As we approach another election, the immigration debate will intensify. The competing factions will ramp up their influence campaigns hoping to gain our support. These marketing efforts have and will include real stories of hardship, abuse and criminality. The stories are likely true. The difficulty is they engage emotions over critical analysis diverting us from the broader picture an informed opinion requires. As we have seen, it is a successful method that has swung public opinion toward shortsighted, bad policy more than once. The historical method is the most reliable antidote. The patterns from the past have a way of clarifying the motives of today.
This is part 3 of a series examining the history of illegal immigration, how it emerged and why it grew. Parts 1 and 2 traced legal immigration from the 19th century through the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 and provide helpful context for what follows.
History reveals that immigration policy was often driven by laudable cultural and economic concerns. Yet the record shows results were often the opposite of intentions. At times this reflected shortsightedness or narrow self-interest. At others it was overly bureaucratic solutions, grand ideology trumping human nature or the arrogant belief that legislators could change economic reality by proclamation. We will see another pattern - poor execution discredited sound programs and the baby went out with the bathwater. This installment covers the history through the early 1960s. That is when the wheels came off. To understand how, we need to understand what came before.
The concept of “illegal immigration” did not exist in America initially. It gradually emerged as immigration concerns grew.
Rapid Immigration into California
The first major restrictive federal immigration law was the 1875 Page Act, introduced by Representative Horace Page of California and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant. It was a direct response to intense anti-Chinese sentiment that developed after the California Gold Rush of 1848.
The Chinese population exploded from almost nothing in 1848 to 9-10% of California’s population in twelve years. Approximately 93% of the immigrants were men who sent much of their earnings back to China. They lived in enclaves where gambling, opium and prostitution were visibly present. They looked different, were not Christian, spoke an incomprehensible language, and offered cheaper labor. There was little attempt to assimilate. California residents were deeply concerned about all of it, especially the speed and scale of the changes.
The Page Act sought to ban three things: forced “coolie” labor from Asia, convicts, and the importation of women for prostitution. The first two were nearly impossible to enforce. Enforcement of the third went overboard. Chinese women faced humiliating interrogations and inspections that resulted in even fewer women migrating. This compounded the gender imbalance, which in turn intensified many of the original concerns.
While some immigration trends on the southern border were similar to those in California, there were important differences that delayed political action.
A Border Drawn Through Communities
The US established our southern border in 1848 after winning the Mexican American War. At that time approximately 80,000 Mexicans were granted US citizenship. Since the new border cut through established communities, border crossings were an everyday unregulated event. Mexicans routinely crossed for seasonal farm work and then returned home. This is referred to as circular migration and dominated Mexican immigration patterns for decades.
Mutual Benefit — At a Price
Even though this pattern was mostly male and circular with little attempt at assimilation, it did not create the same negative response as occurred in California. Chinese immigration was a rapid influx of culturally dissimilar people into a limited area. In contrast, Mexican immigration was seasonal and spread over a far larger area. Communities of Mexican Americans already inhabited the border states. The main reason it continued unabated, however, was simple mutual benefit. Seasonal farm labor was desperately needed, growers could pay Mexicans less than domestic workers, and Mexicans earned more than they could at home while sending remittances back to support their families.
This arrangement was not a benign win-win. Many workers were exploited, subjected to poor working conditions, exposed to dangerous chemicals, and targets of intense discrimination. Addressing the exploitation was one reason the labor arrangement was eventually formalized under the Bracero Program in 1942.
The 1924 Act
Before examining that program however, it is important to understand the motivations and consequences of the 1924 Immigration Act, also called the Reed-Johnson Act. That legislation effectively created the concept of “illegal” immigration and set the stage for everything that followed.
In Part 2 we examined the genesis of this act as it related to legal immigration. As a reminder, nativist sentiment heightened by WWI, widespread adoption of the pseudoscience of eugenics, and pressure from labor unions to protect American wages, drove exclusionary immigration policies. The Act established numerical quotas favoring northern European countries and effectively prohibited immigration from southern Europe and Jewish populations on grounds of “racial inferiority”. Even though Mexicans were viewed as “peons,” no quotas were placed on the Western hemisphere.
The Pitched Battle and the Birth of Illegal Immigration
The lack of Western hemisphere quotas was the result of a pitched battle between two factions. On one side were Southern growers who opposed Western hemispheric quotas because Mexicans were their primary source of seasonal labor. The influential California Farm Bureau Federation and other large agricultural interests repeatedly warned that American workers would not perform seasonal stoop labor in sufficient numbers and that without Mexican labor, crops would rot. Their key argument in support was that migration was circular rather than permanent. The workers went home after the harvest.
