Ethnic Prejudice and Anti-Immigrant Policies In Times of Economic

Ethnic Prejudice and Anti-Immigrant Policies In Times of Economic
Stress: Mexican Repatriation from the United States, 1929-1939

By Dr. Jorge L. Chinea
Published in East Wind/West Wind (Winter 1996) P.9-13

In the now classic 1980 debate, Ronald Takaki and Nathan Glazer sparred over the defining traits of American race relations. Glazer, a Harvard University sociologist, maintained that despite its shortcomings, the United States pattern was characterized by ever widening attempts to provide for the equality of all groups. Takaki, a University of California-Berkeley professor of history, pointed out the many instances of racism and discrimination meted out against the nation's minority groups - slavery, detention camps, annexation of American Indian's lands, colonization of Puerto Rico - and doubted if the aptitudes and structures of oppression had changed at all.

In the following pages, I assess the relative merits of these widely opposing views by focusing on the repatriation experience of Mexicans and Chicanos during the Great Depression. Over one quarter of a million Mexicans were systematically deported in the 1930's. Their repatriation experience was prompted by a concern with their "alien" status, competition with native-born workers, and alleged overrepresentation among the unemployed ranks and the nation's relief programs. These exemplify many of the same concerns that currently fuel the anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States, as suggested by a series of 1992 articles published in the CO Researcher entitled, "Illegal Immigration: Does it Damage the Economy and Strain Social Services?" Knowing about the 1930's repatriation of Mexicans might teach us something about the irrationality and potential harm that such policies entail.

During the Progressive Era , 1890-1930 massive waves of Mexican Immigrants were propelled to the United States. They came for different reason. Many were drawn by job prospects resulting from the building of railroads and growth of commercial agriculture. The Mexican Revolution (much like the American and French Revolutions) also sent thousands of political refugees across its northern border. Smaller numbers of religious refugees flowed in as a result of the bitter conflict between the Mexican government and the Catholic Church (the Cristero Rebellion). And finally, during World War I, all immigration restrictions were lifted to allow the free and legal entry of Mexican immigrants to the United States on a temporary basis.

When Mexican immigration peaked around the mid-1920s, the government of the United States imposed stringent immigration laws affecting Mexicans. Many of them born in this country, began to be seen as a racial and economic "problem." Nativists clamored for restriction, expulsion, or repatriation of Mexican nationals. Many considered Mexicans (or Chicanos) darker that Anglo-Americans and less "sturdy" than the Europeans they were replacing. Some referred to Mexicans as "hacienda-minded peones," and recipients of relief. When the Great Depression overwhelmed the American economy, thousands of Mexicans and Chicanos, along with their families, were "repatriated" to Mexico. The entire event represented, as David F. Gomez noted, "one of the most tragic chapters in Mexican-American history, where both Mexicanos and Chicanos suffered together…"

Given the implications of such a large exodus, one is tempted to ask: what, if any, are the similarities and differences between racism and nativism? Maria Dolores de Krotchech and Carlos Jackson offered this answer: "The latter is an ideological doctrine which asserts the superiority of one race over another based on assumed rather than scientifically verified racial attributes and limitations, and seeks to maintain the supposed purity of a race. Nativism, on the other hand, is fear of non-Anglo foreigners, or… the anti-foreign spirit."

In addition, one might ask was the movement resulting in the 1930's exodus of Mexicans a "repatriation," a deportation or a voluntary return migration? In his essay, "Mexican Repatriation from Michigan: Public Assistance in Historical perspective," Norman D. Humphrey wrote:

What is repatriation? The term gained currency during the early years of the depression when immigrant peoples returned from the United States to their native lands. Simply, it denotes a restoration to one's homeland. This term deportation differs in connotation since it has a coercive or compulsory element which repatriation does not. Yet, in particular reference to Mexican repatriation from Michigan, American-born children of Mexican parentage were sent to Mexico, and some degree of coercion was exercised to effect many a family's return. Forced repatriation became so usual on a national level, and so much a part of agency policy, that the Immigrants Protective League of Chicago found it necessary to issue a statement emphasizing that the clients stake in America must be thoroughly considered before repatriation was planned. (p. 497)

