Mexican Immigration--Now Surging--Has Ebbed and Flowed for a Century

Mexican immigration to the United States stretches back more than a century, but the movement has ebbed and flowed according to the availability of work and demand for labor.

Late 19th century immigrants toiled in Southwestern agriculture, but they also built railroads and worked in dangerous mining operations, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Urban Institute in Washington, in a recent paper.

The trend accelerated in the 1920s as newcomers--some pushed out by the Mexican Revolution and its attendant economic tumult--were drawn to jobs in urban areas as far away as Chicago.

Public outcry about illegal immigrants, a common refrain in recent years, was a catalyst for previous mass repatriations, including the U.S. government’s notorious Operation Wetback in the 1950s, and 1930s-era sweeps that snared numerous legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens, many plucked from the streets of Los Angeles.

“In the resulting rush to open up jobs for natives (i.e., white natives), the Border Patrol deported almost anyone who looked or sounded Mexican,” Passel wrote.

The hard-line policies, he said, contributed to a significant drop in the nation’s Mexican-born population between 1930 and 1940--the last such decline before more than half a century of sustained growth.

World War II, and the vast work force needed to support it, saw the birth of the bracero program, a guest worker initiative for agriculture that lasted until the 1960s.

By 1960, though, there were still fewer than 600,000 Mexican-born people residing in the United States, a fraction of today’s numbers. As recently as 1970, the Mexican-born represented only the fourth-largest immigrant group, still trailing Italians, Germans and Canadians.

However, illicit immigration had already taken off by then, spurred in part by the many ex-braceros who had built up extensive job contacts. Mexico’s periodic economic shocks propelled people northward. By 1980, more than 2 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States, the largest immigrant population--2 1/2 times as many as the next group, Germans.

The northward flow continues today at breakneck pace despite an unprecedented enforcement buildup along the U.S.-Mexico border. Census data show that the Mexican-born population skyrocketed 50% from 1990 to 1996.

Independent researchers have found little evidence that the ongoing crackdown has stemmed the tide. In fact, some say the buildup has encouraged permanent settlement of illegal immigrants, since the casual back-and-forth patterns of the past are too difficult to repeat now.

According to estimates by Passell, fully two-thirds of net Mexican immigration since the late 1960s has been unlawful. Nonetheless, most are now here legally, having gained that status in the amnesty program of 1987-88, via relatives with legal residency or through sponsoring employers.