Coming to America Through the Back Door

Q 12 Coming to America Through the Back Door AMERICA IS OFTEN CALLED a “nation of immigrants,” highlighting a long tradition of an open and welcoming front door. But this tells only part of the story. T e front door has never been fully open, and became increasingly regulated at the national level in the last decades of the nineteenth century. 1 Consequently, less welcome immigrants developed alternate routes and methods of entry through the back door. T ey either deceived authorities at of cial ports of entry or evaded authorities by clandestinely crossing the country’s vast land borders—smuggling themselves in or hiring the services of professional smugglers. T is chapter tells the story of this back door and how it was created, used, policed, and transformed over time. Considering the current policy preoccupation with illegal Mexican immigrants, it is especially striking that the early part of our story has so little to do with Mexicans. Indeed, Americans illegally migrated to Mexico long before Mexicans illegally migrated to the United States, moreover, the f rst illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico viewed by U.S. authorities as a problem were actually Chinese. T e inf ux of foreigners, both legal and illegal, changed the face of America. At the same time, enforcing increasingly restrictive entry laws and cracking down on human smuggling gave birth to a national immigration-control apparatus. Federal responsibility for regulating 208 COMING TO AMERICA THROUGH THE BACK DOOR 209 the nation’s borders, traditionally focused almost entirely on the f ow of goods, was now extended to also include the f ow of people. Illegal entrants were numerically far less signif cant than their legal counter- parts, but the political and bureaucratic scramble to keep them out transformed the policing prof le of the federal government. An Old American Tradition Our story begins with a brief historical detour back to the colonial era. Illegally moving and settling, it turns out, is an old American tradition, even if it was not called “illegal immigration.” Consider, for instance, colonial def ance of the British Proclamation of 1763, which imposed a frontier line between the colonies and Indian terri- tories west of the Appalachian Mountains. King George III prohibited colonists from moving across the line and settling, and he deployed thousands of troops to the western colonial frontier to enforce the law. T e British feared loss of control over their subjects, and they also wished to avoid conf icts between colonists and Indians. But the colonists simply ignored the proclamation and illegally moved into what became Kentucky and Tennessee. Tensions between the colonists and British authorities over freedom of movement intensif ed until the outbreak of the American Revolution. And after Independence, these Anglo-American tensions persisted, but now over the illegal emigration of skilled British artisans. As we saw in Chapter 6, thousands of ambitious artisans managed to smuggle themselves out of the country in violation of strict British emigration laws, helping to jump-start the American industrial revolution. Meanwhile, independence from Britain opened up enormous oppor- tunities for illegal westward movement by settlers in def ance of central government authorities. 2 With the adoption by Congress of the Land Ordinances of 1784 and 1785, the national government planned to sur- vey and then sell of territory west of the original states. T e Northwest Ordinance, passed in August 1789, created the Northwest Territory, a geographic area east of the Mississippi River and below the Great Lakes. T ese land ordinances, designed by Congress to raise revenue, deter squatters, and promote orderly westward migration and settlement, were quickly undermined by a f ood of unlawful settlers unwilling or 210 PART IV: THE GILDED AGE AND THE PROGRESSIVE ERA unable to pay for the public land. Squatters also moved onto Indian lands in violation of federal treaty obligations, often leading to blood- shed. T e debates over the Northwest Ordinance included public denouncements of illegal squatters. William Butler of New York, for instance, complained, “I Presume Council has been made acquainted with the villainy of People of this Country, that are f ocking from all Quarters, settling & taking up not only the United States lands but also this State’s, many Hundreds have crossed the Rivers, & are dayly going many with their family’s, the Wisdom of the Council I hope will Provide against so gross and growing an evil.” 3 In 1785 Congress empowered the secretary of war to crack down on illegal settlers, and the laws grew harsher as the problem persisted. T e Intrusion Act of 1807 criminalized illegal settlement and authorized f nes and imprisonment for lawbreakers. T ese measures were largely inef ective from the start. Testimony delivered to Congress in 1789 noted that the army “burnt the cabins, broke down the fences, and tore up the potatoe patches [of the squatters]; but three hours after the troops were gone, these people returned again, repaired the damage, and are now settled upon the land in open def ance of the union.” 