All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  Yet before violent battles between drug cartels, military, and police erupted in Mexico, and before militarization took root north of the line, the border had for many Americans been simply a gateway to a short vacation. During Prohibition, the streets of Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana were lined with high-end clubs. For decades, party seekers made their way from San Diego through the busy San Ysidro port of entry to Avenida Revolución’s expansive street party. Just east in Tecate, women on the Mexican side hung their wash on a fence that stood less than five feet tall and was intended to block cattle rather than people. Nearby, the fence was simply a steel cable that children employed as a swing.11

  For many, the international boundary was long a bridge to a sister city, perhaps where an actual sister lived. It was easily traversed for family visits, or for lunch.12 Through the 1960s, the Border Patrol was a minor agency barely known to many who lived outside the borderlands.13 After mass Mexican migration became criminalized in the 1960s, however, immigration became a growing concern most everywhere. At the border itself, the situation slipped into what looked like a spontaneous invasion as massive numbers of undocumented Mexicans surged past an overwhelmed Border Patrol. In reality, the scene was the direct outcome of the US government criminalizing long-standing Mexican migration by squeezing off legal immigration pathways.

  In the late 1950s, roughly 450,000 Bracero migrants and 50,000 permanent residents entered from Mexico each year. In 1964, the Bracero program was terminated.14 In 1965, the first-ever caps were placed on Western Hemisphere immigration as part of the Hart-Celler Act, which repealed the racist national origins quotas. In 1976, Congress criminalized a larger swath of Mexican migration by establishing a global ceiling of twenty thousand visa slots per country. President Gerald Ford signed the bill, but he also complained that the cookie-cutter low cap imposed on Mexicans failed to take into account the “very special historic relationship” between the two countries.15

  The effect, as Douglas Massey and Karen Pren write, “was predictable”: undocumented migration exploded.16 In 1960, total apprehensions in the Southwest stood at 21,022, rising to 40,020 by 1965. By 1970, they had risen to 201,780, and to 690,554 by 1980. In 1983, they topped one million and would remain in the seven figures, save for a few dips, until the era of mass unauthorized Mexican migration ended with the Great Recession’s onset.17

  Meanwhile, Mexico created the Border Industrialization Program to create jobs that would compensate for the shuttered Bracero program. The result was the rise of what would become a massive maquiladora industry, through which US corporations export components to Mexican border factories duty-free and then re-import the manufactured product into the country, paying a tariff only on the value added in Mexico. This created a population boom in border cities like Juárez and Tijuana and allowed US corporations to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor without hiring Mexican migrants inside the country: a “disembodied export of the Mexican workforce.”18

  As the United States began to sharply restrict Mexican migration in the mid-1960s, a new service economy took hold, hollowing out the middle of the labor market and expanding the ranks of low-wage workers to occupy its bottom rungs, which in turn spread demand for Mexican workers far beyond Southwestern agriculture.19 Mexico’s export of migrants facilitated economic restructuring on both sides of the border, functioning as an “escape valve” for a Mexican economy with insufficient good jobs and providing “a reserve army of workers, at the disposal of the U.S. economy, the training costs of which are mostly borne by Mexican society.”20 Mexican workers, like Chinese in the late nineteenth century, were emblems of a distrusted new system. The border, an ordinary place for people who lived there, became a symbol of trouble for millions who didn’t. Still, until the 1990s, it could be crossed with little difficulty. Perhaps not on the first try but then, if caught, on the second.21

  “All we ever do is delay them a little,” said a Border Patrol supervisor in San Ysidro, the largest site of illegal crossings, in 1983. “I’ll never forget this one guy we caught four times. The last time we got him, he just threw his hands up in the air and shook his head. I felt sorry for him … But that’s rare. He just had bad luck. Usually they make it through on their second try.”22

  Many understood that the new system was plainly nonfunctional—including, quite remarkably in retrospect, INS officers’ union head Michael Harpold, who complained that “relatives of legal U.S. residents who had been waiting years to immigrate legally were forced to come in illegally in order to join their families.”23 Thanks to the “colorblind” equality that followed 1965 reform, Mexican applicants for visas—to which they had rights by virtue of their US citizen relatives—were confronted with backlogs that by 2017 stretched as long as twenty-one years.24

  The result was a chaotic nightly scene. As darkness fell one night in 1984, hundreds of migrants—mostly Mexicans but also Central Americans fleeing poverty, war and repression—gathered by Tijuana’s Colonia Libertad neighborhood where beer, tacos and used coats were for sale.25 Heading to Los Angeles’s Pico Boulevard and other points north, they met up with the polleros—like coyote, a Spanish word for what English-speakers disparagingly call a smuggler—who would guide them across borderland canyons as agents waited across the line in San Diego. Some would be caught and would promptly try again.26

  The futile dynamic seemed almost choreographed, with polleros reportedly timing their attempts to coincide with agents’ shift changes. The San Ysidro cat-and-mouse game, however, was taking a violent turn, as bandits targeted migrants for theft, assault, rape and murder, and engaged in shootouts with San Diego police. Neither the possibility of apprehension nor the violence deterred the migrants. “Fear is not having beans on the table,” said one Mexican from the state of Guerrero.27

