reagan, in March 1981.10 Just five days after SCIRP released its report, Reagan established the President’s Task Force on Immigration and Refugee Policy, appointing Attorney General William French Smith as chairman. In his memos, Reagan stated that the Task Force’s work should include consideration of “the adequacy of the U.S. legal framework and improved methods for the control of illegal immigration and the handling of mass asylum or immigration crises.”11

Exacerbating the problem was that beginning in the late 1970s, and continuing through the 1980s, there was a mass exodus from Central America to the United States, due to guerrilla wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador and political strife in Honduras and Guatemala. A well-traveled route began to develop from Central America to the U.S.-Mexican border, particularly in California and Texas, and ultimately, many applied for political asylum. The Reagan administration, as part of its Cold War driven foreign policy, actively discouraged Salvadorans and Guatemalans from applying for political asylum: their approval rates were less than 3 percent in 1984, compared with 12 percent for Nicaraguans, most of whom were opponents of the socialist Sandinista government, and far below the 32 percent of Poles and 60 percent of Iranians who were given sanctuary. The INS used detention centers and built tent cities to house the applicants, based on the theory that detention would deter others from coming. Although migration from Central America declined with the end of the conflicts in the early 1990s, the Central American immigrant population continued to grow, as did the social networks developed to assist political refugees facilitated economic migration for many individuals entering the United States illegally.12

For Reagan, taking control of the illegal immigration issue was a priority, and he framed border control as an issue of national security. In June 1983, speaking at a Republican fundraiser about Communist insurgencies in Central America, Reagan predicted “a tidal wave of refugees – and this time they’ll be ‘feet people’ and not ‘boat people’ – swarming into our country seeking a safe haven from communist repression to our south.”13 By 1986, Reagan was linking border control to the threat of foreign terrorism, declaring in a televised speech that “terrorists and subversives are just two days’ driving time from [the border crossing at] Harlingen, Texas.” A year later, the president’s cabinet-level Task Force on Terrorism warned that extremist groups would likely “feed on the anger and frustration of recent Central and South American immigrants who will not realize their own version of the American dream.” According to Massey, Durand, and Malone, by the end of the decade, the “metaphor of a ‘flood’ had given way to martial images of a threatened ‘invasion.’ The border was ‘under siege,’ border patrol officers were ‘outgunned,’ and they constituted a ‘thin green wall’ trying to ‘hold the line.’”14

As early as 1982, the Reagan Administration had proposed legislation to give the president new authority to declare “immigration emergencies,” during which the border could be sealed by the military and aliens considered threats to national security could be rounded up and detained without warrant. Although the proposed immigration emergency bill failed to pass, in 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), spearheaded by Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Representative Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), was signed into law by President Reagan and took effect on January 1, 1987, which ushered in a new era of immigration.15

The new law allocated additional resources to expand the Border Patrol, offered amnesty for undocumented migrants who could prove continuous residence in the U.S. after January 1, 1982, and gave Reagan the authority he wanted to declare an “immigration emergency” if large numbers of unauthorized migrants were to come across the border. Additionally, it required employers to verify that workers carried documentation establishing their right to work in the country and established stiff fines and possible criminal prosecution for repeated offenses. Ultimately, the IRCA provided residence documents to more than three million people, three-quarters of whom were Mexican.

While IRCA served to placate those clamoring for something to be done about an immigration crisis seemingly out of control, the law, according to political scientist Peter Andreas, exacerbated, rather than remedied, the situation. Instead of discouraging illegal immigration, the law reinforced and expanded well-established migration networks, as Mexican migrants who had returned to Mexico came back to the U.S. to claim their legalization papers, and those legalized provided a secure base for new immigrants.16 Additionally, an unintended consequence of the minimally enforced employee sanctions was to create a booming business in falsified documents. In an article in The New York Times, Roberto Suro claimed there had been “fraud on a huge scale.” The result was to create a potent backlash against illegal immigrants in the 1990s, especially in California.17

Media images of migrants as drug traffickers proliferated in the early and mid-1980s, as U.S. anti-drug trafficking efforts attempted to curtail the success of Colombian smugglers in southern Florida. Cartels began cooperating with associates in Mexico and shifted their routes to San Diego, where drug seizures skyrocketed; on September 16, 1986, The Tribune, one of San Diego’s two major newspapers at the time, declared the border a “war zone.” At the same time, local officials complained of a drastic decline in opportunities for U.S. citizens as a result of unauthorized migrants. The Sheriff of San Diego County proposed stationing U.S. Marines every 15 or 20 feet along the border, declaring:

Illegal aliens are gradually affecting the quality of life as we know it. For example, now we have to admit illegal aliens into our colleges, which means my grandchildren may not be granted entry because of an illegal alien and they’ll probably require her to be bilingual.18

Other states jumped onto the anti-immigrant bandwagon, with a series of referenda to make English the state official language– particularly between 1984 and 1988. In 1987 alone, five states made English their official language.19 However, during the 1992 presidential campaign, Democrats largely maintained silence on the information about the issue of illegal immigration. In Bill Clinton’s first budget proposal, the new president called for a reduction of 93 Border Patrol agents, and the Office of Management and Budget soon announced that the agency would have to “do more with less” in terms of resources.20

NOTES

1.      Sánchez, 106; Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S. – Mexico Border. (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006), 193.

2.      Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 73.

3.      Gratton, Brian and Myron P. Guttmann. “Hispanics in the United States, 1850-1900: Estimates of Population Size and National Origin,” Historical Methods. Summer 2000, Volume 33, No. 3, 142.

4.      Gutiérrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995, 123.

5.      Acuña, 247; Neil Foley, Mexicans in the Making of America, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 91.

6.      Ibid., 251.

7.      García, Mario T. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 2.

8.      Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 90.

9.      Chacón and Davis, 140.

10.   Ibid., 145.

11.   Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 116.

12.   Ibid., 119.

13.   Borjas, George J. “Labor Outflows and Labor Inflows in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Human Capital, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2008, 35.

14.   Perez y González, María E. Puerto Ricans in the United States. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 36.

15.   Hunker, Henry L. “The Problem of Puerto Rican Migrations to the United States,” The Ohio Journal of Science. Vol. 51, No. 6, November 1951, 344.

16.   Duany, Jorge. eds. Maura I. Toro-Morn and Marisa Alicea. “Puerto Rico: Between the Nation and the Diaspora – Migration to and from Puerto Rico,” in Migration and Immigration: A Global View. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 187

17.   Rodríguez, Clara E. “Puerto Rican Studies,” American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3, September 1990, 444.

18.   Dinnestein, Leonardo and David M. Reimers. Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, 143.

19.   Dinnerstein and Reimers, 144.

20.   Duany, Jorge. “Reconstructing Racial Identity: Ethnicity, Color, and Class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico, Latin American Perspectives. Vol. 25, No. 3, May 1998, 161.