In 1993 Carey McWilliams, a pioneer of Mexican-American history, understood repatriation as a "getting rid of the Mexican" scheme. Beatrice Griffith, writing in 1948, referred to the exodus as the repatriation of the deportados. John Burma, a few years later, called it an informal deportation campaign. In 1970 scholars Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzman labeled it, the welfare repatriations. The problem with the exodus is that it involved "legal and illegal immigrants temporary workers and permanent residents, U.S. citizens and aliens," and it was carried out through a variety of methods, "including deportation, persuasion, coaxing, incentive, and unauthorized coercion." "Repatriation," Abraham Hoffman concluded, "was a complicated process composed of many factors and nuances, most of which have been unexplored, neglected, omitted, or oversimplified."

Racialist dogma characterized discussions of Mexican immigrant labor in the United States in the 1920's and 1930's. Congressman Eugene Black from Texas, testifying before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the House of Representatives in 1929, argued that the quota system should be imposed on Mexicans because they allegedly were "germ-carriers, inassimilable, a people who are with us but not of us, and not for us." Mexicans had, in his own words, a large "percentage of moral and financial pauperism, (and were) incapable of development away from that condition, whose influence is forward the breaking down of our social fabric…"

Senator Box from Texas, who wrote a bill to restrict Mexican immigration to the United States, stated:

The ruling white classes of Mexico, numbering comparatively few, whatever their numbers are, do not migrate. There is another large class of people of Mexico who are sometimes called "greasers" and other unfriendly names, the great bulk of them are what we ordinarily al "peons," and from this class we are getting this great migration. It is a bad racial element… to speak frankly… The Mexican population of this class is made up in large part of, first, a good sprinkling of Spanish peasants, Mediterranean races, mingled with a great number of Indians, and the Indians in the main seem to have been a little different in type from those existing farther north. Most of the Indians in the northern part of the United States fought until their tribes were thinned. They were an upstanding, stalwart, battling race, but a remnant of them survived when we decided to huddle them up in a corner somewhere. We had a few of them here, there, and yonder, but the very smallness of their number testifies to the stalwart character of the race when it first came in contact with a superior people.

Edward H. Dowell, representing the California State Federation of Labor, argued that:

In Los Angeles, where the Mexican population is estimated at 150,000, the outdoor reliefdivision states that 27.44 percent of its cases are Mexican. The Bureau of Catholic reports that 52 percent of its cases are Mexicans who consume at least 50 percent of the budget. Twenty-five percent of the budget of the General Hospital is used for Mexicans, who comprise 43 percent of its cases. The city maternity service reports 62 ½ percent of its cases Mexicans, using 73 percent of its budget. The bureau of municipal nursing and divisions of child welfare state that 40 percent of their clients are Mexican, and in the day home of the Children's Hospital 23 percent of the children cared for are Mexican, while12 percent of the outpatient department are Mexican. Similar conditions exist in Pasadena and Long Beach, and in San Bernandino, Orange, Santa Barbara, and Fresno Counties.

To further ignite anti-immigrant sentiments, Dowell emphatically placed the question to the Senators: "Do you want the kind of people that sit in this capitol, or that you have in the north or middle west, or do want a mongrel population consisting largely of Mexicans and Orientals?"

During the 1930's, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service targeted Mexican workers, particularly those engaged in labor organizing. Sensing a potential halt of much needed Mexican labor; representative John N. Garner of Texas noted that "The kind of labor that will do this work, you simply can not get it. You can not get a white man to take his whole family, go out, and set onions-you could get them to set onions at $3 or $4 a day, but the farmer is not going to plant onions if he had to pay that wage." Fred H. Bixby, representing a number of agricultural and cattle-raising interests throughout the Southwest and Midwest, defined Mexican workers: "If I do not get Mexicans to thin those beets and to hoe those beets and to top those beets, I am through with the beet business. We have no Chinamen; we have not the Japs. The Hindu is worthless, the Filipino is nothing, and the white man will not do the work." A spokesman for the U.S. Beet Sugar Association used a demographic defense in favor of Mexican migrant labor by pointing out that in the preceding 15 years there was a net loss of 1,020,000 people away from farms. In 1927, 30,091 Europeans came to the United States but another 24,145 departed for Europe, leaving a net immigration of only 5,946 people. Besides filling an important labor gap, the spokesman explained, Mexicans have no inclination or ingenuity to do skilled jobs outside of agriculture.

