The Four Phases of US Bound Immigration PDF

chapter 1 The Four Phases of U.S-Bound Immigration In mid-May 2021, about ten thousand Moroccans swam to the Spanish African enclave of Ceuta after Morocco deliberately lifted border con- trols. All that Morocco needed to do was remove the border guards for a mass of young people from a presumably...

chapter 1 The Four Phases of U.S-Bound Immigration In mid-May 2021, about ten thousand Moroccans swam to the Spanish African enclave of Ceuta after Morocco deliberately lifted border con- trols. All that Morocco needed to do was remove the border guards for a mass of young people from a presumably mid-income country to try to swim their way into the rich world. The Spanish government promptly flew two ministers to parley with the Moroccan government and sent military reinforcements to stem the tide and repatriate thousands of migrants. For weeks, life in Ceuta would not be back to normal.1 Thousands of miles away in Tapachula, southern Mexico, a caravan of would-be asylum seekers from Central America set out to walk the length of Mexico in a desperate bid to reach the border of the United States and request asylum. Even though the U.S. government at that time (September 2021) was sending back asylum seekers or forcing them to wait indefinitely in Mexico, Central American families, single women with a baby or a small child on their back or held by the hand, and unaccompanied children still kept leaving their countries by the thousands hoping that, somehow, they would be let into America. What was already an untenable situation on the U.S. southern border came to a head a year later when, following word of a more humane approach by the new Biden administration, thousands of Haitians— including many who had already obtained asylum in other countries like Brazil and Chile—trekked to the American border to request humanitarian visas. They converged in the Texas border city of Del Rio 1 2 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration where they proceeded to pitch a huge camp under a bridge. The situa- tion “became surreal,” in the words of the Del Rio mayor; mounted Border Patrol agents sought to block Haitians from reaching the camp; and Department of Homeland Security personnel swiftly moved to take the would-be asylees to other locations from which they could be flown back to Haiti.2 Similar stories along multiple locations could be told. They would range from the tens of thousands of Syrian and Afghan refugees arriving in Germany in 2015 to the makeshift camp dubbed “the jungle” built by African migrants near Calais, France, as they sought entry into Great Britain. All these episodes feature a single-minded quest by people from what is generically termed “the Global South” to somehow gain entry into “the North.” They come to escape civil wars, terrorism from gangs, political persecution, imploding governments, generalized poverty, and lack of economic opportunity. What marks these episodes as an inflection point at present are two factors. First, new communication technologies make possible the diffu- sion of information—including the diffusion of opportunities and life- styles in the wealthier countries—to the most remote corners of the world. Everyone now has a mobile phone, enabling contact with rela- tives who already have gained entry into rich nations and information about the best opportunities to do so oneself. Second, there is the percep- tion among an increasing mass of people in impoverished countries that it is now possible to breach the barriers of the developed world due to a combination of human rights legal protections, nongovernmental com- passionate organizations, and the emergence in the target nations of coethnic communities made up of earlier migrants and their descendants. People in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Central and South America are no longer willing to put up with the interminable process of obtaining a legal visa, permanent or temporary. They now march on, moved by the conviction that it is their right, as human beings, to escape intolerable conditions in their countries of origin and gain access, at least, to some of the benefits enjoyed by a minority of the world’s population. This is the sentiment impelling young Africans to risk their lives aboard fragile rafts in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean; Hon- duran and Guatemalan families to trek their way across hundreds of kil- ometers in a foreign country; and, of late, tens of thousands of Haitians huddling under a border bridge in the hope of working their way in. The current situation also marks a fourth moment in the history of U.S.-bound migration since the beginning of the twentieth century.  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 3 Unlike earlier waves of migration that were, in one way or another, regulated by labor demand in the receiving country’s economy, the cur- rent flow of asylum seekers is not “functional” in the sense of fulfilling a niche in the American labor market. Their only claim to entry is their humanity and the terrible conditions that they have left behind. With a few notable exceptions, boat people and caravan marchers are met with great hostility by the native population of the receiving countries, as their governments scramble to prevent these flows or to send back those who have managed to make it in. Solutions so far range from attempts to buy off the cooperation of sending country governments so as to prevent out-migration in the first place to massive deportation cam- paigns and attempts to build fences and even “a Great Wall” separating the poor countries of the Global South from the North. Unraveling these and other riddles of the complex relationship between migration and the successive stages in the development of the American economy and society is the goal of this book. We begin the story with the great waves of migration that accompanied the American Industrial Revolution. As noted in the preface to this 5th edition, it is not the case that immigration to the United States started in the 1880s or 1890s. On the contrary, migration from other countries, primarily England, Germany, and Ireland, accompanied the birth of the American Republic and was a permanent feature of its history during the nine- teenth century. Historians have written reams of pages on immigration during this period, including its crucial role in the American Civil War. We chose to begin our story a few decades later because this was the period in which the United States transitioned from being just another country to becoming the center of the global system. The transition owed a great deal to the immigrant waves crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific at that time. the great european wave, 1880–1930 Political Economy As shown in table 1, over 23 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the United States during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth. Certainly, not all of them stayed; many eventually returned home or even engaged in a back-and-forth movement depending on the ups and downs of labor demand on both sides of the ocean. As many as half of certain peasant-origin groups, such as the southern Italian contadini, went back at some point, while table 1 decennial immigration to the united states, 1880–1919 TOTAL 1880–1889 Percentage 1890–1899 Percentage 1900–1909 Percentage 1910–1919 Percentage Northwestern Europe United Kingdom(a) 810,900 15.5 328,759 8.9 469,578 5.7 371,878 5.8 Ireland 674,061 12.8 405,710 11 344,940 4.2 166,445 2.6 Scandinavia(b) 671,783 12.7 390,729 10.5 488,208 5.9 238,275 3.8 France 48,193 0.9 35,616 1.0 67,735 0.4 60,335 1.0 German Empire 1,445,181 27.5 579,072 15.7 328,722 4.0 174,227 2.7 Other(c) 152,604 2.9 86,011 2.3 112,433 1.4 101,478 1.6 Central Europe Poland 42,910 0.8 107,793 2.9 Not returned separately Not returned separately Austria-Hungary 314,787 6.0 534,059 14.5 2,001,376 24.4 1,154,727 18.2 (f) Other(d) — — 52 34,651 0.4 27,180 0.4 Eastern Europe Russia(e) 182,698 3.5 450,101 12.7 1,501,301 18.3 1,106,998 17.4 Romania 5,842 0.1 6,808 0.2 57,322 0.7 13,566 0.2 (f) Turkey in Europe 1,380 3,547 0.1 61,856 0.8 71,179 1.1 Southern Europe (f) Greece 1,807 12,732 0.3 145,402 1.8 198,108 3.1 Italy 267,660 5.1 603,761 16.3 1,930,475 23.5 1,229,916 19.4 Spain 3,995 0.1 9,189 0.2 24,818 0.3 53,262 0.8 Portugal 15,186 0.3 25,874 0.7 65,154 0.8 82,489 1.3 Asia (f) Turkey in Asia 1,098 23,963 0.6 66,143 0.8 89,568 1.4 Other 68,673 1.3 33,775 0.9 171,837 2.1 109,019 1.7 America British North  America(h) 492,865 9.4 3,098(g) 0.1 123,650 1.5 708,715 11.2 (f) (f) Mexico 2,405 734(g) 31,188 0.4 185,334 2.9 West Indies(i) 27,323 0.5 31,480 0.9 100,960 1.2 120,860 1.9 (f) Central & South 2,233 2,038 0.1 22,011 0.3 55,630 0.9 America Other Countries Australia(j) 7,271 0.1 11,191 0.1 11,280 0.2 Other 6,643 0.1 40,943 0.5 10,414 0.2 100.0k 100.0 100.0 100.0 source: Carpenter, “Immigrants and Their Children,” 324–25; cited in Kraut, The Huddled Masses, 21. a England, Scotland, Wales b Norway, Sweden, Denmark c Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland d Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro e Includes Finland and boundaries prior to 1919 f Less than one-tenth of one present g Immigrants from British North America and Mexico not reported from 1886 to 1893 h Including Canada i Including Jamaica j Including Tasmania and New Zealand k Totals are rounded to nearest percent as in census report. 