Smuggler Nation (38 page)

Chinese were not the only ones coming in through the back door. They were simply at the top of a growing list of “undesirables.” By the last decades of the nineteenth century, federal law also prohibited the admission of paupers, criminals, prostitutes, “lunatics,” “idiots,” and contract workers in general (not just Chinese). And the list of inadmissible aliens kept growing: “those convicted of a crime of moral turpitude,” polygamists, and persons with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases were added in 1891. By 1903 there was a lengthy list of excludable illnesses, with trachoma the most common health reason given for exclusion.
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Anarchists were added to the exclusion list in 1903, and “imbeciles” and Japanese laborers were added in 1907. Illiterates were banned from entry in 1917. The head tax also increased sharply, from fifty cents in 1891 to four dollars in 1907 and eight dollars in 1917.
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Not surprisingly, as seaports became more
tightly regulated and policed, immigrants who feared being placed in one of these excludable categories increasingly turned to the back door. Those groups that were disproportionally being turned away at the front-door ports of entry—among them Lebanese, Greeks, Italians, Slavs from the Balkans, and Jews—found Mexico to be a convenient back-door alternative.
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A 1908 letter from the secretary of commerce and labor to Secretary of State Elihu Root described the situation at the Mexican border:

On the Mexican side of the border, at towns nearest the several ports of entry, aliens, both European and Asiatic, congregate in larger numbers prior to seeking entry into the United States. By reason of the influx of foreigners into these towns, a profitable industry has grown up in the promotion of immigration, by methods seldom more than colorably legal and often simply illegal. There are “boarding houses” offering, not only food and lodging, but effective assistance in crossing the border. There are “immigrant bureaus” whose advertised promises plainly indicate the use of unlawful methods. There are physicians professing ability to remove signs of disease, and there are smugglers and guides in abundance.
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Chinese reportedly ran much of the smuggling business in border towns west of El Paso, but they relied on Mexicans to guide immigrants across the line.
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Also, given the importance of railways as the primary means of long-distance transport, it is little surprise that railroad workers, ranging from brakemen to dining car cooks to conductors, were found complicit in schemes to deliver smuggled migrants from the El Paso railroad terminal to interior destinations as far away as Chicago.
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Since Mexicans were still of little concern to border inspectors, one deceptive ploy immigrants used to avoid being noticed was to try to appear Mexican. Almost all of the traffic back and forth through the port of entry in El Paso and in other urban areas along the border involved local residents who were typically not inspected. It was therefore not uncommon for unauthorized U.S.-bound immigrants, ranging from Greeks to Lebanese to Chinese, to attempt the border crossing simply by blending in.
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The relationship between smugglers and law enforcers along the border was not entirely adversarial. Not only was corruption sometimes part of their relationship but they also occasionally rubbed shoulders socially. In his memoir, former immigration inspector Clifford Perkins notes that El Paso Deputy Sheriff Mannie Clements “had been mixed up with the smuggling of narcotics and Chinese,”
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and he also recalls drinking rice whiskey with Charlie Sam, a prominent figure in the El Paso Chinese community who was reputed to be “the brains behind the smuggling of Chinese.”
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On another occasion, Tom Kate, dubbed the “king of smugglers” in the El Paso area, apparently threw a party for the city’s attorneys and judiciary members. The list of prominent attendees included federal judicial commissioners whose workload included cases involving Chinese migrant smuggling, and the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting such smuggling cases.
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The Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920 and World War I disrupted the use of Mexico as a stepping-stone for illegal entry by non-Mexicans into the United States. But migrant smuggling through Mexico strongly rebounded when international steamship service was resumed. However, this mostly now involved smuggling Europeans rather than Chinese. Mexico had become a far less hospitable environment for Chinese during the course of the Mexican Revolution, with many Chinese residents in Mexico robbed and abused as a particularly vulnerable minority population (and many fled the chaos and violence of the revolution years by moving to the United States illegally).
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The popularity of the Mexican back door received a major boost by new U.S. restrictions on European immigration through the national origins quotas in 1921 and 1924 at the peak of the nationwide nativist backlash against foreigners.
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Passport rules left over from World War I, formalized in the Passport Act of 1918, also now required immigrants to secure visas at U.S. consulates abroad.
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The Mexico route offered a way to sidestep these new numerical restrictions and documentation requirements. This did not go unnoticed in Washington, and it provided political ammunition for calls for more border enforcement. As the commissioner general’s 1922 report put it, “The experience of the past two years in dealing with Europeans unable to secure entry at our seaports who look to the back door of this country as a favorable means
of ingress has demonstrated as nothing else could the ever-existing and increasing need of a strong border patrol.”
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U.S. officials acknowledged that more restrictive laws were creating more business for smugglers and more work for law enforcement. The commissioner-general of immigration reported in 1923 that each new restriction “promoted the alien smuggling industry and furnished new and multiplied incentives to illegal entry.”
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The commissioner-general’s 1923 report noted that Europeans were resorting to using the Mexican back door “because of passport difficulties, illiteracy, or the quota law.”
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The report claimed that migrant smuggling had become a sophisticated operation: “Reliable information has been received to the effect that there is now in existence a far-reaching organization that takes the alien from his home in Europe, secures a passport for him (a fraudulent one, if necessary), purchases his steamship passage to Mexico, places him on the ship, arranges for his entry into Mexico at Vera Cruz or Tampico, conducts him north to the Rio Grande, and delivers him into the United States—all for a fixed price.”
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The commissioner’s report the following year predicted that the Immigration Law of 1924 “Will result in a further influx of undesirable European aliens to Mexico with the sole object in view of affecting illegal entry into the United States over the Rio Grande.”
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The El Paso inspector expressed similar concerns, noting that “if the Mexican government continued to permit aliens to enter Mexico practically without restriction, the more stringent provisions of the restrictive immigration act of 1924 undoubtedly will result in a still higher ratio of increase in the number of European aliens proceeding to Mexico with the United States as their objective.”
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Local media reports reinforced these concerns. A December 22, 1924, article in El Paso’s Spanish-language newspaper
La Patria
pointed to the booming cross-border business for “contrabandistas de carne humana” (“smugglers of human meat”) in the wake of the new U.S. immigration restrictions.
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The article (with the headline “Foreigners who want to cross over to the United States have invaded the city of Ciudad Juarez”) described Juarez as a depot for foreigners—including Russians, Germans, Czechs, Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Italians, French—waiting to enter the United States. The article suggested renaming one of the streets in Juarez “Foreigners Street.”
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Just as the Chinese Exclusion Act had made front-door entry at the nation’s seaports more difficult and created a smuggling problem along the nation’s land borders, the same pattern was now repeating itself with the new immigration restrictions in 1924. “It must be conceded that the present law was enacted primarily for the purpose of providing for the closer inspection of aliens coming to the seaports of the United States,” U.S. Immigration Commissioner John Clark stated at the time. “When we come to consider the dangers of unlawful invasion along the land boundaries, however, we find our law conspicuously weak, and almost totally inadequate to protect the interests of our Government.”
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Echoing this concern, Congress greatly expanded immigration bureau personnel’s powers to search and arrest along and near the nation’s borders.
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In a country otherwise wary of increasing the power and reach of government, border control was clearly one realm where there was a push to bolster federal authority.

