Migrating Concepts

Abstract The Bracero Program (1942–64), a bilateral agreement to regulate labor migration between the United States and Mexico, oversaw more than four million contracts enabling Mexican men to work “temporarily” in the United States. Historians of the Mexico-US borderlands and of global migration have interpreted the program through hemispheric as well as broader imperial lenses. Yet this article shows that the program’s foundational ideas emerged from two decades of transatlantic exchange and circulation that cannot be contained within a single continent, nor a single framework such as imperialism. During the interwar period, Mexican politicians, intellectuals, and migrant labor activists eagerly participated in transatlantic and inter-American dialogues about migration policy, compared themselves to Italy, and admired the bilateral labor migration agreements that had recently emerged in Europe. Meanwhile, US officials heard but resisted pleas from migration scholars and the International Labor Organization to emulate European receiving countries. The two parties’ differing engagements with European migration policies meant that when World War II pushed US officials to suddenly propose the agreement, Mexican actors’ transatlantic knowledge inspired their participation and crucially shaped the program’s design. This article thus pushes historians of migration policy towards studies of not just comparison but also entanglement.