6 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration over 90 percent of Eastern European Jews left their places of origin never to return.3 Be that as it may, the sediment that these human waves left over time was substantial enough to cause significant changes in the demography of the receiving nation. By 1910, the foreign born accounted for 14.7 percent of the American population and for 22 per- cent of those living in urban places. As Simon Kuznets and Brinley Thomas showed in detail, the great waves of European immigration were, by and large, the product of the transatlantic political economy. If conceived as a single unit, this econ- omy generated enormous synergy between its complementary parts. Beginning in England at the start of the nineteenth century, the advance of European industrialization continuously uprooted peasant masses whose economic livelihood was rendered precarious by advances in capital-intensive agriculture and whose only alternative was migration, either to industrializing cities or abroad. As Kuznets states: The shift from Great Britain and Ireland to Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and then to Italy and Eastern Europe, follows the trail of the industrial revolution in Europe. It at least suggests that immigration to the United States provided a welcome alternative to population groups displaced by revolutionary changes in agriculture and industry; and thus facilitated, in no small measure, the course of industrialization in the European countries. This migration may thus be viewed as an adjustment of population to resources, that in its magnitude and the extent to which it adapted itself to purely economic needs has few parallels in history.4 On the other side of the Atlantic, the European waves were not well received by everyone but were welcomed by a politically decisive class, namely, capitalists bent on breaking the hold of independent craftsmen and skilled workers so as to meet the demand of a vast market for cheap manufactures. This was no easy feat. Gerald Rosenblum notes that Toc- quevillian democracy in America was grounded on independent small producers whose determination to avoid lifelong wage slavery led to a proliferation of enterprises whose craftsmen-owners freely and person- ally interacted with their journeymen. These, in turn, planned to estab- lish their own enterprises in due time.5 This tradition went hand in hand with the settlement of a vast frontier by independent farmers whose demand for agricultural implements and manufactured goods created a comfortable synergy with the products of small-scale industrial shops. The challenge for the rising class of capitalist manufacturers was how to break this synergy so that markets  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 7 could be expanded at home and abroad. As Brinley Thomas demon- strated, immigration prior to the 1870s preceded indicators of economic development such as railway construction and demand for bituminous coal. That was the pioneering phase when a comparatively small nation was engaged in subduing a continent and the rate of expansion was conditioned by the arrival of new labor.... Moreover, the railways could not have been built without the gangs of laborers, many of them Irish, recruited in the East and transported to the construction camps.6 After 1870, however, the causal correlation reversed itself and indi- cators of economic development started to precede mass migration. This is the moment when the “pull” of American wages, advertised by paid recruiters sent to Europe, began to make its mark among Italian and Eastern European peasants whose economic existence was rendered increasingly precarious by industrialization in their own countries. As table 1 also shows, Southern and Central Europeans progressively dis- placed migrants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia as major sources of U.S-bound migration. Their massive arrival led to a radical transformation in the composition of the American working class, from independent and quasi-independent craftsmen and journey- men to unskilled workers. Naturally, the native working class vigorously and often violently resisted the changes engineered by industrial capitalists. Better than any other movement, the Knights of Labor exemplified this resistance. The phenomenal rise in the membership of this order and the bitter struggles that ensued coincided with a rise in factory production that became generalized by the 1880s. The Knights grew in membership from about 104,000 in July 1885 to over 702,000 one year later. As John R. Com- mons writes: The idea of solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal, and took on flesh and life; general strikes, nation-wide boycotts, and nation-wide political movements were the order of the day. Although the upheaval came with the depression, it was the product of permanent and far-reaching changes which had taken place during the seventies and the early eighties.7 The Knights were, in the end, unsuccessful. The master-journeyman relation was gone forever and, with it, the social basis for democratic equality and self-reliant individualism that were founding elements of the American Republic. European migration did not change the 8 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration fundamental pillars of American society—its elites, its class structure, or its constitutional order; what it accomplished was to alter the demo- graphic composition of the population and, along with it, the character of the American working class. Henceforth, workers became dependent on trade unions rather than independent ownership as their sole basis for “voice” in their nation’s political process.8 European migration accelerated to such an extent that it made the causal order between capitalist development and population displace- ment uncertain. While originally promoted by capitalist firms through deliberate recruitment to staff the incipient factory system, the move- ment produced such an abundance of cheap unskilled labor as to trigger new waves of technological innovation to take advantage of it, in the process forever burying the independent artisan class. Thomas con- cluded: The massive inflow into the United States of cheap labour from Southern and Eastern Europe coincided with technical innovations calling for a “wid- ening” of the capital structure. The changing technique in the expanding industries entailed minute subdivision of operations and a wide adoption of automatic machines worked by unskilled, often illiterate men, women, and children. After 1900, the new supply of manpower was so abundant that firms using the new techniques must have driven out of the market many old firms committed to processes depending on human skill.9 As shown in table 2, male immigrants around 1910 were overwhelm- ingly concentrated in the bottom rungs of the occupational ladder. While illiterate or poorly educated first-generation migrants were pretty much stuck at the bottom of that ladder, prospects for the better edu- cated and, especially, for the children born in America were much brighter. As it kept growing, the new industrial economy generated mul- tiple economic opportunities accessible to those with a modicum of education. A universal public education system opened the doors for such positions to second-generation youths. Naturally, it was the chil- dren of earlier immigrant waves—primarily the British, German, Scan- dinavian, and Irish—who benefited most from such circumstances. They needed a continuous supply of unskilled Italians, Poles, and other Eastern European workers to keep fueling a mass industrial economy that was propelling them to positions of ever greater wealth and pros- perity.10 This is a fundamental reason that nativist reactions against the Southern and Eastern European waves and the consequent identity politics were kept in abeyance until the third decade of the twentieth century.  