Political pressure had been building up for a number of years to create a uniformed border patrol force. “How many men would be required to patrol that border of 2,000 miles,” Ohio Representative Benjamin Welty inquired at a February 1920 hearing, “for the purpose of protecting ourselves against all undesirables?”
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Frank Berkshire, supervising inspector of the Mexican Border District, projected that four hundred more officers might be sufficient to “enforce it to a reasonable certainty.” But, he also warned, “To absolutely sew up the border so that nobody will get across would take more than the standing army because they would have to be in sight of each other.”
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The U.S. Border Patrol was formed in 1924 with a $1 million budget and a total force of some 450 officers, with the vast majority of them reportedly World War I veterans.
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The primary mission was to keep out illegal immigrants, though it spent much of the time in those Prohibition years chasing bootleggers. And given the Prohibition mind-set at the time, media reports began to conflate migrant smuggling and alcohol smuggling. The
New York Times
even referred to migrant smuggling as “bootlegged immigrants.”
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The
Washington Post
similarly called it “bootlegging aliens,” warning that “A cargo of rum in the wrong hands can do a lot of damage. But a cargo of undesirable aliens can easily become a national calamity.”
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The Border Patrol’s priority target was the smuggling of Europeans excluded by the restrictive immigration reforms of the 1920s. Wesley E. Stiles, one of the first border patrol agents hired in the summer of 1924, later recalled, “the thing that established the Border Patrol was the influx of European aliens.” He noted that he and other agents deployed to the immigration subdistrict at Del Rio, Texas, especially “looked for European aliens.” Border patrolmen “didn’t pay much attention to the Mexicans” because they were considered merely cheap seasonal farm labor that returned to Mexico when no longer needed.
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Retired immigration service officer Perkins similarly recalled that border communities were equally unconcerned: “Residents near the border paid little attention to the comings and goings of Mexicans.”
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The growing influx of unauthorized Mexican workers was largely tolerated and overlooked—at least for the time being.

Despite an 1885 law restricting the importation of contract workers, U.S. employers informally recruited large numbers of Mexicans to work in southwest agriculture in the early twentieth century. Whereas formal, legal entry was a complicated process, crossing the border illegally was relatively simple and largely ignored. Up to half a million Mexicans may have come to the United States in the first decade of the century. The Mexican Revolution, U.S. labor shortages during World War I, and the continued expansion of agriculture in the southwest fueled a further influx.

The agriculture lobby pushed hard to exempt Mexicans from the eight-dollar head tax imposed by the Immigration Act of 1917. The president of the South Texas Cotton Growers Association complained to a Senate committee in 1920 that Mexicans would stop coming because they could not afford the head tax. He bluntly suggested that Congress should therefore either exempt Mexicans or turn a blind eye to their illicit entry: “If you gentlemen have any objections to admitting Mexicans by law, cut them out and take the river guard away and let us alone, and we will get them all right.”
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Strict controls against Mexicans crossing the border were widely perceived as neither viable nor desirable. As one observer put it, “from a practical administrative standpoint a quota system would be impossible to enforce” because the long border with Mexico “could not be adequately policed. The pressure to bring Mexicans across the border
would be so great and smuggling them would become so profitable that a quota law for Mexicans would become a joke.”
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The numerical limits and nationality quotas imposed on European immigration were therefore not applied to Mexicans. And those restrictions that did apply—the head tax, visa fee, literacy requirement, and exclusions on contract laborers and “lunatics, paupers, and convicts”—were anemically enforced. Consequently, as immigration scholar Aristide Zolberg puts it, “undocumented entry became the norm.”
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There was a growing disconnect between the formal entry rules handed down from a distant capital and the realities, needs, and practices on the ground along the border.
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