On the other side was a coalition of restrictionists composed of unions, Northeastern and Midwestern politicians, and nativist groups who strongly supported numerical quotas on the Western Hemisphere. In 1919 Samuel Gompers, who led the influential American Federation of Labor, stated: “We are in grave danger unless something is done. The standards which we have raised and established for the American workers are high and we are not going to give them up to the greed and rapacity of the employing class...[or] have them undermined by large immigration.”
The compromise resulted in no numerical quotas in exchange for a regulated border. Congress imposed an $8 head tax, a visa fee and a literacy test. The Border Patrol was created on May 28, 1924 with 450 officers tasked with patrolling between official ports of entry to catch those who tried to bypass the new requirements.
The unions and other restrictionists believed these measures would curtail Mexican immigration and force growers to raise wages, improve working conditions, and hire Americans. Rep. Albert Johnson (R-WA), Chairman of the House Immigration Committee and a eugenics supporter, was the chief architect of the 1924 Act. He viewed the new rules as meaningful enforcement: “The Border Patrol will enforce the law… the head tax, the visa requirement, and the literacy test will serve as effective barriers against the unrestricted influx from Mexico.”
Rep. John C. Box (D-TX), a vocal restrictionist from a border state offered a blunter assessment: “The literacy test and the head tax will do much to stop the flood of illiterate and undesirable Mexicans… we must have some protection on our southern border.”
They were spectacularly wrong.
Since the 1924 Immigration Act made seasonal crossings more difficult and expensive, laborers simply bypassed the bureaucracy and crossed undetected. Growers had no fear of penalty for hiring them and many preferred those who had skipped the paperwork since they were cheaper and had no legal recourse.
Voila, illegal immigration was born.
Without contracts or any practical legal recourse, the illegal immigrants were more vulnerable to exploitation. Many growers took full advantage of this, and working conditions in much of Southwestern agriculture stagnated or deteriorated further.
The Depression Answers the Question
Were the growers accurate when they asserted Americans would not take these jobs and that migration would remain circular? Or were the restrictionists correct when they claimed Americans would do seasonal work if wages increased and working conditions improved? The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl provide the answer. The Dust Bowl refers to the severe drought and dust storms that devastated the Great Plains, forcing hundreds of thousands of farming families to migrate west in search of work.
When the Depression hit, unemployment soared and local welfare budgets were overwhelmed. Attitudes toward noncitizens hardened and local governments across the Southwest launched aggressive repatriation campaigns against Mexican immigrants, peaking between 1930 and 1933. When the financial burden shifted to the federal government under the New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the pressure to repatriate subsided.
Somewhere between 400,000 and 1,000,000 Mexicans were shown the exit. Approximately 40% to 60% were children born in America and therefore American citizens. People with children are permanent settlers, not seasonal migrants. The growers’ assertion that migration would remain circular was already unraveling.
The restrictionists were also wrong. When hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were pressured to leave in the early 1930s, the labor gap was largely filled by domestic migrants - the “Okies” and “Arkies” - displaced by the Dust Bowl. As soon as conditions improved in the late 1930s, and especially during WWII when steady, full-time factory jobs opened, these workers left agriculture and never returned.
The operative words are steady and full-time. Farm work is part-time and migratory since workers follow the harvest from place to place. Higher wages and better working conditions would never change the fundamental nature of the work. Americans performed this work only when desperate and left the moment alternatives appeared. Mexicans, by contrast, found the seasonal nature of farm work a positive since many returned home when the harvest was complete.
The Depression had just answered the question. Would Americans consistently choose seasonal, part-time migratory labor? Only when they had no alternative. The restrictionists, particularly the unions, would spend the next thirty years pretending it hadn’t. Illegal crossings became the inevitable result.
Bracero and the Illegal Alternative
As with other industries, the growers experienced severe labor shortages during WWII. To address the labor mismatch, the American and Mexican governments negotiated and implemented the Bracero program to bring in millions of Mexican agricultural and railroad workers under temporary labor contracts. It was mutually beneficial due to high labor demands in America and high unemployment in Mexico. Addressing worker exploitation was another stated goal. Mexico took a hard line during negotiations, requiring Texas be barred from participation due to its documented history of abuse and discrimination. It took five years of lobbying before Texas was reinstated.
Participation was limited initially and apprehensions at the border exploded as the post WWII US economy surged. The common explanation for this is that the growers preferred illegal workers so they could continue to exploit workers who had no legal recourse. There is truth in that statement, but the reality is far more complex. Bracero was a costly, bureaucratic burden from the grower’s perspective. While the large agricultural companies could more easily manage this load, the midsize farmers could not and tended to rely on their established Mexican labor networks even though these temporary workers were now deemed illegal.