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 9 table 2 percentage of foreign born among white male gainful workers, 10 years of age or over, 1910 Occupation Percentage Total 24.7 Professional, technical, and kindred workers 15.6 Farmers and farm managers 12.8 Managers, officials, and proprietors, except farm 26.4 Clerical and kindred workers 10.9 Sales workers 18.0 Craftsmen, foremen, and kindred workers 29.6 Operatives and kindred workers 38.0 Service workers, including private household 36.8 Farm laborers and foremen 8.4 Laborers, except farm and mine 45.0 source: Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children: 1850–1950, table 38, p. 202; cited in Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, 77. Identity Politics Despite the extraordinary synergies in the transatlantic political econ- omy between Europe and North America, the mass of peasant immigra- tion from Catholic countries of the European periphery could not but awaken sentiments of rejection and hostility among the native born. Such sentiments and the resulting anti-immigrant mobilizations cumu- lated over time as the mass of foreigners extended throughout the national territory and as the economic “mobility machine” fueled by their labor slowed down in the wake of World War I. Throughout this book, we will encounter multiple instances of anti-immigrant discrimi- nation. The main point here is that the interplay between the economic basis of immigration and the cultural reaction to it was definitely evi- dent in this earlier period. Anti-immigrant sentiment was fueled by a conjunction of groups that saw the relentless flow of foreigners as a direct threat. First, skilled native workers and their organizations were pushed aside by the onslaught of unskilled migrant labor. While the Knights of Labor put forward an ide- ology of universal brotherhood among all workers and radical transfor- mation of the capitalist factory system, realities on the ground continu- ously undermined that ideology and put the confrontation between skilled natives and illiterate foreign peasants into stark evidence.11 Sec- ond, there was a general malaise among the native population at being 10 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration surrounded by a sea of foreign faces, accents, and religious practices and finding itself increasingly as “outsiders in their own land.” Nativist reac- tions took multiple forms, from violent attacks and lynching of foreign- ers to organized campaigns to Americanize them as quickly as possible. In March 1911, the White League, a New Orleans organization akin to the Ku Klux Klan, lynched eleven Italian immigrants accused of con- spiring to murder the city’s police chief. Six were about to be released after being found not guilty. Their dark Mediterranean features undoubt- edly contributed to their instant indictment by the mob. Commenting on the incident, the Harvard intellectual Henry Cabot Lodge characterized it not as a mere riot but as a form of revenge “which is a kind of wild justice.” He characterized the earlier acquittals as “gross miscarriages of justice” since the Italians were undoubtedly active in the Mafia.12 Cabot Lodge’s stance reflected the third set of forces in favor of nativ- ist radicalism: the concern among American intellectuals that so many foreigners would dilute the moral fiber of the nation and the integrity of its institutions. In an academic environment dominated by the Social Darwinist evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and the “science” of eugenics, the intellectual and moral inferiority of Southern and Eastern Europeans was taken for granted and their capacity for eventual assimi- lation into American culture widely questioned. The statistician Richard Mayo Smith warned that “the thing we have to fear most is the political danger of the infusion of so much alien blood into our social body that we shall lose the capacity and power of self-government.”13 Similarly, in his 1926 volume, Intelligence and Immigration, the psychologist Clif- ford Kirkpatrick argued against expecting much progress among immi- grants through the reform of school programs because “definite limits are set by heredity, and immigrants of low innate ability cannot by any amount of Americanization be made into intelligent American citizens capable of appropriating and advancing a complex culture.”14 Under the intellectual zeitgeist of the time and the leadership of such public thinkers, the restrictionist movement gathered momentum. The movement was reinforced by three major forces in the economic infra- structure. First, as noted by Thomas, the progressive closure of the fron- tier and the slowing down of the industrialization process began to limit the “economic engine” propelling native workers and members of the second generation on the backs of foreign labor. The mass of newcomers progressively ceased to be the backbone of a segmented labor market to become a source of direct competition for natives.15 Second, the minor- ity of educated immigrants with union and party experience in Europe  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 11 and the Americanized second generation mobilized against capitalist exploitation, becoming, in many regions, the backbone of the union movement. The enthusiasm of industrialists for foreign labor cooled sig- nificantly when confronted with such unexpected resistance. Immigrants with industrial background were those who contributed primarily to the first radical cohorts in America: “The spirit of a disciplined, intelligent, and aggressive socialist army was typified by the organized working- class movement of Germany. The leaders of this mighty force were deeply respected at home and abroad. It was men trained in such a movement who tried to build up a duplicate in the United States.”16 Events back home also contributed to the radicalization of certain immigrant nationalities, such as Russian Jews and Slavic immigrants. As Fine noted, “Almost two-thirds of the members of the Workers’ (Communist) Party were born in countries which were either part of the old Russian empire or inhabited by Slavs.”17 The horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York stimulated labor militance in the needle trades. As a result, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, each of which had a largely Jewish, Italian, and Polish membership, developed into two of the strongest labor unions in the United States.18 Thus, the fundamental function of immigrant labor to American industrialists, which included not only supplementing a scarce domestic labor force, but disciplining it through strikebreaking and the acceptance of poor working condi- tions, gradually weakened. The stage was set for the search by capitalist firms of a new source of pliable labor to replace increasingly organized and militant immigrants and their descendants. The identification of this alternative labor source represented the third economic force buttressing the restrictionist movement that finally tri- umphed in the mid-1920s. As will be seen in the next chapter, the activa- tion of the massive Black labor reserves in the American South provided the impulse for the emergence of a split labor market in industry, marked by major differences in pay and work conditions between white and Black workers. Descendants of former slaves, previously confined to a semisubsistence agricultural life in the South, were actively recruited by the likes of the Ford Motor Company as early as 1916. The recruitment process was similar to that previously used among southern Italian and Eastern European peasants, and the purpose was the same: to supply large manufacturing industry in the American Northeast and Midwest with an abundant, cheap, and unorganized labor source. Because this source was also unskilled, the policy of encouraging southern Black 12 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration migration was accompanied by the acceleration of capital-intensive tech- niques in manufacturing. With this strategy, capitalist firms attempted, and largely succeeded, in breaking the power of trade unions. From 1920 to 1929, union membership dropped by almost 2 million. In 1933, it stood at less than 3 million, a precipitous decline from the peak years before World War I.19 The final victory of radical nativism with the enactment of restrictive legislation by the U.S. Congress in 1924 was, to a large extent, the out- come of the withdrawal of support for immigration by forces in the American economy that had previously supported it. First, natives and members of the second generation shifted attitudes, regarding further immigration as an obstacle and not as a propeller of their own upward mobility. Second, the pivotal capitalist class lost enthusiasm for the for- eign labor supply as it became progressively organized. This withdrawal of supports accelerated when firms found in southern Black peasants a new major source to replace and, if necessary, discipline an increasingly restless white labor force. Political Economy and Identity in the West The size of European immigration after 1890 and the attention bestowed on it by politicians, academics, and the public at large commonly blocked from view what was happening at the other end of the land. