MEANS AND WAYS

JOANNE FREEMAN: Now, Erika Lee told me that the Chinese immigrants that were sneaking across the border were actually part of an international smuggling ring. These people were furnished with detailed maps, safe houses, and even fake ID papers.

ERIKA LEE: There’s even a case in the National Archives where the US immigration officials found a group of about 20 Chinese who were expertly disguised as Mexicans and were being housed in a hut a little south of the border and being taught a few words of Spanish. So that if they were caught, they could claim to be Mexican and not Chinese.

JOANNE FREEMAN: So it was easier to cross the border if you were Mexican and not Chinese.

BRIAN: And how many Chinese are we talking about Joanne?

JOANNE FREEMAN: A good question. Erika Lee says the numbers are hard to pin down, but she said that the best estimates are about 1,000 or 2,000 a year.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And why are they trying to get into the US from Mexico?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Another good question. Well, guys the basic reason is the Chinese Exclusion Act, which Congress passed in 1882. And this was the first time that the United States targeted immigrants based on race or on national origin.

ERIKA LEE: Asian immigrants are not only the first to be excluded or banned, they also become the first illegal or the first undocumented immigrants who try to come to the United States across the US-Canadian and US-Mexican borders.

BRIAN: So hold on. You’re saying that we didn’t have any illegal immigrants until the 1880s?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And not only that, that the first illegal immigrants, quote unquote, were actually Chinese and not from Latin America?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Yeah, kind of a big double whammy there. Now Lee says that the Chinese Exclusion Act is a watershed moment in American history.

ERIKA LEE: It’s the first chapter in our long history of undocumented immigration and the ways in which immigration will find another way to come into the United States if there’s the means, the will, and jobs waiting for them on this side of the border.

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JOANNE FREEMAN: Today on BackStory we’re looking at how the United States tries to control who gets in and who’s kicked out, because the president has big plans.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Department of Homeland Security announced brand new priorities when it comes to their plan to deport illegal immigrants.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The White House is rejecting the charge that President Trump is pursuing mass deportation.

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DONALD TRUMP: We will soon begin the construction of a great Great Wall along our southern border.

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JOANNE FREEMAN: This is the second in our two-part series on immigration. Our earlier episode was about immigration bans, but today we’re going to be focusing on how the United States polices its borders. We’ll hear about a little-known deportation campaign in the 1930s that targeted Mexican immigrants and their American-born children, and we’ll also hear how the US immigration bureaucracy has grown dramatically over the 20th century.

BRIAN: As we just heard, there weren’t any federal restrictions on immigration before the 1880s. Businesses actively recruited immigrants, and they came from all over the world to work in factories, farms, and mines. And while many Americans were ambivalent or even hostile towards those newcomers, they kept coming as long as there were jobs.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Which brings us back to my conversation with historian Erika Lee. She pointed out that in the late 19th century, the federal government had just started to police immigration, and the Southern border of the United States was still pretty open.

ERIKA LEE: Mexico becomes the back door for Chinese immigration and later Asian and even European and Syrian immigration. Those immigrants who find themselves either locked out of the United States because of restrictive immigration laws or because they’re concerned that, for example, they might not pass the inspections at Ellis Island or another port of entry.

JOANNE FREEMAN: And so what’s bringing these people, what’s driving them to cross the desert to get into the United States from Mexico?

ERIKA LEE: This is the era of migration. We call it the Century of Migration from 1830 to 1930. 35 million immigrants came to the United States during this time period. Just over a million are from Asia, so they– just like all of the Ellis Island immigrants– are coming for the same reasons, for labor, for economic opportunity. Some are fleeing persecution.

JOANNE FREEMAN: But they’re being focused on as a group that has been declared illegal immigrants. So what is the problem with Chinese and Japanese and Korean people who are trying to get into the United States?

ERIKA LEE: Asian immigration sparks, really, the first large scale immigration debates in the United States, and the debate should be very recognizable to those of us living today. The arguments about an immigrant group that was just so different than previous immigrants, incapable of assimilation, from a country and a civilization that was diametrically opposite from Americans and from America. But again, also because they were racially so different, more like African-Americans than like European immigrants.