American nativism did not pass unperceived in Mexico, where various measures were being undertaken to reduce the flow of emigrants leaving for the United States. Mexican government officials warned would-be emigrants of possible injustices, lack of protection, and mob violence in United States soil. Mexico City's newspaper Excelsior accused California officials on inciting racial disharmony. A new Department of Social Prevision was established in Mexico to create new working opportunities "in industry, in mining, in agriculture, and in commerce, (and other) new areas of production…" The Secretarial of Government banned the immigration of foreigners to Mexico, "due to the economic crises the country is going through, which has left unemployed a considerable number of Mexicans." Mexico's National Commission on Irrigation requested that uncultivated state land be opened to the "expatriated nationals." As deportations in California, Texas and New Mexico rose, the Excelsior charged that between two to three million Mexicans in the United States were being treated like slaves. In a desperate move President Pascual Ortiz Rubio ordered Mexican consuls in the United States to focus on protecting the Mexican immigrants' rights and duties.

While Mexico took steps to address the problems of massive expulsions, American nativist sentiment stepped up its condemnation of Mexican aliens." The immigrant from south of the border was now seen strictly strictly as a worker and as a racial inferior. "In relation to the Mexican," Mark Reisler has written, "American nativism manifested itself almost exclusively in terms of racial nationalism. Only rarely in the 1920's did nativists view the Mexican immigrant as a radial threat and almost never did they single him out as a religious danger. Representatives of the United States Chamber of Commerce stated that "Mexican laborers were of a docile nature." One C.M.Goetha, President of the Immigration Study Commission of Sacramento, California, argued that a normal Mexican family produces about 32 children and 1,024 grandchildren as opposed to three children and only nine grandchildren in the typical American family. "We are therefore," Goether concluded, "daily adding newcomers to the 3.000,000 Mexicans now here breeding against us. In 1935, Representative Dies of Texas called for the deportation of a reputed 6,000,000 aliens then residing in the United States.

A racialist classification of the 1930 census added to the hysteria. "The instructions given to enumerators for making this classification," the census report states, "were to the effect that all persons born in Mexico or having parents born in Mexico, who are not definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese, should be returned as Mexican." Based primarily on the racial attitudes and perceptions of the census-takers, close to a million-and-a-half "Mexicans" were found to be residing in the United States in 1930.

The United States Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak, apparently adhered to these findings when in the 1930's he launched a nationwide "scare" campaign against Mexicans. Local Immigration officers, law enforcement agencies, and slanted newspaper stories teamed up to publicize deportation raids to serve as a "psychological gesture" to frighten aliens, Mexicans in particular, to leave the United States. With these tactics, between 50,000 and 75,000 Mexicans and their American-born children in California were "repatriated" to Mexico. The belief that the best workers were an "alien population," observed Norman S. Goldner in Minnesota, "provided the rationale for a deportation policy. A study in 1936, however, indicated that of 2,961 persons (in Minnesota) queried 72 percent were citizens of the United States. "Economic adversity, fearful over recently renewed activities of immigration authorities and perplexed by what they regard as anti-Mexican sentiment," the New York Times reported, had resulted in "The greatest begins of modern times… By the end of 1931, the paper estimated that "in the greatest immigration movement in recent Mexican history 112,407 Mexican repatriates have returned to (Mexico) this year, most of them from the United States… the total for the year may exceed 150,000." In July, 1932, the Times figures had risen to 250,000.

