Illusions of National Security: Migra! by Kelly Lytle Hernandez

This week we read Migra! by Kelly Lytle Hernandez to examine the topic “Illusions of National Security.” The book is an excellent continuation of many ideas we explored last week in Impossible Subjects and provides important insight into the forces shaping our country’s immigration policy.

The book’s subtitle tells us exactly who this history will focus on – the US Border Patrol (for a copy of my notes – see here). Hernandez illustrates how the Border Patrol was able to shape the country’s ideas and policies regarding immigration, illegality, and race despite its relatively specific role as an enforcement agency, which is not usually framed as a role driving policy.  She is able to reframe the Border Patrol through her sources – the federal government’s collections at the National Archives as well as personal materials found at the Border Patrol’s Museum – that provide specifics on who the Border Patrol’s employees were and how they viewed their service.  Interestingly, Hernandez also uses material from Mexican archives that helps to illustrate Mexico’s role in policing the border region.

Central to Hernandez’s history are the Border Patrol agents on the ground and tasked with enforcing the country’s immigration laws.  As we learned last week, Mexicans were not the initial target of the country’s first restrictive immigration laws – those focused on Asian and European immigrants.  However, this began to change during the 1920s when the National Origins Act of 1924 formed the Border Patrol.  Border Patrol agents were often recruited from the white working classes of the American southwest and grew up amid a culture of violence directed at Mexicano ranchers and families in the region.  These early recruits had few qualms about directing violence toward Mexican immigrants and with no cohesive policy for how the Border Patrol was supposed to operate their remote, disconnected stations largely took it upon themselves to enforce the law as they deemed most appropriate.  While working-class white men joined the Border Patrol as a high-paying job that offered them a chance at upward social mobility, the Patrol’s force was rounded out by agents with middle-class Mexican American background, a community largely opposed to more immigration that could undermine their standing.  Because most of the country’s immigration restrictions did not focus on Mexicans these cultural attitudes played an important role shaping the broader mandate of the Border Patrol.  

As we also learned last week, Mexican immigrants often traveled in irregular patterns that avoided formal border crossings.  Hernandez demonstrates the factors on both sides of the border that encouraged this process.  In the United States, high fees and humiliating exams discouraged immigrants from using formal crossings. In Mexico the country’s immigration agents stripped migrants who were unlikely to pass American immigration rules of their passports, while also levying large fines on those assisting immigrants evading authorities.  These tactics encouraged increased illegal immigration that reinforced Border Patrol agents’ existing prejudices against Mexicans.  During the 1930s as the cost of deporting Asian immigrants rose dramatically and the Great Depression led to a surplus of labor, the Border Patrol cracked down even more harshly against Mexican immigrants.  During World War II the Border Patrol became more centrally organized, receiving additional funding, supplies, and agents from beyond the southwest – these new recruits were more willing to disrupt the influence of local industrial farmers as they were less beholden to local social norms.

Hernandez illustrates the powerful role these industrial farmers played in challenging and reshaping shaping the Border Patrol and immigration policy more broadly.  Although many working-class white men hoped the land the United States conquered in the Mexican-American War could be used by small farmers as family plots, the reality was most of the land was held by large corporate farmers who relied on wage laborers to work it.  Due to immigration restrictions Mexicans emerged as one of the few groups able to work this land and business owners embraced them as a cheap labor source.   Industrial farmers sometimes worked with and against he Border Patrol as their interests were primarily economic – they needed low cost laborers.  When the Border Patrol attempted to deport workers en masse following the organization’s centralization after World War II, industrial farmers opposed these steps by hiring armed guards for their farms and lobbied their Congressional representatives to change the Border Patrol’s tactics.  However, industrial farmers also relied on the Border Patrol to serve as a threat to their workforce that could prevent their demands for better wages – if the workers threatened a strike or demanded better conditions, they were easy to remove. By examining the Border Patrol and industrial farmers’ tense relationship, Hernandez ably demonstrates how nativist racism and capitalism worked both together and  against one another to shape the country’s understanding of illegal immigration.

By the 1960s and 1970s, Border Patrol agents increasingly focused on drug smuggling and linked illegal immigration to this process. Although two separate law enforcement tasks, both helped to reinforce the other mandate and led to increased incarceration of Mexican immigrants.  As we learned last week, the country’s 1964 immigration reforms placed extremely low quotas on the number of Mexican immigrants permitted to legally enter the country, essentially guaranteeing that illegal immigration would continue – Border Patrol policy increasingly focused on incarcerating repeat offenders, further contributing to the country’s prisons and prison labor forces.

Using Hernandez and Mae Ngai’s research as guides, I suspect that measures such as border walls and the arrests of immigrants with no criminal record will do little to curtail illegal immigration as increased policing has done little to curtail it in the past. This is because restrictive enforcement agencies such as the Border Patrol do not address the macroeconomic forces shaping immigration.  As Ngai proposed last week, more effective and targeted aid programs would be far more likely to curtail illegal immigration. However, as Ngai and Hernandez have both illustrated, those concerned about illegal immigration often think in terms of the nation-state and the perceived necessity of preserving a cohesive concept of the “nation” – however, that project is often linked to popular understandings of race and inequality and suggests that framing illegal immigration as a criminal problem presents substantial philosophical problems for a nation built on the idea of democratic equality.