JOANNE FREEMAN: So it’s racial and it’s cultural and it’s ideological and it’s the full spectrum of things to be anxious about.

ERIKA LEE: Absolutely.

JOANNE FREEMAN: You through economics in there, too. Yeah. It’s pretty much everything bundled into one.

ERIKA LEE: Right.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, so let me ask you a question that’s more geographically based. We are focusing– so far, we’ve been talking about the Mexican border. Does that border stay a leaky border? I mean, so does the back door kind of become a leaky front door?

ERIKA LEE: Absolutely. And over the course of the early 20th century, there are US agents paying informants for any information about Chinese who are landing in Mexico and moving north, and there’s also a system of patrolling the border. So we do see an increase in the border patrol from just three officers patrolling the Mexico-California border and 1891 to over 80 by the early 1900s.

JOANNE FREEMAN: So it sounds like part of what we’re talking about on the border between the United States and Mexico. We’ve been focusing obviously on the story of Asian immigrants trying to get across, but surely there were Mexican people trying to get across, too. How does that play out?

ERIKA LEE: So one of the ironies of the Chinese Exclusion Act is that it does ban one group at the same time that there is such immense labor needs in the southwest. This is a time period when the railroads are continuing to be built. Lumber is continuing to be milled. This is the birth of the great agricultural empires in California and many other states.

Chinese had provided the labor in all of those industries. When they become excluded and when other Asians become excluded, this is when we start relying on Mexican immigrants. And so there is a tacit and maybe also explicit understanding at the border that we need them as laborers and because the US government is getting pressure from southwestern employers to keep those gates open to Mexican laborers.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Wow. So let me take us for a moment away from the border and take us into the United States. So let’s say we’re focusing on some Asian immigrants who are illegally in the United States, but they’re in the United States. Are they living in fear? Are they afraid that they’re going to get caught and sent back across the border? Or do they assume that once they’ve crossed that border that they can sort of incorporate themselves in, and it’s not– they’re not living in fear so much?

ERIKA LEE: It’s absolutely a life under the shadows, and I’ll never forget this one immigration file of a young Chinese-American man in San Francisco. He’s suspected of coming in under fraudulent pretenses. The Immigration Service has placed him under surveillance. They catch him unawares coming to work at a Chinese restaurant. He’s a low level Chinese restaurant cook.

And he runs for his life, but he leaves his wallet behind. And I remember opening up an immigration file, and his wallet falls out. And there was no money in it. And I’m just thinking, you know, what– he must have had to live the rest of his life just fearful that anywhere that he was going to show up, it might be the last time that he went to work or went home. And what went through that guy’s mind, what happened to him, you know.

JOANNE FREEMAN: But let’s take a little bit of a longer view. How does the story that we’ve been unfolding here about early border control– what does that do to shape immigration policy in the long run? So what’s the impact of this ongoing sort of struggle that we’ve been talking about largely taking place on the Mexican border?

ERIKA LEE: We have border patrols. And then when that doesn’t work, we start instituting interior enforcement, meaning we go after those who we suspect are already in the United States without documentation. We go into their businesses, their schools. We’re watching them. We require registration.

It completely changes our relationship to immigration from one of complete welcome to one of guarded and measured restriction to one of exclusion and punishment. So that we have normalized racial profiling for certain immigrant groups. And once it becomes normalized, it becomes so much easier to expand that mentality and those policies to other groups.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Right. So there’s models that are being set, but everything that we’re describing here makes more friction and more tension rather than making things operate any more smoothly.

ERIKA LEE: Right. I mean, for the Chinese in America, not only are they singled out for exclusion, they also cannot become naturalized citizens by law. And so those two things combined– but also the constant threat of deportation– for the Chinese in America, it reinforces self-segregation. It’s clear that we’re not wanted here.

We can only do so much. We can work here, but we can’t become citizens. So for many Chinese-American families, mine included, many don’t root themselves here until several generations have passed, because you just never when you might be kicked out.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Erika Lee is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. She’s the author of At America’s Gates, Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943.

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