A Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce official declared that agricultural work was best done by “the oriental and Mexican due to their crouching and bending habits [to which they] are fully adapted, while the white is physically unable to adapt himself to them.”16 Race was defined by the sort of work someone did, and then work was organized by those racial categories. This created the problem of what to do with racialized others. Mexicans, portrayed as deportable and impermanent laborers, were not excluded alongside Asians or restricted together with Europeans. Instead, a compromise between nativists and agricultural interests was struck in 1929 that made crossing the border without authorization a misdemeanor—the law that would one day make Trump’s family separations possible.17 It also made illegally reentering after having been deported a felony.18
During the Great Depression, federal, state, and local government drove hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from their jobs, the relief rolls, and ultimately the country as part of a massive “repatriation” campaign that combined coerced deportations and voluntary departures, including of US citizens.19 But World War II soon increased demand for low-wage labor. In response, the United States and Mexico established the Bracero program, through which guest workers could work temporarily north of the border. Much of the wages were deposited in a Mexican bank to induce them to return (though some funds never were returned to workers).20 The program issued 4.6 million temporary visas between 1942 and 1964.21 Many others entered without authorization.22 The program laid the groundwork for large-scale Mexican migration—what scholars have called “the largest sustained flow of migrant workers in the contemporary world”—that would last until the Great Recession of 2008.23
Business demanded immigrant workers; indeed, growers in the Southwest adamantly resisted enforcement targeting their employment of undocumented Mexican workers. But politicians would feel compelled to expel, repress, or exclude those same workers in order to placate public sentiment. In these early years, much opposition to both unauthorized Mexican immigration and the Bracero program came from labor: the restrictionist AFL; the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), formed in the 1930s to organize the ethnically diverse masses of mass production workers neglected by the AFL, and which did staunchly oppose racist national origins quotas; and Mexican-American organized labor. In 1949, the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU) mobilized six thousand people at the border in California’s Imperial Valley to protest imported Mexican labor. “Braceros and ‘wets’ are the two sides of the same phony coin,” said NAWU organizer Ernesto Galarza. Their purpose was to “cut down the wages of farm labor, to break strikes and to prevent [union] organization; to run American citizens off farm jobs, especially on the corporation ranches.”24
Mexican labor migration was for decades protected from union and nativist critics by an “iron triangle” comprising Southwestern agricultural interests, Southern and Western conservatives in Congress, and the Federal Immigration Bureau.25 The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act made “harboring” undocumented immigrants a felony, but included a measure known as the Texas Proviso that exempted employers. Enforcement often targeted braceros who attempted to organize.26
In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed Lieutenant General Joseph M. Swing to run the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Swing launched Operation Wetback in June and soon thereafter boasted that it had removed more than a million from the country, mostly Mexicans. It was a program that Trump would approvingly cite in a 2015 Republican primary debate—“moved ’em way south, they never came back”—making a racist past usable to legitimate his present-day nativist agenda. Yet those deportation numbers were an enormous distortion. In reality, as Kelly Lytle Hernández writes, it wasn’t a one-off roundup but rather the culmination of a decade-long Border Patrol crackdown that had prompted massive farmer resistance (and support from many Mexican Americans).27 It aimed to discipline rebellious farmers and their labor force—“drying out the wetbacks” (rather than removing them) by driving them into an expanded Bracero program.28
In 1964, the United States terminated the Bracero program amid the exposure of widespread abuses and strong opposition from organized labor. The next year, Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, which put an end to the overtly racist national origins quota system that had since the 1920s restricted immigration by nationality. The new immigration system simultaneously eliminated official racism and introduced a novel colorblind form, imposing the first-ever numerical caps on immigration from Western Hemispheric nations like Mexico. It also for the first time required that prospective immigrants seeking employment visas file a “labor certification” proving that they would not displace US workers.29 The situation was exacerbated in 1976, when universal country caps were imposed, allotting Mexicans the same number of slots as Argentines or Nicaraguans. The firmly established pattern of Mexican migration would continue but the new system, as historian Mae Ngai writes, “recast” it as “illegal,” “naturalized the construction of ‘illegal aliens’ and, increasingly, of illegal aliens as ‘Mexican.’”30
Organized farmworkers fought employers’ use of undocumented workers to break strikes, and their leader, Cesar Chavez, called on Senator Robert Kennedy to “remove Wetbacks” from the fields.31 From the perspective of many in the farmworker movement, undocumented migrants were doing just what guest workers had done: driving down wages and thwarting unionization.