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico ceded to its northern neighbor almost half of its territory after its defeat in the Mexican-American War. The physical size of the new acquisition was enormous, comprising the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Ari- zona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The need to integrate these territories into the economy of the nation and the opportunities it created generated a strong demand for new labor, to be sourced from west and south. Gold came first. The California Gold Rush of 1848–55 saw adven- turers of every stripe attempt the difficult journey west, going as far as the Magellan Strait at the tip of South America to reach the new prom- ised land. The need for labor in the mines led to the first cross-Pacific recruitment system, with paid contractors sent to southern China, in particular, the greater Pearl River delta region around present-day Jiangmen, in search of contract workers. The system was largely respon- sible for the first appearance of Chinese migrants in American shores.20 The great difficulties of reaching the Pacific Coast and the need to inte-  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 13 grate the vast new territories gave the necessary impetus for transconti- nental railroad construction in the subsequent decades. Two great rail- road companies—the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific—stood in need of massive supplies of labor that could not be sourced east, espe- cially after the tracks left Iowa and Nebraska to start climbing the Rocky Mountains. Labor for this enormous enterprise came primarily from southern China through a massive expansion of the recruitment system. The two railroad companies, racing from Sacramento, Califor- nia, to the east and from Omaha, Nebraska, to the west finally met in Promontory, Utah, in 1869.21 Chinese workers whose hands had built mile after mile of track sud- denly became redundant. A few returned home, but most stayed as they had not accumulated enough money to pay the costs of the return pas- sage and buy land. They first turned to California agriculture, but their appearance in the fields triggered a furious reaction among natives who regarded the Chinese as semihuman. Chinese immigration was described as “a more abominable traffic than the African slave trade,” and the immigrants themselves were portrayed as “half civilized beings who spread filth, depravity, and epidemic.”22 The weak Qing imperial dynasty could do little for its nationals abroad, and the rising xenophobia in California and elsewhere culmi- nated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that effectively ended this labor flow. Chinese laborers were pushed out of California farms and ranches and forced to find refuge in tightly knit urban communities that formed the precursors of today’s Chinatowns. Hand laundries and cheap restaurants became the means of survival for this confined “bach- elors society” where the ratio of men to women reached a remarkable 26 to 1 in the 1930s.23 With Chinese laborers out of the land and California agriculture in full bloom, a new source of field labor had to be found. For some time after the mid-eighties, the Hawaii sugar industry had sourced its demand for cane cutters in Japan. The flow now reached the mainland, where the renowned discipline and frugality of Japanese workers made them welcome by California ranchers and farmers, at least for a while. Trou- ble started to brew when landowners realized that the Japanese coupled these virtues with a strong desire to buy land and farm on their own. In 1900, forty Japanese farmers owned less than 5,000 acres of Califor- nia’s land. By 1909, however, about six thousand Japanese were farm- ing under all sorts of tenancy, controlling more than 210,000 acres.24 As Ivan Light explains:  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 15 table 3 mexican immigration to the united states, 1881–1950 As Percent Number of Total Decade (000s) Immigration 1881–90 2.04 1891–1900 1.02 1901–10 50.6 1911–20 219 3.8 1921–30 459 11.2 1931–40 22 4.2 1941–50 61 5.9 source: Portes and Bach, Latin Journey, 79. Table compiled from annual reports of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. labor conflicted, however, with the increasing exclusionary mood back East. The history of immigrant regulation from the end of World War I to the Great Depression is a case study of governmental efforts to rec- oncile seemingly incompatible demands through legislative compromise and administrative regulation. Direct attempts by Western ranchers and growers to beat back restrictionism at the federal level were defeated. However, in 1918, an exception to the ban on illiterates was granted by Congress in favor of immigrants from Mexico and Canada. The 1924 National Origins Act again exempted Mexico and other Western Hem- isphere countries from the quota imposed on the Europeans. In 1929, a Supreme Court decision upheld an earlier administrative decree declar- ing workers who commuted between residences in Mexico and jobs in the United States legal immigrants.28 In effect, through various loopholes and administrative devices, the federal government endeavored to keep the “back door” of immigration open to Western capital while closing the “front door” to new Southern and Eastern European migrants. For reasons seen previously, Europeans had ceased to be a preferred source of unskilled industrial labor, but while their replacements could be sourced from domestic labor reserves, the same was not the case in the West. There, foreign workers, this time from south of the border, continued to be in high demand for many years as the human instruments to fuel an expanding economy. Mexican migration possessed another convenient feature, namely, its cyclical character. Because the border and their home communities were 16 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration relatively close, Mexican migrants found reverse migration a much eas- ier enterprise than Europeans or Asians. Indeed, the normative behavior among Mexican male workers was to go home after the harvest or after their contract with railroad companies had expired. This feature, added to the predominantly nonurban destinations of the Mexican labor flow, reduced its visibility, making it less of a target for nativist movements of the time than the Italian and Poles. That honeymoon period was short- lived, however, as will be seen shortly. While the history of U.S- bound immigration before the 1930s had few parallels between the East and the West, a decisive feature was com- mon to both. This was the conflicting interplay between political econ- omy and identity politics. Growing industrial and agricultural econo- mies consistently demanded and received immigrant labor flows, while the presence of many foreigners inevitably triggered a nativist backlash. That reaction was prompted by the perception of immigrants as labor market competitors and as sources of social and cultural fragmentation and by the behavior of some foreign groups that sought to assert their labor rights and their rights to self-employment in America. When that happened, the protective hand of the employer class quickly withdrew, leaving the newcomers to their own fate. Early Twentieth-Century Migration and Social Change The literature on international migration generally makes a great deal of the changes that such flows wreak in the host societies, often pro- claiming that they “transform the mainstream.”29 These assertions often confuse impressions at the surface of social life with actual changes in the core culture and social structure of the receiving society. While major immigration movements, such as the great transatlantic and transpacific waves before and at the start of the twentieth century, had a great impact on the demographic composition of the population, it is an open question whether such changes also led to transformations in more fundamental elements of the host societies. In the case of the United States, it is clear that, despite much hand- wringing by nativists of the time, the value system, the constitutional order, and the power structure of American society remained largely intact. Native white elites kept firm control on the levers of economic and political power and existing institutions, such as the court system and the schools, and proved resilient enough to withstand the foreign onslaught and gradually integrate newcomers into the citizenry. It is a  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 17 commonplace to affirm that assimilation is a two-way street, with both the host society and foreign groups influencing each other. In the Amer- ican case, however, the process was definitely one-sided, as existing institutions of the receiving society held the upper hand. Eventually, children and grandchildren of immigrants began scaling the ladder of the American economy and class system, but, in order to do so, they had first to become thoroughly acculturated, learning fluent English and accepting the existing value system and normative order. It is important to distinguish between the structural significance and the change potential of migrant flows. There is no question that the great early twentieth-century migrations had enormous structural importance for the American economy. They were the sine qua non for the Industrial Revolution of the time, and this was, from the point of view of white American elites, almost their sole raison d’être. That effect did not so much alter American society as reinforce its existing struc- tures of wealth and power. The actual social transformations wrought in the fabric of American society by these flows came largely as conse- quences of the basic economic forces that engineered them. First, as seen previously, the masses of largely unschooled and unskilled labor arriving on American shores did change the character of the class structure in favor of the rising capitalist elites. It did so by weakening the power of skilled workers and their organizations as well as doing away with the class of small independent producers. The American Industrial Revolution consisted basically in replacing arti- sanal production by autonomous workers with mass production by machinery, operated largely by unskilled labor. The demise of the Knights of Labor, described previously, was but one episode in the end of the social basis of Tocquevillian democracy and its replacement by a capitalist-controlled social and political order. Second, as shown in table 4, places of destination of Europeans were overwhelmingly urban. Foreigners lived in cities at far higher rates than natives, triggering a veritable urban explosion. The overall effect was to shift the political center of gravity of the nation from the countryside to the cities, especially those in the Northeast and Midwest.30 Thanks to the great European waves, the United States became an overwhelmingly urban nation. Aside from its social and cultural ramifications, this transformation had an important political consequence. Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned on the basis of number of persons in each district and state rather than the number of citizens. As Tienda puts it: 18 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration table 4 proportion urban: white, native white, and foreign-born white Native Foreign-Born Year White (%) White (%) White (%) 1940 57.5 55.1 80.0 1930 57.6 54.5 79.2 1920 53.4 49.6 75.5 1910 48.2 43.6 71.4 1900 42.4 38.1 66.0 1890 37.5 32.9 60.7 1870 28.0 23.1 53.4 source: Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers, table 6.2. The 14th Amendment of the U.S Constitution states that: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole numbers of persons in each state.”... That all persons residing in the United States are counted, but only citizens are per- mitted to vote in national elections presumes that the right to representation is more fundamental than the right to exercise the franchise.31 The six major immigrant-receiving states gained sixteen seats in the House between 1900 and 1910, signaling a significant shift in political influence that directly threatened mostly rural states. Not surprisingly, representatives of those states strongly supported a restrictionist stance, adding their voices to the chorus of those endorsing the conclusions of the 1911 Dillingham Commission Report to Congress to the effect that “immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are intellectually infe- rior and unworthy of naturalization.” Nevertheless, the shift in political power toward cities in the Northeast and Midwest became a fait accom- pli by the 1920s. Such a shift corresponded well with the consolidation of the power of capitalist elites located, for the most part, in these cities.32 The final major effect of immigration was the transformation of the cultural landscape through the massive arrival of believers in other creeds. Over time, European immigrants and their descendants were willing to give up their languages and many elements of their culture but not their religions. As a consequence, an overwhelmingly Protestant nation was forced to accommodate the institutionalization of the Cath- olic faith, brought by Irish immigrants and consolidated with the arrival of millions of Italians and Poles, and, subsequently, the proliferation of synagogues in the wake of massive Eastern European Jewish immigra- tion. Thus, it came to be that a predominant Protestant culture became 14 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration So long as the Japanese remained willing to perform agricultural labor at low wages, they remained popular with California ranchers. But even before 1910, the Japanese farmhands began to demand higher wages.... [W]orse, many Japanese began to lease and buy agricultural land for farming on their own account. This enterprise had the two-fold result of creating Japanese competition in the produce field and decreasing the number of Japanese farmlands available.25 Faced with such “unfair” competition, ranchers turned to the ever sympathetic state legislature. In 1913, the first Alien Land Law was passed restricting the free acquisition of land by the Japanese. This legal instrument was perfected in 1920 when Japanese nationals were forbid- den to lease agricultural land or to act as guardians of native-born minors in matters of property. Driven from the land, the Japanese had no choice but to move into cities, just as the Chinese had done before. They did not huddle, however, in the same restricted areas but fanned out in diverse forms of self-employment. By 1919, almost half of the hotels in Seattle and 25 percent of the grocery stores were owned by Japanese migrants. Forty percent of Japanese men in Los Angeles were self-employed, oper- ating dry-cleaning establishments, fisheries, and lunch counters. A large percentage of Japanese urban businesses were produce stands that mar- keted the production of the remaining Japanese farms.26 The anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobic measures pushed by nativists in the West thus ended up depriving its farms and other busi- nesses of any source of Asian labor while turning those migrants who stayed into urban entrepreneurs. Farms, ranches, and cities kept grow- ing, however, and the question was what new labor flow could be engi- neered to replace the departed Chinese and Japanese. Western business- men borrowed a page from their Eastern counterparts by turning south. While Northeastern industrialists tapped the large Black labor reserves in the former Confederacy, California and Texas ranchers went to Mex- ico. In both cases, the method was the same: deliberate recruitment through economic incentives. By 1916, the Los Angeles Times reported that five or six weekly trains full of Mexican workers hired by the agents were being run from Laredo. According to Mario García, the competi- tion in El Paso became so aggressive that recruiting agencies stationed their Mexican employees at the Santa Fe Bridge where they literally pounced on the immigrants as they crossed the border.27 As seen in table 3, Mexican immigration surged after 1910 as a con- sequence of these developments—a flow that was intensified by the tur- moil of the decade-long Mexican Revolution. Free access to Mexican  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 19 first “Christian” and then “Judeo-Christian,” signaling the institution- alization of these immigrant faiths. In chapter 8, we will examine the manifold effects of religion on the social and economic adaptation of newcomers. At present, the impor- tant point is that this transformation both demonstrated and reinforced the strength of the country’s institutional framework while leading to significant changes in its culture. In effect, the arrival of millions of Irish and Italian Catholics first and Eastern European Jews later pitted the strong desire of the Protestant majority to keep the nation culturally and religiously homogeneous against the separation of church and state and the right to religious freedom enshrined in the American Constitution. The legal framework prevailed, and the result was a vast transformation in the American cultural landscape as the influence of Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues went well beyond their weekly services. For Jews, in particular, accustomed to systematic persecution in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, the American constitutional order was a priceless gift: “For the orthodox, the good life consisted of being able to live and worship in a manner consistent with Mosaic Law and religious tradi- tions. Not all east-European Jews were equally religious, but most were imbued with the Jewish cultural respect for intellectual pursuits.”33 It is a matter of debate whether the consolidation of other faiths altered, in a fundamental way, the American value system. While Prot- estant hegemony certainly suffered, it can be argued that, at a deeper level, the system was strengthened. The victory of the legal framework over provincial fears of cultural disintegration reinforced the basic insti- tutional pillars of the nation. In reciprocity, Catholics and Jews responded by “Americanizing” their religious practices, making them increasingly compatible with core American values. On balance, the Industrial Revolution and the masses of foreign labor that fueled it did change important elements of the host society, but the value system, constitutional order, and power structure inherited from the country’s history remained largely in place. retrenchment, 1930–1970 The historical replacement of Europeans by southern Black migrants in the East and of Asians by Mexicans in the West continued during the 1920s, although some Italians, Poles, and others kept coming since the 1924 National Origins Act took time to be implemented. The delays were due to endless wrangling in Congress about the census year on 20 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration which to base the quota of 2 to 3 percent of the resident immigrant nationality already in the country, to be admitted yearly. Pushing back the census year to 1890 or even 1880 facilitated future admissions from Northern Europe and concomitantly limited those from the South. In the end, the annual quota of immigrants who could be admitted from any country was set at 2 percent and the selected census year was 1920, which