A Rough Draft of Some Historical Context

Historical Context

From the first immigration laws in the late 1800s, US immigration policy has revolved around limiting undesirable ethnic populations from immigrating, and encouraging desirable populations. The reality of this meant that prior to 1965 white, Christian Western Europeans were encouraged to immigrate, while Asians, Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans were either excluded entirely, or their immigration was extremely limited. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended this quota system, allowing for equal immigration opportunities regardless of national origin, and resulted in an explosion of non-European immigration. This, however, is a small part of US Immigration policy.

In the 1930s over one million mestizos (of whom 60% were US-born citizens) were repatriated to Mexico, many of whom were forcibly deported, in an attempt to deal with the labor surpluses of the Great Depression and to appease the growing anti-immigrant sentiment and prominence of the white supremacy movement. This changed during World War II when the US developed the Bracero program, an agreement between the US and Mexico wherein seasonal migration to the US would be allowed in exchange for border security, in order to meet the labor needs of American agribusinesses. However, the bureaucracy of the Bracero program, which required extensive paperwork and had requirements for fair wages and housing, was too cumbersome for many American companies. Many actively ignored the law and knowingly recruited illegal labor. 

In the post-war years this schism between Agribusiness’ desire to recruit and exploit cheap Mexican labor and the Government’s desire to strengthen and militarize its border patrol infrastructure to prevent illegal immigration has defined the immigration policy debates. The United States has been unwilling to deal with the reality that economically it requires undocumented immigration, but culturally it still struggles with racism, xenophobia, white supremacist movements. DACA is a major first step won by immigration activists to addressing the current paradox in immigration policy by acknowledging the complex factors that create undocumented immigration and allowing the children of undocumented immigrants, who are culturally American, to be treated with dignity and have a path by which they can earn citizenship.