4 Some states, such as Vermont and Maine, actually won statehood after being settled by illegal squatters who refused to buy the land from the legally recognized owners and violently resisted government eviction ef orts. Even President Washington found it maddeningly dif cult to remove illegal settlers from his western lands and bitterly complained about it. 5 T e pattern of illegal settlement and intense (sometimes even violent) resistance to central government authority repeated itself for decades as migration accelerated and the frontier pushed westward. 6 According to one estimate, by 1828 two-thirds of Illinois residents were illegal squatters on federal land. 7 T e westward demographic movement included European immigrants who entered the country legally but then settled illegally. Failing to deter and remove illegal settlers, Congress passed “preemption” acts, f rst in 1830 and again in 1841. T ese were essentially pardons for illegal settlement, providing legitimate land deeds at heav- ily discounted prices. T e law, in other words, eventually adjusted and conformed to the realities of the situation, legalizing previously criminalized behavior. 8 COMING TO AMERICA THROUGH THE BACK DOOR 211 Of course, even though illegal settlers def ed the authorities and undermined the rule of law, in the end they were an essential part of westward expansion, very much serving the federal government’s objec- tive of populating the West and extending the nation’s geographic reach. T is included the illegal inf ux of American settlers into what is now the state of Texas despite Mexico’s decree of April 1830 prohibiting further immigration from the United States. Texas border of cials paid little attention to such orders from a faraway central government. By 1836, the immigrant population greatly outnumbered Tejanos. 9 T e Mexican government even deployed garrisons to try to control the inf ux, but the Americans continued to illegally move across the border. In this regard, the famous battle at the Alamo can be viewed as a militarized attempt to stop illegal American immigration—though that is not what “remember the Alamo” is meant to remind us of. Last but not least, the smuggling of hundreds of thousands of African slaves into the country after the importation of slave labor was banned—f rst by states and then by the federal government—certainly qualif es as the most brutal form of forced illegal migration in the nation’s history. T e federal government’s erratic and often halfhearted measures to restrict the illegal importation of slaves can be viewed as a form of immigration control. Moreover, as formally codif ed in the nation’s fugitive slave laws, escaped slaves residing in the North were essentially illegal immigrants. T ey were asylum seekers denied the legal protection of asylum, and therefore lived in constant fear of being deported back to the South. And even in the midst of the Civil War, f eeing slaves crossing Union lines were labeled “contrabands”; they remained in a legal limbo until the repeal of the fugitive slave laws and abolition of slavery. Closing the Front Door T e federal government did not get into the business of controlling immigration in a serious and sustained way until the ef orts to prohibit Chinese immigration in the 1870s and 1880s, marking the beginning of Washington’s long and tumultuous history of trying to keep out “unde- sirables.” Before then, regulating immigration was mostly left to the states to sort out. 212 PART IV: THE GILDED AGE AND THE PROGRESSIVE ERA Figure 12.1 “And Still T ey Come.” Political cartoon depicts Uncle Sam trying to manage the inf ux of Chinese migrants through the front door while many sneak in via the back doors of Mexico and Canada. T e Wasp , August–December 1880 (Bancroft Library, University of California). Starting in the 1850s, tens of thousands of Chinese laborers (many of whom left China in violation of their country’s emigration laws 10 ) were welcomed in the American west as a source of cheap labor, especially to build the transcontinental railroad. But they were never welcomed as people. From the start, Chinese could not become citizens. So it is little surprise that once the demand for Chinese labor dried up, an anti-Chinese backlash quickly followed. And it is also no surprise that the backlash was most intense in California, home to most of the country’s Chinese population. 11 B y 1870, Chinese composed some 10 percent of the state’s population and about one-fourth of its workforce.

Load more