  Meanwhile, the militarization of the border increased alongside the criminalization of Mexican migration. It was a war zone, Americans remarked, something like a not-so-distant Vietnam. Or, perhaps, like the long hot summer of black urban uprisings in 1967. The fight was waged with buried electronic sensors, helicopters, four-wheel drive vehicles, and infrared scopes that might identify migrant groups as large as thirty, ghostly figures against a green backdrop.28

  Much of the Border Patrol’s equipment was initially developed for military use—sensors to surveil the Ho Chi Minh Trail, scopes for Marine Corps snipers at Khe Sanh.29 It was, said INS commissioner Alan C. Nelson, an effort to stop “the greatest surge of people in history across our southern border.”30

  “It’s part of the Rambo mentality … that every problem that confronts this country can be solved through law enforcement or military action,” said Herman Baca, chairman of the Committee on Chicano Rights in San Diego. “It parallels Vietnam. Our government policy makers are fighting a war that they don’t understand … And you know who won in Vietnam.”31

  Border Patrol violence was rampant. One agent said that it was commonplace for agents to carry unregistered “throwaway” guns: “They explained to me that if you shoot an alien ‘by accident,’ all you have to do is throw away that gun next to him and say he was shooting at you.” An immigration inspector confirmed the account, saying that he had been taught how to do so in the academy. “I’ve seen many such shootings,” said one former agent, “and these are unarmed people, people who come across just to get jobs.”32 Rape accusations were commonplace, as was the trading of access to the United States for sex. Migrants were called “wetbacks,” “wets,” and “tonks,” referring to the sound agents’ flashlights make when they smash against detainees’ heads.33

  Those who spoke out reported being ignored and fired. A supervisor alleged that one “tends to overempathize with people trying to get into this country legally or illegally” and so “does not have the proper attitude to become a successful immigration inspector.”34

  Complaints of abuse were so rampant that in 1980 two Hispanic agents were sent undercover, dressed as Mexican workers, to investigate the San Clemente,
California, checkpoint on the I-5 highway.35 The result was that the agents on duty allegedly beat them with a chair and a flashlight, resulting in criminal charges for that assault and for others allegedly committed against civilians, including a fifteen-year old US citizen.36

  A Border Patrol agent charged in a separate case of physical abuse allegedly told a trainee that beatings were necessary “because the criminal justice system doesn’t do anything about these people.”37 “These people,” however, would soon become one of that system’s priority targets.

  Taking down the surrender flag

  The southern border was viewed not only as the entryway for “illegal” humans but for illicit drugs as well. The quixotic goal of stopping both created contemporary border politics. The Border Patrol had enforced Prohibition, and in 1956 had created the Criminal, Immoral, and Narcotics program.38 But the war on drugs was something of a different magnitude, launched as a supply-side war that blamed others, whether black drug dealers at home or Latin American traffickers abroad, for the drug consumption that seemed to be sapping American’s virtue and vitality. Many worried that the youth had, like society as a whole, lost their way. President Nixon privately fumed that the problem with marijuana was that “once people cross that line from … straight society to the drug society, it’s a very great possibility they are going to go further … You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general. These are the enemies of a strong society. That’s why the communists and left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they are trying to destroy us.”39

  Nixon had a border strategy for his 1968 campaign, promising California parents that he would protect their children from Mexican marijuana.40 The war on drugs, Matthew Lassiter writes, was fought in the name of defending innocent white youth from the perceived threat from lower class black and Mexican peddlers invading across social boundaries41—including, in Southern California, from across the border.42

  In 1969, Nixon launched Operation Intercept,* a massive crackdown that subjected all cross-border traffic to dragnet inspection and drove it to a near-halt.43 It didn’t stop the flow of marijuana. In fact, drug interdiction repeatedly backfired. For example, the shutdown of the famed French Connection, which smuggled heroin from Turkey through France to the United States, shifted sourcing of heroin to Mexico, which was then trafficked across the US southern border.44

  Crackdowns created new crises to exploit. But crises were already plentiful: changes in the economy, the geographic organization of housing, work and education, and gender roles; the rise of crime rates, the counterculture, the anti-war movement, and second-wave feminism; militant black struggle and uprisings; a national identity shattered by Communist victory in Vietnam. The capacity of American families and the American people to perpetuate themselves into the future was in doubt.

  President Reagan then campaigned on banishing doubt from the American mind, branding the Carter presidency a paragon of abdication and decline. Any restraint on drugs was capitulation. “We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts; we’re running up a battle flag,” Reagan announced in June of 1982. “We can fight the drug problem, and we can win. And that is exactly what we intend to do.”45

  The drug war was global, from Colombia to New York and beyond. The border was stigmatized as the open door through which drugs came; in fact, the border was an unlucky, consummately in-between place in a global drug market governed by American demand. Unsurprisingly, the campaign quickly faltered. Reagan escalated, proclaiming drugs to be a national security threat emanating from Sandinista Nicaragua, Communist Cuba, and Colombian revolutionaries.46 As government was deemed unfit to do most anything aside from repression, and as the Soviet menace evaporated, an unwinnable war on drugs became urgently necessary even in the face—and maybe because—of its constant failure. Drugs, and the people who sold, transited, and consumed them, became an enemy perfectly suited to late twentieth-century American politics, stitching back together a once-unitary threat that defeat in Vietnam had cast into doubt and the Cold War’s end would shatter into fragments.

