Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol

This is a thorough and substantive study of the United States Border Patrol, or la migra in colloquial Spanish. The agency was created in 1924, underfinanced and understaffed, within the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It took over the duties of an even less-organized group of mounted guards known as line riders, who mainly arrested Chinese migrants attempting to enter surreptitiously from Mexico. Even after its official formation, the Border Patrol continued to guard against clandestine entry of Chinese, now barred totally by the 1924 immigration law. The patrol also targeted Eastern and Southern Europeans who used Mexico as a springboard to slip into the United States because of restrictive quotas within the same law.It did not take long before Mexicans became a main object of entry enforcement. Even though the western hemisphere was exempted from quota requirements, Mexicans had to meet minimal entry requirements such as the visa fee and head tax. Nonetheless, as unemployment increased at the end of the prosperous 1920s, the main instruments that employers and the merchant class used to control Mexican labor were the brutal tactics of enforcement agencies such as the Texas Rangers and local police units. But now southwestern elites could rely on the recently created Border Patrol. By cooperating with regional elites in the management of Mexican workers, members of the agency integrated socially into respectable mainstream southwestern communities.During World War II and with the emergence of the Bracero Program, the Border Patrol became larger and more accountable to its federal base. Consequently the organization began to lose its symbiotic relationship with local leaders. Enforcement of entry requirements became more standardized, if not less racist, but employers lost expected access to undocumented laborers. Consequentially, a feud ensued between agriculturalists and the agency, which at times led to violence. To discredit the agency in the late 1940s and 1950s, southwestern agriculturists highlighted the brutality of Border Patrol practices, while patrol officials countered by exposing the extreme exploitation of Mexican migrants by employers. Even Mexican American civil rights organizations such as the American GI Forum (AGIF) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) entered the fray on the side of the Border Patrol. Mexican Americans opposed immigration because the presence of newly arrived immigrants supposedly hindered their ability to achieve social mobility and accommodation and because it competed with local labor. By the late fifties, however, Mexican American leaders lost faith in the agency because of racist tactics. It is within this context that the infamous Operation Wetback was initiated, a two-month publicity stunt that was no different than what had been going on for two or three years, according to the author.The period studied in this book ends in the late 1960s, a time characterized by a lull in undocumented immigration from Mexico. During this time the agency also expanded its enforcement base and even assigned agents to trouble spots such as those created by integration of African Americans in the South. In the 1970s undocumented entry became an issue catching the attention of activists of the Chicano Movement, and today it is a major concern among Chicana/o civil rights advocates. The book is thorough in its documentation and employment of a myriad of sources. Significantly, Lytle Hernández uses the valuable Archivo Histórico del Instituto Nacional de Migración in Mexico City.The book contains methodological techniques with which I disagree. Lytle Hernández often points to individuals who joined the Border Patrol, especially in its early period, to fulfill a desire to punish Mexicans because of prejudices sometimes harbored since childhood. Only sparse anecdotal evidence is provided for this. The tone of this assertion casts a wider net implicating both recruits and veterans for which we have no information. That steady work and government benefits could have provided a main reason for joining is treated only in passing. I suspect that is the reason why so many Latinos — half the agents, according to the author — are in the organization today. Also, Mexican Americans holding an anti-immigrant posture seem restricted to an ethereal middle class. Nonetheless, no compelling evidence is provided to show that working-class Mexican Americans, whether US-born, naturalized, or with residency, countered this stance. We do not know yet, for example, what percentage of the rank-and-file members of so-called middle-class organizations like LULAC and AGIF came from the working class. I must also point out the miscasting of two very important historical figures of the Mexican Revolution: Victoriano Huerta and Adolfo de la Huerta (p. 78).My differences with some of the methodological approaches used by Lytle Hernández do not detract from my mainly positive assessment of this very important study. It has informed me on many unknown fundamentals and theoretical constructs of the very complex history of the United States Border Patrol.