would have allowed a greater number of Italians and other Southeastern Europeans to come had it not been for the intervention of a major economic downturn.34 In 1929, the American gross national product had come close to $90 billion; by 1932, it was cut to $42 billion and by the following year, to a miserable $39 billion. Residential construction fell by 95 percent, eighty-five thousand businesses failed, and the national volume of sala- ries dwindled by 40 percent. The nation lay prostrate.35 Worse, the gov- ernment had no clue as what to do at a time when “Hoovervilles” of impoverished families rapidly dotted the land. The Great Depression proved to be the greatest immigrant control measure of all time since, no matter what the quota was, foreigners had no incentive to come and join the masses of unemployed Americans. As shown in table 5, while immigrant arrivals, ages sixteen to forty-four, surpassed one million and reached 4 percent of the adult labor force in 1907, by 1932, only twenty-two thousand newcomers arrived, not even reaching 0.1 percent of the domestic labor force. One of the most telling features of this period was the attempt by the federal government to reduce unemployment by deporting foreign workers. Most European immigrants were legally in the country and could not be sent back. The repatriation and deportation campaign thus focused on Mexicans, of whom close to half million were deported. As Leo Grebler put it, “Only a few years earlier, many of those now ejected had been actively recruited by American enterprises.”36 In Texas, the Mexican-born population dropped nearly 40 percent between 1930 and 1940. A distinct feature of this campaign was that many U.S -born Mexican Americans were sent back along with the immigrants.37 Being brown-skinned and mestizo-looking was sufficient reason for federal officials to put you aboard a bus bound for Mexico. Needless to say, this campaign made no dent in the country’s eco- nomic situation, which continued to worsen. It was only after massive deficit spending and a deliberate program of job creation by the Roo- sevelt administration that things started to take a turn for the better. World War II represented a quantum leap in this policy as federal spend-  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 21 table 5 immigration and the american labor force, 1900–1935 Immigrant Arrivals Immigrants as Percent Year Age 16–44 (000s) of the Labor Force 1900 370 1.3 1901 396 1.4 1902 539 1.9 1903 714 2.6 1904 657 2.4 1905 855 3.1 1906 914 3.3 1907 1,101 4.0 1908 631 2.3 1909 625 2.3 1910 868 2.6 1911 715 2.1 1912 678 2.0 1913 986 2.9 1914 982 2.9 1928 231 0.6 1929 208 0.5 1930 177 0.4 1931 67 0.1 1932 22 0.0 1933 15 0.0 1934 19 0.0 1935 22 0.0 source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, 55–73. ing reached a then-monumental $103 billion per year, while unemploy- ment dropped down to near zero.38 By the early 1940s, American agri- culture found itself again short of hands, a situation that led the U.S. government to reverse itself and tap the ever available Mexican labor reserve. In 1942, an agreement was signed by both governments leading to the initiation of the Bracero Program under which tens of thousands of Mexican contract workers went to work for American farms and ranches, reproducing the pre-Depression labor scene. From the view- point of their employees, braceros proved so pliable and productive that they insisted on the continuation of the program after the war’s end. As seen in table 6, from a modest start in the post–World War II years, the program reached close to half a million workers over the next decade. 22 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration table 6 the bracero program and clandestine migrant apprehensions, 1946–1972 Apprehensions Year Braceros (000s) (Deported Aliens) (000s) 1946 32 1947 20 1948 35 1949 107 1950 68 1951 192 1952 234 1953 179 1954 214 1955 338 1956 417 1957 450 1958 419 1959 448 1960 427 71 1961 294 89 1962 283 93 1963 195 89 1964 182 87 1965 104 110 1966 9 139 1967 8 162 1968 6 212 1969 — 284 1970 — 345 1971 — 420 1972 — 506 source: Grebler, Moore, and Guzman, The Mexican-American People, 68; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Annual Reports. By the time it ended in 1964, some twenty-eight states had received several million braceros—one of the largest state-managed labor migra- tions in history. Tellingly, during the twenty-two years of the Bracero Program, no farm labor union ever succeeded in organizing or carrying out a strike.39 The period of immigration retrenchment, marked by the Great Depression and World War II, had a series of important and unantici- pated consequences. The suffering of the 1930s was shared by the chil-  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 23 dren of natives and immigrants alike, forging new social and cultural bonds out of common adversity. These bonds were much strengthened when youths of all ethnic origins found themselves in the trenches. Fighting platoons had no time for discrimination, so that men whose parents had been at each other’s throats because of racial or ethnic dif- ferences came into close and prolonged contact. As an outgrowth of the war, prejudice and hostility against the children of Europeans largely became a thing of the past. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, completed the process by giving these newly empowered Americans a leg up to the middle class.40 The effects on individual mobility facilitated by the GI Bill were most notably experi- enced by white veterans, although not by Blacks in the South. As so often happens in retrospective narratives, necessities were built out of historical contingencies, with later authors speaking of an “inev- itable” process of assimilation under which natives and immigrants melted into a single body. Others would portray a “designer” nation forged by the far-seeing policies of its leaders. In fact, nothing of the sort happened. The process by which the great European and, to a lesser extent, Asian migrations of the turn of the twentieth century became part of the American mainstream was due to a series of unforeseen and, with the wisdom of retrospect, rather fortunate accidents. World War II represented not only a massive Keynesian stimulus program for the American economy but also a giant melting machine out of which the pluribus finally turned into the unum. There were important exceptions to this pattern. While Mexican Americans had enlisted by the thousands and fought and died in the war, they were not beneficiaries of the melting machine, at least not to the extent of other ethnic minorities. Upon return from the front, they still found themselves confined to the barrios and being continuing objects of white discrimination and prejudice. Their collective position in the American hierarchies of status and wealth barely budged, despite their enormous sacrifice. Part of the reason for this outcome was the minority’s role as the backbone of the unskilled labor market in western states. This position in the social order, shared with southern Blacks back east, was too entrenched to be changed even by a global war.41 A second, and decisive, reason was that the Bracero Program ensured the continuity of the migration from south of the border, thus renewing and strengthening the bonds of the Mexican American population with its country of origin. This did not happen to the children of Europeans and Asians for whom the cutoff of migration in the 1920s inexorably 24 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration weakened cultural and linguistic ties, forcing them to become American in one form or another. From the “longtime Californ,” as Chinese Americans branded themselves, to the newly minted Italian American and Jewish American ward politicians in the East, the process of adapt- ing to and pushing ahead within the American institutional system was well advanced by the late 1930s. The war gave it the final impetus. Blacks and Mexicans were left behind as “unmeltable,” the latter fur- ther handicapped by their inability to shed their foreignness in the face of a ceaseless migrant flow.42 rebound: 1970–2010 The 1960s were a period of prosperity and atonement in America. The failure of the post–World War II years to integrate African Americans and Mexican Americans into the social and economic mainstream finally came back with a vengeance. In the midst of economic prosperity and global hegemony, the relegation of one-fifth of the American population to a caste-like status could no longer continue. The urban riots and the parallel Civil Rights Movement wrought significant changes in the nation’s institutional framework. Predictably, the Black mobilizations in the Southeast and the riots in cities everywhere were accompanied by parallel protests in the Southwest by its large Mexican American popu- lation. Both groups reacted to the patent injustice of being used as the backbone of the low-wage labor market and as foot soldiers in the nation’s wars without ever being granted access to its opportunities. Fortunately, the nation’s political leaders at the time recognized this and took a series of measures to remedy the situation. Civil rights legis- lation and the War on Poverty, launched by President Lyndon Johnson, followed in short order. Embedded in the new national mood to atone for past racial injustices was the initiative to eliminate the last vestiges of the racist provisions of the 1924 National Origins Act. Thereafter, access to the United States would be based on two basic criteria: family reunification and occupational merit. National origin would not enter the picture, except for a per-country limit set on a universalistic basis. In 1952, provisions to exclude Asians had been repealed in a bill passed over President Harry Truman’s veto. The 1965 amendments completed the task. It opened the door to immigration from all countries, setting a cap of 20,000 per country and a global limit of 290,000.43 Children under twenty-one, spouses, and parents of U.S. citizens were exempt from those numerical limits.  