1921 and again in 1924 Congress passed Quota Laws that established a maximum number of immigrants by national origin. The quotas were based upon the demographic makeup of the United States in 1890—prior to the great waves from southern Europe. The intent was obvious: America had been founded as a white Nordic country, and Congress intended to keep it that way.
As it happens, Western Hemisphere immigration was excluded from the quotas established in 1921 and 1924. Between 1921 and 1930 there were numerous attempts to impose quotas on Mexican immigration. Representative John Box of Texas, a Methodist minister and a founder of Southern Methodist University, argued on the floor of the House in 1928 that “every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border.” But in this and other instances, the quotas were blocked in the Senate by Southerners and Westerners who were protecting the agricultural lobby and its flow of cheap labor. Immigration policy in the 1920s officially welcomed only the Nordic race, but the Mexican “back door” was left open.
Then came the Depression. The repatriation campaigns of the Great Depression were initiated by the Hoover Administration as an attempt to do something, no matter how ineffective, in response to the growing wave of unemployment sweeping the country. Like Obama’s deportations in his first term, they began in response to accusations of inaction against hordes of criminal Mexicans crossing the border and stealing jobs. In both cases, it was perhaps the president’s choice of chief enforcer of immigration laws that signaled the willingness to use the blunt force of government. William Doak was appointed Secretary of Labor by Hoover in 1930. Doak was a leading figure in the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen union and a prominent figure in the campaign against immigrants. (Janet Napolitano, appointed Secretary of Homeland Security by Obama in 2009, had deployed the National Guard on the Mexican border as governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009. She had signed into law the most severe employer sanctions bill in the nation and had approved measures making migrants smuggled in as much felons as traffickers.)
Shortly after taking office, Doak centered his attention on deporting aliens who were or had been in the workforce. In his annual departmental report of 1931, he wrote that the purpose of the Department of Labor, which then enforced immigration laws, was
to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of wage earners of the United States … it is a mere corollary of this duty and purpose to spare no reasonable effort to remove the menace of unfair competition which actually exists in the vast number of aliens who have in one way or another, principally by surreptitious entries, violated our immigration laws … the force and effect of these provisions would be largely defeated if they were not accompanied by provisions for the deportation of those found in the country as having entered in violation of these restrictions.
In 1930 the Border Patrol numbered 781 agents. President Hoover offered Doak unqualified support for his campaign, and pledged an additional “245 more agents to assist in the deportation of 500,000 foreigners.”3 Even 1,000 agents were insufficient for the magnitude of the task. Doak, undeterred, launched initiatives to expand the reach of the Border Patrol, measures that would continue to be refined by successive administrations, including Obama’s.
The belief that deteriorating employment was a consequence of immigration reached hysterical levels. Congressman Martin Dies of Texas introduced a thick raft of bills aimed at making the life of immigrants miserable. Dies’ racist and anti-Semitic views were well known. He proposed forcibly deporting all of the 6 million aliens he claimed resided in the United States. There were raids, roundups, and mass deportations in almost every state in the Union. Local committees, mayors, sheriffs, and governors escalated the rhetoric of hate. In Los Angeles, the chairman of a local committee, Charles Visel, proposed a campaign of extensive newspaper publicity, threatening detention and deportation to “scare-head” Mexicans to self-deport without the necessity of formal proceedings.4 The city saw nationally publicized raids in which streets were closed off, cars stopped and searched, and those who looked “Mexican” apprehended. Colorado’s governor, Edwin C. Johnson, threatened “to call the National Guard to round up foreigners and expel them from the state.” Latinos lived with the ever-present fear of detention and deportation. To seek help from a welfare office or a county hospital was to run great risks.
The description of raids conducted by local law enforcement fully authorized by high officials reads disturbingly like the front-page stories of today, as with the raids of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (the bombastic Arizona poster boy of the nativist movement). If anything, there was a bit more frankness and clarity in the rhetoric of the 1930s. There was no pretense that the expulsions were aimed solely at “illegals,” leaving little doubt that the corrupting influence of Mexican morals, values, and inferior culture threatened America’s very existence. Even Arpaio tiptoes more delicately through the racial and ethnic maze than did his more honest predecessors. While governor of Arizona, President Obama’s Homeland Security secretary was careful enough to call on the National Guard only to keep the foreigners out, and not to round them up.
Miami on the eve of the Depression was a thriving boomtown of 12,500 in a state that was barely being born. The 1930 Census recorded a population of 48,000 for Arizona’s capital city, Phoenix. Tucson was the second largest city in the state, with 32,000. Miami had been founded near the claims of major mining companies in 1909 as the real-estate play of an eastern speculator. His name was Cleve Van Dyke, and by 1929 he had made a fortune on his private town. But when the Depression came, all of the mines in the Globe-Miami Basin of Gila County closed. Then as now, there was someone to blame. Miami’s newspaper, the Arizona Silver Belt, reviled the Mexican community of Miami, often in front-page editorials. In April of 1930, the Silver Belt told its readers:
The experience of the country is that almost any form of European immigration is preferable to that from Mexico. It has been found that Mexicans are less assimilable and show a greater tendency to tear down American living and wage standards than any class of Europeans. Go to any community, such as the Globe-Miami district, where there are large European elements among the population as well as Mexicans, and ask any native citizen or business man which of these alien residents is least desirable … and the answer almost invariable [sic] will be “the Mexicans.” … Thousands of white miners in Globe-Miami district, not to mention other copper-producing sections of the state, have been displaced by these Mexicans.5
And raising the specter of Mexican political domination of Arizona, the Silver Belt appears to have pioneered the arguments against Mexican babies and Mexican birth rates that cause panic and dread in the hearts of nativists today:
It won’t be long until more babies of Mexican parentage will be born in Arizona each year than the white race. The state board of vital statistics for the year 1929 show there were 9,521 babies born in Arizona. Of that number 4,754 were white. Babies of Mexican parentage numbered 3,706, or 40% of the total…. During the last few years the percentage in favor of the Mexicans has steadily increased … How long will the Caucasian strain in Arizona retain political control after the majority of the citizenship is of Mexican blood? The answer is, not for long.6
Soon enough, the white establishment, responding to Doak’s call for local participation, began forming a mechanism to repatriate the Mexicans. In Miami it took the form of the Gila County Welfare Association. As the name implies, the association coordinated welfare efforts for unemployed miners, but its duties quickly evolved to include coordinating the dragnets that led to repatriations and deportations. The term “voluntary departure” is the Orwellian phrase adopted by the Obama Administration for using local police to apprehend undocumented persons under any pretext, jail them in massive private prisons for extended periods while they await judicial proceedings, and then offer to release them immediately if they agree to a “voluntary departure” from the country. The phrase was invented in the 1930s to support the fiction that only criminal aliens were being forcibly removed. All other Mexicans were allegedly leaving in response to the
