There was a time when the United States slammed the door on Italians, Poles, Greeks, Russians, Jews from Eastern Europe, and millions of other southern and eastern Europeans — while leaving the door open for Mexicans.
Not because America suddenly liked Mexicans.
America needed their labor.
After World War I, a powerful nativist movement argued that the United States was being changed by the wrong kind of immigrants. They did not simply want fewer newcomers. Many wanted to preserve what they considered the country’s proper racial and cultural character: northern and western European, white, Protestant, and “American.”
The federal government eventually put that thinking into law.
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 began sharply limiting immigration according to nationality. Then the Immigration Act of 1924 went further, using a national-origins system designed to favor older immigration from northern and western Europe while reducing immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The State Department’s history of the law says its purpose was to preserve the ideal of American “homogeneity.”
That polite word concealed some ugly ideas.
It was the era of eugenics and racial ranking. Italians were often portrayed as violent, criminal, anarchistic, or incapable of becoming proper Americans. Slavic immigrants were described as backward and unassimilable. Jews from Eastern Europe faced open antisemitism. Catholics were regarded with suspicion by many Protestant Americans.
America was not simply deciding how many immigrants it wanted.
It was deciding what kind of people it wanted Americans to be.
Then there was Mexico.
Mexicans did not fit the racial ideal promoted by many of the same nativists. But they possessed something American farmers, railroads, mines, and other employers desperately wanted.
Their hands.
Congress therefore left Mexico, along with the rest of the Western Hemisphere, outside the national-origins quota system. The Library of Congress notes that Southwestern agricultural interests fought restrictions because they depended heavily on Mexican labor.
And the numbers explain why.
By the early 1920s, Mexican workers made up about 85% of railroad track labor in the Southwest, roughly half of cotton pickers, and around three-fourths of the workers in some beet, fruit, and vegetable operations. In Arizona copper mining, Mexicans were about 43% of the workforce. These were not marginal workers filling a few seasonal jobs. Major industries had become dependent on them.
That is why growers, railroads, mines, and other employers fought efforts to put Mexico under the same quota system imposed on Europe.
They were not necessarily defending Mexicans.
They were defending their labor supply.
That produced one of the great contradictions of American immigration history.
A Polish or Italian family thousands of miles away could be told that America already had enough people like them.
A Mexican laborer could cross the Rio Grande because somebody needed cotton picked, railroad tracks maintained, copper mined, or vegetables harvested.
Eventually, nativists noticed the contradiction.
Texas Congressman John C. Box became one of the leaders of the effort to impose quotas on Mexico. By the late 1920s, members of Congress were openly arguing that Mexico had escaped restrictions imposed on European immigration.
The language could become much uglier. Material inserted into the Congressional Record in support of restriction described Mexican immigrants as a flood of “non-English, un-American, uneducated, diseased peons.”
There was no mystery about the mentality.
Some Americans believed Mexicans were racially and culturally undesirable.
Other Americans needed them to work.
Meanwhile, the broader “100 percent American” movement had become so common that Will Rogers was mocking it in newspapers by 1927. In a November 20 column, Rogers invented an “America Only Society.” His cartoon carried the sign “NO OTHER NATION NEED APPLY.” He ridiculed the patriotic clubs whose idea of Americanism seemed to consist largely of deciding who did not belong.
Rogers was making a joke.
Congress was making law.
And the growers were making money.
For a time, the growers prevailed. Mexico remained outside the national-origins quotas while immigration from much of southern and eastern Europe was drastically restricted.
It would be comforting to say that meant Mexicans were more welcome in America.
They were not.
They were more useful.
America wanted the Mexican worker when crops needed picking, tracks needed laying, mines needed digging, and factories needed labor. When those workers were no longer wanted, the same country would build an increasingly powerful immigration-enforcement system capable of arresting and deporting them.
That is the part of our immigration history that gets lost when we pretend the argument has always been simply about people coming here legally or illegally.
A century ago, America was openly choosing which peoples it considered desirable enough to become Americans.
And for a brief, revealing moment, Mexicans were allowed through a door being slammed shut on millions of Europeans.
America wanted the Mexican’s labor. It was considerably less certain that it wanted the Mexican.
