*10 C. Post-1924 Congressional Debates Over Mexican Immigration Policy Reveal Widespread Racism Against Mexicans
The 1924 Act's foundational compromise did not last long. Congress considered bills designed to curtail Mexican immigration in 1926 and 1928. And although these debates ostensibly pitted Nativists against agribusiness lobbyists, legislators from both groups used openly racist language when describing Mexican immigrants.
The Nativists voiced their usual fears about the effects of the United States' shifting demographic composition due to immigration. For example, the Immigration Restriction League warned the Senate that “[o]ur great Southwest is rapidly creating for itself a new racial problem, as our old South did when it imported slave labor from Africa.” Migra! 29 (quoting Restriction of Western Hemisphere Immigration: Hearings on S.1296, S.1437, and S. 3019 Before the Senate Comm. on Immigration, 70th Cong., 1st Sess. 188 (1928) (statement on Mexican immigration submitted by the Immigration Restriction League)).
While the Southwestern agricultural lobby fought against proposals to curtail Mexican immigration, they accepted the racist premise underlying the Nativists' worldview. In 1926, an agribusiness lobbyist named S. Parker Frisselle testified before Congress that “[w]e, gentlemen * * * are just as anxious as you are not to build the civilization of California or any other Western district upon a Mexican foundation.” City of Inmates 135 (quoting Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico: Hearing on H.R. 6741, H.R. 7559, and H.R. 9036 Before the House Comm. on Immigration and Naturalization, 69th Cong., 1st Sess. 7 (1926) (statement of S. Parker Frisselle) (Frisselle Testimony)). “With the Mexican comes a social problem.... It is a serious one. It comes into our schools, *11 it comes into our cities, and it comes into our whole civilization in California.” Migra! 29 (quoting Frisselle Testimony at 6-7).
Agribusiness disagreed with the Nativists on the question of whether Mexican immigrants were here to stay. The southwestern lobbyists believed that the Mexican migrant is more like a “pigeon,” who “goes home to roost” at the end of each season. City of Inmates 135 (quoting Frisselle Testimony at 6, 10, 14); see also id. at 136 (quoting George Clements, “Mexican Indian or Porto Rican Indian Casual Labor?,” folder 1, box 62, GPCP (Clements Testimony) (“A Mexican would not settle in the United States because ‘his homing instincts take him back to Mexico.’ ”)). Even if they were wrong on this point, and the Mexicans stayed, Mexicans could easily be deported if need be, as agribusiness lobbyist George Clements testified in 1928. Id. at 135-136 (citing Clements Testimony).
Agribusiness also fought racial animus with more racial animus, raising the specter of Black workers from Puerto Rico who might serve their labor needs if Mexicans could not. As Clements warned, “[t]he one problem which should give us pause is the negro problem.” City of Inmates 136 (quoting Clements Testimony). He went on to explain that if Mexicans were denied entry into the United States, the “[Puerto Rican] negro will come.” Ibid. Clements thus forced Nativists to choose between “Mexico's deportable birds of passage or Puerto Rican Negroes, who, as citizens, would leave the edge of the U.S. empire to settle within the final frontier of Anglo America.” Id. (citing Clements Testimony).
While the two camps had their differences, the congressional debates of 1926 and 1928 make clear that both Nativists and agribusiness industrialists agreed that Mexican immigration presented a “social problem” that had to be managed. A businessman from Texas put it *12 plainly: “If we could not control the Mexicans and they would take this country it would be better to keep them out, but we can and do control them.” Migra! 29 (quoting Paul Schuster Taylor, An American-Mexican Frontier, Nueces County, Texas 286 (1971)). When questioned about the possibility that Mexicans might permanently settle in the United States, Frisselle offered that “the Mexican pretty well solves that problem himself. He always goes back [to Mexico].” Frisselle Testimony 14. But to the extent that more assurances were needed, he promised to keep the Mexican population in check: “We, in California, think we can handle that social problem.” Migra! 29 (quoting Frisselle Testimony at 6). To that end, Frisselle highlighted an ongoing effort to set up labor organizations across the state that could shuffle immigrant workers from region to region throughout the year in accordance with different crops' harvesting periods. Frisselle Testimony 13-15. The goal, as he put it, was to get migrants “out of the congested areas” where they were “congregating” (like Los Angeles) and “keep them moving.” Id. at 14-15.
Yet as time passed, the facts on the ground changed. By 1929, 10% of the Mexican population already lived in the United States, Los Angeles was home to the second-largest Mexican community in the world, and “small Mexican communities were developing as far north as Detroit.” City of Inmates 136-137. The Nativists may have once been content with the agricultural industry's promises that it could, as Frisselle put it, “handle” the Mexican “problem,” but by 1929 agribusiness's assurances of Mexican impermanence looked increasingly illusory.