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 25 In the floor debates over the new legislation, its cosponsor, Emanuel Celler (D-New York), argued that few Asians and Africans would actually come since they had no families to reunite with. President Johnson reas- sured critics of the bill’s benign consequences. “This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” he declared. Secretary of State Dean Rusk anticipated only eight thousand immigrants from India over five years and few thereafter. Senator Edward Kennedy argued that the ethnic mix of the country would not be altered.44 Subsequent history was to prove these predictions deeply wrong. A year before this legislation was passed and in the same mood of atonement, the Bracero agreement with Mexico was repealed. Oppo- nents argued that the program subjected Mexican workers to systematic exploitation by unscrupulous American employers and corrupt Mexican officials. Its elimination would also create new employment opportuni- ties for native workers.45 The lofty spirit in which these pieces of legisla- tion were crafted did not envision what their actual consequences would be. Denied access to braceros, U.S. ranchers and farmers did not hire native workers but turned to the same Mexican workers now rebaptized as clandestine migrants. As also shown in table 6, apprehensions of “ille- gal aliens” at the border shot up with the end of the Bracero Program, rising year by year and reaching over half a million by 1972. A second unexpected consequence of the 1965 act was that it provided a new avenue for unauthorized migrants to legalize their situation. Clan- destine Mexican workers who wanted to stay on this side of the border could now make use of various legal means, paramount among which was marriage to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. A study of Mexican migration conducted in the early 1970s found that by 1973, 70 percent of legal Mexican migrants had already lived in the United States for one year or more: “Clearly, most of the men in this sample did not face legal entry into the United States as strangers or newcomers. Instead, the vast majority were ‘return immigrants’ coming back to places and people that had long before become established parts of their lives.”46 A third consequence of the 1965 act was to open the professional labor market to foreigners. As Representative Celler would have it, few Africans and Asians had families to reunite with, but they had occupa- tional qualifications, and Asians, in particular, took full advantage of the meritocratic provisions of the new system. As will be seen next, a major consequence was to bifurcate the immigration stream into flows targeting different segments of the American labor market. Thereafter, both the composition of the foreign population in America and its  26 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration Number in millions 45 16 Percent of total population that is foreign born 40 14 35 Number in millions 45 12 16 Percent of total population that is foreign born 30 Number in millions 40 10 14 25 35 8 12 20 30 Number in millions 6 10 15 25 4 8 10 20 5 2 6 15 0 0 4 10 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2019 5 Year 2 figure 0 1a. The Evolution of the Foreign-Born Population of the United States, 1900– 0 50 2019. Sources: Decennial 1900 1910 1920 Censuses, 1930 19401900–2010; 1950 19602019 American 1970 Community 1980 1990 Survey. 2000 2010 2019 44.5 44.9 45 Year 40 40 35.7 35 31.1 50 30 44.5 44.9 45 25 40 40 20 35.7 35 15 31.1 30 10 25 5 20 0 15 2000 2005 2010 2017 2019 10 5 0 2000 2005 2010 2017 2019 figure 1b. Total Immigrant Population, 2000–2019 (millions). Source: Frey, “Analysis of Decennial Censuses and 2000–2019 American Community Surveys.” impact on the receiving society and economy would become far more nuanced and complex. Industrial Restructuring and the Hourglass As in the 1920s, it took time for the new immigration act to be imple- mented. Immigration continued at low levels during the 1960s so that, as shown in figure 1, the foreign-born population reached its lowest  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 27 absolute and relative numbers in 1970. It was only after that year that the momentous effect of the reform was to be felt. Framers of the 1965 amendments could not possibly have foreseen it, but the new system paved the way for a segmentation of future immigration flows reflecting the bifurcation of the American economy and labor markets in the dec- ades to come. As seen previously, the United States generated a vast demand for industrial labor during the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, this was the reason that Euro- pean immigrants, first, and southern Black migrants, second, were recruited and came in such vast numbers to northern American cities. The availability of industrial jobs and the existence of a ladder of occu- pations within industrial employment created the possibility of gradual mobility for the European second generation without need for an advanced education. This continued labor demand was behind the rise of stable working-class communities where supervisory and other pre- ferred industrial jobs afforded a reasonable living standard for Euro- pean ethnics. As has also been seen, their gradual mobility into the higher tiers of blue-collar employment and then into the white-collar middle class furnished the empirical basis for subsequent theories of assimilation. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating thereafter, the structure of the American labor market started to change under the twin influences of technological innovation and foreign competition in industrial goods. The advent of Japan as a major industrial competitor took American companies by surprise, accustomed as they were to lacking any real foreign rivals in the post–World War II era. As two prominent students of American deindustrialization concluded: What caused the profit squeeze was mainly the sudden emergence of height- ened international competition; a competition to which U.S business leaders were initially blind. In the manufacturing sector a trickle of imports turned into a torrent. The value of manufactured imports relative to domestic pro- duction skyrocketed—from less than 14 percent in 1969 to nearly triple that, 38 percent, only ten years later.47 Caught in this bind, many companies resorted to the “spatial fix” of moving production facilities abroad in order to reduce labor costs. Technological innovations made the process easier by lowering transportation barriers and making possible instant communication between corporate headquarters and production plants located abroad. 28 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration The garment industry represents a prime example of this process of restructuring. While fashion design and marketing strategies remained centralized in the companies’ American headquarters, actual produc- tion migrated, for the most part, to industrial zones in the less devel- oped world.48 Industrial restructuring and corporate downsizing brought about the gradual disappearance of the jobs that had provided the basis for the economic ascent of the European second generation. Between 1950 and 1996, American manufacturing employment plummeted, from over one-third of the labor force to less than 15 percent. The slack was taken up by service employment that skyrocketed from 12 percent to close to one-third of all workers. Service employment is, however, bifurcated between menial and casual low-wage jobs commonly associated with personal services and the rapid growth of occupations requiring advanced technical and professional skills. The highly paid service jobs are generated by knowledge-based industries linked to new information technologies and those associated with the command and control func- tions of a restructured capitalist economy.49 The growth of employment in these two polar service sectors is one of the factors that stalled the gradual trend toward economic equality in the United States and then reversed it during the following decades. Between 1960 and 1990, the income of the top decile of American fam- ilies increased in constant (1986) dollars from $40,789 to $60,996. In contrast, the income of the bottom decile barely budged, from $6,309 to $8,637. The income of the bottom half of families, which in 1960 