During a 1967 strike in California’s Central Valley, the union protested outside the Bakersfield INS office demanding action against “illegal aliens” and also “green carders.”32 In 1974, the United Farm Workers deployed people to the border wearing “UFW Border Patrol” armbands to form a “wet line” against migrants crossing the Arizona border. Multiple Mexicans were beaten, allegedly by “wet line” members. Chavez said that he had found no evidence of union wrongdoing.33
In 1965, when national origin quotas were abolished, the United States admitted 296,697 immigrants. By 1973, it admitted 400,063. They came alongside a large but unknown number of unauthorized migrants from Mexico. Authorized immigration from Asia grew by 500 percent, while immigration from northern and western Europe declined by two-thirds.34 Just as a social and economic order that had delivered considerable gains for a generation of white American workers began to collapse, a historic influx of non-white immigrants arrived—all amid the violent racist reaction that greeted the black Great Migration, which government facilitated by imposing an intensive system of residential segregation. Segregation was and remains a system of domestic bordering. And as with the border with Mexico, those on the “wrong” side of the line are portrayed as a criminal threat that must be contained. Both migrations, transnational and domestic, challenged the racist demographic norms that tenuously held the New Deal order together; in response to both, white reaction helped destroy that order.
The economic crises of the 1970s no doubt made for what historian Judith Stein called a “pivotal decade”: high inflation driven by soaring oil prices, high unemployment, and intensified global competition battered the economy.35 Many people, however, benefited from inflation, as wages rose to meet price increases, and the value of their debts eroded.36 But white middle-class homeowners nonetheless shifted their allegiance to the right and to the rich, and business launched a coordinated assault on labor after a decade of militant organizing drives.37 Middle-class members of the so-called Silent Majority aggressively resisted school and housing integration while former New Deal Democrats and Republicans alike foregrounded the demonization and punishment of “welfare mothers as a nonproductive rentier class.”38 In constructing racially and economically exclusive suburbs, postwar liberalism created the social basis for its undoing.
This was the emerging economic dynamic that facilitated the turn of the public mood against foreign workers. Perhaps surprisingly, though, neither suburban homeowners nor unions founded the contemporary nativist movement—environmentalists fixated on overpopulation did. The scarcity of natural re
sources would soon be demoted to a decidedly minor theme as anti-immigrant politics emphasized anxieties over the English language, the white numerical majority, crime, welfare expenditures, job competition, and, ultimately, terrorism. But it was the belief that America’s air, water, and land were threatened by foreign invasion that first began to weave the complex tapestry of fear and hatred that would shape immigration politics for the next half-century.
Lifeboat ethics
Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 bestselling book, The Population Bomb, placed these American anxieties into a terrifying global context, warning that rapid human population growth would lead to mass famine and ecological catastrophe. Fear of overpopulation complemented an ominous vision of the future foretold by a landscape of blighted and violent cities, poisoned water and closed factories.
Though Ehrlich’s book wasn’t about immigration, some of his fans seized on it obsessively. Ecologist Garrett Hardin, who in 1968 published his landmark Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” helped connect the dots. Hardin popularized the now-famous thought experiment as a problem of collective action: if every herdsman maximally grazed their cattle in a common pasture they would be acting in their rational self-interest but also to the collective ruin.39 The pasture is destroyed this way. Though there are, of course, countless examples of people efficaciously managing commonly held resources,40 Hardin’s paranoid myth quickly became a staple of neoliberal thought—an argument for the indispensability of private property. What many who are familiar with the concept today might not know is that Hardin was a racist, and that his article, which advanced this seminal concept, was a polemic against overpopulation, arguing, “Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.”
That same year, astronaut Bill Anders took his famous photograph of the whole earth at the horizon. National borders were invisible, bolstering a vision opposite to Hardin’s: humanity’s shared fate within the common home of Spaceship Earth. Adlai Stevenson, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, described the concept in 1965: “We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love that we give to our fragile craft.”41
Neo-Malthusians took the dimmer view that, since the spaceship was running low on supplies, it would have to do with fewer passengers. Instead of universalist environmentalism, they demanded First World resource hoarding. In 1974, Hardin made the nativist implications of his philosophy clear when he published two versions of an article called “Lifeboat Ethics.” “Environmentalists use the metaphor of the earth as a ‘spaceship’ in trying to persuade countries, industries and people to stop wasting and polluting our natural resources,” Hardin wrote. “The spaceship metaphor can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists to justify suicidal policies for sharing our resources through uncontrolled immigration and foreign aid.”42
“Metaphorically, each rich nation amounts to a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people,” he continued. “The poor of the world are in other, much more crowded lifeboats. Continuously, so to speak, the poor fall out of their lifeboats and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to be admitted to a rich lifeboat, or in some other way to benefit from the ‘goodies’ on board. What should the passengers on a rich lifeboat do?”43 Hardin’s sober-minded implication was to let them drown. Given today’s massive crisis in the Mediterranean—thousands of migrants dying each year trying to reach Fortress Europe—it was morbidly prescient.44
Resources, whether they be jobs or food or clean water, seemed to be in short supply. Difficult questions required forthright answers. Or, this was at least one way to justify opposing non-white immigration to a country that had been founded by genocidal white settlers. “The press of numbers, of masses of humanity, have made migration obsolete as a solution to human problems,” said Democratic Colorado governor Richard Lamm.45 What this perspective rendered invisible was that severe exploitation of Third World people had rendered the First World so much richer than the Third. Lamm’s imperative was to uphold the global color line.