  Illegal activity was no doubt widespread at the border. Yet ironically, drug trafficking was and is such an attractive business not in spite but because of border enforcement and interdiction. Borders generate a stratified hierarchy of nationally bounded markets because enforcement raises transaction costs: every border and law enforcement obstacle, then, is an opportunity for criminals to reap a profit. In 2013, a kilo of cocaine that sold for $2,200 in the Colombian interior might sell for between $5,500 and $7,000 at the ports, $10,000 in Central America, $12,000 in southern Mexico, $16,000 in a Mexican town on the US border and then $24,000–$27,000 once it has been smuggled into the United States.47 Drug traffickers use the border to make a profit in the same way that maquiladoras do.

  The drug war took on a life of its own as it intensified. The bureaucracy and frontline officers dedicated to stopping drugs swelled, with funding for drug interdiction doubling between 1982 and 1987 alone. Officials boasted of major drug seizures, though larger seizures also reflected more drugs being trafficked.48 Law enforcement has a stake in making the case that the drug scourge was huge and required a sizable force to confront it.49 Even so, the enterprise was and would always be beset by a sense of futility. “I’d like to think that we’re making a difference,” said one customs agent in 1985. “Are we seizing a significant amount? Probably not.”50

  Interdiction efforts expanded from the border to US-backed, militarized interventions abroad, while domestic police forces fed drug dealers large and small, foreign and domestic, into the country’s ballooning prison system. The seminal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which infamously created draconian mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine, also required that the US government condition economic and military aid and related matters on nations’ “full cooperation” with drug war aims.51 The entirety of Mexico, the United States, and beyond became a borderland: fantastical lines were drawn everywhere between areas where drugs were produced and where they were consumed. The delusion made the border into the epicenter of a diffuse war zone that invited repression in every direction.

  As a matter of politics and law, the modern war on drugs was from its early years a war on immigrants. Prosecutor and police power expanded, and immigration enforcement was commandeered by the war on crime. IRCA, Reagan’s landmark immigration law, had made deporting immigrants who had been convicted of crimes a priority. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 empowered federal immigration authorities to issue “detainers,” or requests for local law enforcement to hold suspected undocumented immigrants.52 Later, those detainers would be transformed into a key tool under Obama’s Secure Communities program, facilitating the transfer of immigrants from local to federal custody.

  The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 tied immigrants to the narcotic threat, subjecting non-citizens convicted of the newly coined category of “aggravated felonies”—murder, drug trafficking, and firearms trafficking—to mandatory detention. That same year, INS created the Institutional Removal Program and the Alien Criminal Apprehension Program, which targeted the class of “aggravated felons” created by the Act.53 Congress also created harsh additional penalties for immigrants who illegally reentered the country after having been convicted of a felony or aggravated felony.54

  By tying the burgeoning narcotic menace to immigrants, politicians waging the war on drugs during the 1980s and 1990s helped build our present-day system of what legal scholar Juliet Stumpf first called “crimmigration.” This new system encompassed a growing number of criminal convictions that can lead to deportation; the increasing treatment of ordinary actions by unauthorized immigrants, like crossing the border between ports of entry or using someone else’s Social Security number to secure work, as criminal offenses; the Border Patrol’s growing role in domestic law enforcement, and domestic law enforcement’s increased role in identifying and detaining undocumented immigrants.55

  As was made all too clear in
2016, the right builds its most compelling political narratives by linking distinct sources of perceived external threat to one another. Drugs were a Swiss Army knife of statecraft, providing a conduit for the simultaneous criminalization of the domestic poor, the repurposing of the post–Cold War US national security state toward foreign interdiction, and the militarization of the border in both rhetoric and reality.

  After IRCA

  The Border Patrol was, by 1986, “undeniably the largest and most well-equipped staff in Border Patrol history,” with its size increasing to more than three thousand agents.56 It was quite modest compared to the roughly twenty thousand agents that would fill its ranks three decades later. But the Border Patrol had been radically transformed into an increasingly militarized force charged with the improbable task of stopping illegalized drugs and humans.57

  As agents gave chase through the canyons, other migrants slipped through authorized ports of entry with fraudulent documents—as did large amounts of smuggled drugs.58 Yet it remained common sense in policymaking circles and even among agents that enforcement could not fix the problem without attending to the factors pushing people to migrate. “If we had twice the manpower, we’d cover more area and make more apprehensions, but they’d still be coming,” said one agent. “The answer is not in enforcement, the answer is to keep these people in Mexico.”59