It is important to understand that growers faced no legal repercussions for hiring illegal workers. In 1952 the McCarran-Walter Act codified this arrangement explicitly. The Texas Proviso defined employment of undocumented workers as categorically distinct from the illegal act of harboring them, writing employer protection directly into federal statute.
The more pressing issues however were that the Bracero Program failed to supply enough workers to meet demand and could not reliably deliver them at the precise moment crops were ready for harvest. For growers operating on narrow seasonal windows, both failures were potentially devastating.
The chart below illustrates the results of well-intentioned policy that missed the mark. Apprehensions alone however tell only part of the story. A common scholarly estimate for this period holds that only one in three people crossing illegally are apprehended. This means for every person caught, approximately two entered successfully. One million apprehensions suggests two million successful entries. Please let that sink in.
Operation Wetback — The Proof of Concept
By 1954 the stream of illegal workers had grown larger than the legal one. Bracero, the program designed to manage migration, had created the illegal flow it was meant to stop, a direct consequence of its flawed incentive structure. This set the stage for Operation Wetback launched in June 1954 by the Eisenhower administration, spearheaded by General Joseph Swing, the newly appointed INS Commissioner. The name of this operation might make heads explode but that’s what it was called.
Operation Wetback was designed to work in concert with an expanded Bracero program – an intense deportation operation paired with a dramatic increase in the number of legal worker slots. The combination created real incentives for farmers to embrace the legal Bracero program. INS reinforced this by converting illegal workers to Braceros in lieu of deportation.
The problems with Bracero were not corrected. It remained a poorly designed incentive structure held together by practical workarounds rather than sound policy. The most important of these was the years-long relationships farmers had built with specific workers. They were experienced and knew exactly what was required and when. It functioned but in a fragile state.
The deportation operation was not without serious problems. Conditions during mass transport resulted in deaths. American citizens of Mexican descent were caught in enforcement sweeps and, in some cases, removed without due process. The political backlash from these abuses may explain why subsequent administrations were reluctant to pursue aggressive deportation even when circumstances clearly warranted it.
While there were serious problems with both Bracero and Operation Wetback that needed to be fixed, we learn a valuable lesson from this chapter in history that has been forgotten or ignored. Simultaneously opening legal channels while closing illegal ones works. The chart above proves it.
Unfortunately, concern over methodology undermined the goal and Bracero came under attack. It deserved reform. What it got was abolition...
DETAILS
This is the third installment of a multipart series on immigration. I wish I could have made this historical summary shorter and less dense. Unfortunately it is a complicated history that resists compression. Given the bombardment of misleading narratives surrounding this topic, the historical record is our most reliable recourse. Consider reading the full series as of July 6, 2026:
The Clash Over Immigration, Part 1
The Clash Over Immigration, Part 2
The Clash Over Immigration, Part 3 - the article above
The Clash Over Immigration, Part 4
For a deeper dive into understanding the Bracero program please consider the companion piece “Why Growers Preferred Illegal Workers to Braceros: The Full Story”.
For a more detailed description of Operation Wetback, please consider the companion piece “Operation Wetback: The Full Story”.
For information on the Dust Bowl, consider this historical summary.
The cartoon above by William A. Walker, published in Life on April 14, 1921, references the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 which is the direct precursor to the 1924 Immigration Act examined in this piece. The sentiment it captures applied equally to both.
This is a great article that will be useful to historians, but in the way that historians study what was written and then re-write it differently, without the fallacious notions that were present in the original authors. For instance you give three issues that led to the 1924 Act:
"As a reminder, nativist sentiment heightened by WWI, widespread adoption of the pseudoscience of eugenics, and pressure from labor unions to protect American wages, drove exclusionary immigration policies"
The fallacious notion is that all three of these factors caused the Bill to happen. What your article does for history is to identify the true cause as "pressure from labor unions."
And this is quite remarkable to a person living 100 years later, ie that labor could cause the government to do something that benefits labor and not the Robber Barons
1924 NYT op ed on Reed-Johnson Act with graphic: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/learning/explore-100-years-of-immigration-history-with-the-times-archive.html
The 1890 census was used to set quotas by nation. So they could have used 1890, 1900, or 1910. There would have been three versions to the graphic. Are we to believe that that limiting Jews was the main reason 1890 was chosen? The fact that labor unions were strong enough to cause the government to make a law in their favor is what historians will focus on, not the red-herring of limiting the Jews.