A similar argument was made in a 1973 New York Times Magazine cover story, which warned that Americans would either have to choose dramatically smaller families or restrict large-scale immigration if the population were to be stabilized. “There are rumblings,” the author wrote, “of a desire for new changes in immigration law, a desire motivated not by prejudice but by concerns for the environment, dwindling resources and the quality of our lives.” Limiting immigration, the author wrote, would allow us to “catch up on better housing; eliminate unemployment; help the poor, the blacks, realize their aspirations; provide better quality education, health care, welfare and more imaginative care for our senior citizens; conserve our natural resources; improve mass transportation.” Shutting down the border could cure “the whole laundry list of ailments we suffer.”46
The next year, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), the leading US organization founded in response to The Population Bomb, declared that “legal immigration should be reduced to a level approximating emigration”—in other words, all but eliminated.47 Meanwhile, Hardin became involved in the Environmental Fund (later renamed Population-Environment Balance), a new organization funded by Mellon heir Cordelia Scaife May.48 It successfully lobbied for legislation that made it harder for the immigrant parents of US citizens to gain legal status. The group’s president, Justin Blackwelder, said that the law sought to dissuade migrant women from crossing the border “to have their babies on the levee.” The comment anticipated the later nativist vilification of so-called “anchor babies,” a slur against immigrant women who allegedly arranged to birth in the United States so that their children would gain birthright citizenship—thus “anchoring” dangerously fecund Mexicans to a country where they by no right belonged, claiming resources they had no right to.49
In 1975, John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist, abortion rights advocate and former chair of the Sierra Club’s National Population Committee, took over as ZPG president. But the organization’s leaders rejected Tanton’s proposal to forcefully take on immigration, according to one former staffer, because “they were uneasy about getting into ethnicity—they didn’t want to be called racist.” Tanton and company, they said, “talk in very legitimate terms, about protecting our borders and saving the nation’s resources and so on … but the trouble is, after you’ve heard them, you want to go home and take a shower.”50 In 1979, Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and became the godfather of the modern nativist movement.51 Tanton, whose correspondence with May included an alarmed discussion over women in wealthy countries having fewer babies than poor ones, described her as FAIR’s single largest supporter as early as 1983.52 Hardin, in turn, claimed that FAIR and the Environmental Fund had “interlocking directorates … We exchange ideas, we exchange personnel.”53 He joined FAIR’s board and published frequently in Tanton’s journal The Social Contract, founded in 1990. Ehrlich and his wife would join FAIR’s leadership, too.
FAIR remains among the most consequential anti-immigrant organizations today. Remarkably, Tanton created and nurtured a network that ultimately included every major nativist group in the country: U.S. English founded in 1983; the Center for Immigration Studies in 1985; FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, in 1986; and NumbersUSA in 1996.54 Tanton’s network benefited enormously from May’s wealth, receiving more than $150 million since 2005 (the year that she died) from her Colcom Foundation.55 Gradually, the environmental movement drifted away from anti-immigrant politics, though nativists would throughout the late ’90s and 2000s try, and fail, to bring the Sierra Club in line. The flagship organization of the environmental movement from which the new nativists emerged wanted nothing to do with what its leadership called “extremists acting from racial prejudice.”56
Initially, however, FAIR had proclaimed a desire to
seek “a middle-of-the-road stance, eschewing the far right,” and avoid “an image of racism, jingoism, xenophobia, chauvinism or isolationism.”57 Its first executive director, Roger Conner, was a liberal who said that he wanted to pursue restriction “without bringing the crazies out of the woodwork,” or drawing on “the racist, anti-immigrant feelings we all know exist in the country.”58
But the only mass base for red-hot nativist politics was on the right. Initially, FAIR sent its appeals to mailing lists full of liberals who had contributed to populationist and environmental causes. But they also sent appeals to other lists and experimented with other messages. “Over and over again,” writes Charles Kamasaki, longtime immigrant rights advocate and author of a history of immigration politics, “the lists that produced the highest returns were of conservative activists, and the most effective anti-immigration messages emphasized cultural if not necessarily explicitly racial concerns about immigration.”59
Conner moved on in 1988. But before doing so, he recommended that Dan Stein, the head of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, take his place. Stein embraced Tanton’s more forthright racism. He suggested that immigrants were “getting into competitive breeding” and described immigration as posing a political and partisan threat, warning: “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Some of them firmly believe in socialist or redistributionist ideas. Many of them hate America, hate everything the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.”60 He warned that “we’re going to have a bloody battle … [that’s] either going to be settled by effective political leadership or it’s going to be settled in the streets.”61
It was the “dynamics of direct mail,” said Conner, that made FAIR “more culturally conservative.”62 According to historian Carly Goodman, FAIR initially welcomed President Bill Clinton’s hard-line approach—but then seemingly realized that more could be gained by attacking him.63 The emphasis on overpopulation was replaced by arguments that immigration posed dangerous threats. “FAIR’s evolution toward the right both reflected and drove the movement of grassroots conservatives toward immigration restriction,” as Kamasaki writes.64
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