In a retaliatory measure in 1938 President Cardenas of Mexico nationalized United States owned oil companies and used some of the surplus land to establish colonies to be developed by Mexican repatriates coming from the United States "Mexico," declared President Cardenas in 25 May 1938, "is fighting for the suppression of all forms of internal slavery and defending its sovereignty against unjust aggression by foreign capital." In response one Howard T. Oliver, wrote to the New York Times:

What spirit of derision possesses the Mexican authority to name a colony, near Brownsville, Texas, where a few of their people have been repatriated, "The Eighteenth of March," in contumacious glorification of the date of the expropriation of American-owned oil companies in 1938. To be slapped on one cheek by having the Mexicans seize most of our investments and drive out our citizens is unbearable enough, but when they slap the other cheek also by demanding that we care for the millions of Mexicans in our country because we are a rich nation, our tolerance ceases to be a virtue.

The Mexican government, however, was not equipped financially to absorb large numbers of returning job seekers. In turning down a number of German-Jewish refugees desiring to enter Mexico, the government stated that Mexico could not allow the entry of Jewish refugees while she was faced with having to repatriate Mexicans now in the United States. To facilitate their incorporation, Mexico's Secretary of Foreign Affairs barred foreigners from acquiring land, water rights, mining concessions or similar grants.

Emma Reh Stevenson documented the deportees' difficulties with finding employment and re-adaptation. Missionary Robert N. McLean denounced the promoters of deportations as ungrateful. Osgood Hardy who, like Stevenson, followed the repatriates to Mexico, observed that "Mexico has been in a depression since 1911 and the conditions to which they have returned make the lives of even an erstwhile lowly section hand in the United States seem attractive." Sociologist Emory Bogardus wrote that the repatriates formed "a kind of recaitarant minority… and are called "gringos" because of their superior airs and American ways." Some were accused of being "Yankified innovators, Masons or Pagans, destroyers of the old customs, freakish, intruders, etc." American employers in Mexico found them "too smart" who generally "spoiled" other workers when hired.

This sampling touched only on a few locations, political personalities and organizations involved in Mexican repatriation. The incident soured the foreign relations between the United States and Mexico:

Are Mexican immigrants to be sent for again when prosperous times return, to be treated as "cheap labor," and then to be returned penniless to poverty-ridden relatives? Are industry and agriculture under any obligations to neighbors whom they bring into our country under promises of work, when the latter are stranded here in a time of depression? If these people, by virtue of seasonal labor situations, of migratory American salesmen to buy on the installment plan, are unable to save, is anything due them by way of protection in form of insurance? Is the obligation to them simply met by paying their transportation expenses to the Border or "home" especially when that home is one with which they have lost touch and which may already be over burdened with poverty? These are a few of the questions raised by those who wish to see justice done in the relations between Mexico and the United States.

During the decade in the question (1930-1940) and as a result of a racialist campaign, the Mexican population dropped 40 percent. Indiana lost nearly three-fourths of its Mexican population during that interval. Another 12 states - Colorado, Illinois, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming - lost over half of their Mexican-origin constituents.

But the events affected not only 300,000 repatriates, but also future generations of Mexicans, Chicanos/as and other Latinos/as. Moreover, repatriation impacted diverse groupsas well. The populations of Welch, Irish and Czech immigrants declined by 41 percent, 40 percent, and 35 percent respectively. What accounts for the demographic plunge of these groups? At 41 percent Mexicans - then listed as "White" ethnic-experienced one of the highest population drops of all ethnic groups then in the United States. Whatever is repercussions and victims repatriation, or forced departure serves as a poignant reminder to other minority and immigrant groups in the United States today. As Gary S. Becker recently stated, "Rich, democratic countries must do more than simply ship unlawful aliens back home." As I documented above, the problem is compounded for the U.S. born children of immigrants, for they are often torn from schools, neighborhoods and friends when their parents are coerced to return or outright deported. Then there are thousands of U.S. born ethnic groups who the culturally myopic often mistake for illegal immigrants, and thus denied them services, housing, loans, employment opportunities, citizenship status and justice in time of economic stress.