represented about 50 percent of the income of those in the top decile, declined by almost 10 percent relative to this wealthiest group in the following thirty years. By 2000, the median net worth of American households had climbed to about $80,000. However, almost half of households (44%) did not reach $25,000 and exactly a third had annual incomes below this figure. More than half of American families (57%) did not own any equities at all, falling further behind in terms of eco- nomic power.50 The trend continued during the first decade of the twenty-first century, with gaps in household wealth (net worth) becom- ing wider still. By 2009, the net worth of Black and Hispanic house- holds (which among home owners is largely based on their home equity) was largely wiped out in the wake of the collapse of housing prices and a deep recession. Net worth among Hispanics dropped to a minuscule $6,300, and the wealth gap between whites and Hispanics rose to 20 to 1, the widest in twenty-five years. Economic inequality—as measured  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 29 by the Gini index and related indicators—reached Third World levels by 2010.51 In this changed market, high demand exists at the low end for unskilled and menial service workers and at the high end for profession- als and technicians, with diminishing opportunities for well-paid employment in between. Figure 2 portrays this changed situation. Con- temporary immigration has responded to this new “hourglass” econ- omy by bifurcating, in turn, into major occupational categories. As seen before, the end of the Bracero Program rechanneled the low-skill agri- cultural flow from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean into the category “illegal aliens.” Simultaneously, the occupational prefer- ence provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act paved the way for major professional and technical flows originating primarily in Asia. Subse- quent legislation added flexibility and volume to this form of immigra- tion. The increasing heterogeneity of the contemporary foreign-born population in the wake of these legal and labor market changes requires additional emphasis as a counterpart of the common popular descrip- tion of immigration as a homogeneous phenomenon. Reaction:2010– The fourth moment in the history of U.S.-bound migration features the continuation of processes rooted in prior legislation and history, along with the qualitative and quantitative diversification of foreign-born flows. The massive American economy that, in 2021, reached a GDP of $23 trillion continued to demand immigrant labor at all levels but with the notable twist that an increasing proportion of these workers now came under temporary contracts rather than permanently. The mass implementation of the new entry regime led to three simultaneous splits: —Between legal-permanent and temporary migrants. — Between highly educated professionals and manual labor workers. — Between migrant flows sourced in the Americas and those coming predominantly from Asia. While temporary migrants come from everywhere, the last two splits map onto each other, as highly trained migrants come primarily from Asia and manual labor flows are sourced predominantly in the Americas.52  Professional and managerial Administrative and technical Supervisory and lower white collar Skilled and semi-skilled Unskilled Industrial occupations The industrial labor market, 1900–1960 Professional, managerial, and technical occupations Petty entrepreneurs and lower white collar Unskilled and semi-skilled occupations The postindustrial labor market, 1970–2010 figure 2. Changing Labor Markets.  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 31 Complexities of the present situation do not end here, for the evolu- tion of contemporary migration flows has been newly affected by two other momentous forces—those stemming from the politics of postin- dustrialism in the United States and those that reflect the increasing fracturing of the global system. Let us consider each of them in turn. The Rise of National Populism The decision of the corporate world to deindustrialize America in order to meet foreign competition in automobiles and other durable goods, as well as neutralize the power of trade unions, led not only to the hour- glass labor market portrayed in figure 2, but to a mass of suddenly redundant workers. This mass, composed largely of native whites with limited education, became not only unemployed, but unemployable.53 Forced to eke out a living in insecure and semiformal jobs in the middle of the hourglass, this displaced and frustrated mass became fertile ground for populist politicians ready to profit from its anger.54 The industrial U-turn in the American economy led relentlessly to a political U-turn in which the relatively well-mannered interaction between liberals and conservatives of the past was replaced by an increasingly strident war fanned by a militant right wing bent on usurp- ing political power at any cost. Spearheaded by the so-called Tea Party and selected radio commentators and media, the movement played on the fears of a marginalized white working class and asserted its rightful ownership of the nation.55 In the “makers” versus “takers” terminology that became popular on the extreme right, the latter category was popu- lated exclusively by nonwhites—native Blacks and brown-skinned Latin immigrants—whose ascent had to be blocked by any means possible. Neither African Americans nor Mexicans nor other immigrants were responsible for the deindustrialization of America, a deed more prop- erly attributed to white corporate elites, but they became suitable tar- gets for marginalized whites. This task was relentlessly conducted by politicians and media pundits who transformed white anger into con- gressional votes, blockage of pro-immigrant legislation, and the even- tual election of a far-right nativist as president.56 The transformation of white working-class economic redundancy into populist nationalism had two major consequences for U.S.-bound migration. First was the blockage of any comprehensive reform bill in Congress that would open a path for legalization of the undocumented population already in the country. As noted by Douglas Massey, Rubén 32 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration Hernández-León, and others, the bulk of the undocumented crossed the southern border surreptitiously in search of jobs in agriculture and other low-skilled sectors because there was not, until recently, a legal way to do so. They filled such jobs, commonly disdained by native workers, and stayed in the United States because there was no legal way to commute to their countries of origin.57 With time, this immigrant population grew in numbers to comprise at its peak an estimated 12 million by 2007, decreasing to about 10.5 million by the end of the second decade of this century. It included hun- dreds of thousands of youths who were brought by their parents as children through no fault of their own. By and large, undocumented immigrants fill needed low-skill niches in the American economy and focus on rebuilding their lives and educating their children. The latter grew up attending American schools, speaking English, and forgetting their native languages. In all but legal status, they became Americans. Recognizing the functionality of this population for the labor market, their increasing rootedness in local communities, and the patently unjust situation in which these children found themselves, both Democratic and Republican politicians attempted to normalize the situation by passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Four such attempts were made under the Bush and Obama administrations. All four failed. As Kennedy tells the story, Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) that would create a path for legalization of undocumented migrants and their children was attempted twice during the two Bush presidencies and twice during Obama’s. The last attempt, sponsored by the “Gang of Eight” in the Senate handily won approval in that body. However, the level of opposition in the House of Representatives brought about by mobilization of nativists by the Tea Party and Num- bers USA was such as to block the reform. Tea Party “patriots” claimed to have set in motion 900,000 automated phone calls in ninety Repub- lican districts connecting tens of thousands of anti-immigration voters with their congressional representatives. As one lobbyist closely involved with CIR recalled, “There were a lot of members of Congress who wanted to get to yes on immigration reform, including within the Republican Caucus but based on the build- ing pressure, couldn’t get there.”58 In the end, House Speaker John Boehner conceded that it was impossible to pass the bill in 2012. The situation had numerous precedents. In 2009, when debate on a similar bill was about to end, the Capitol Hill switchboard was forced to shut down due to the avalanche of calls from anti-immigration activists.  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 33 Republican senator John Ensign noted, “The intensity and the passion on this bill, we’ve never seen anything like it. Not even close.”59 The determined opposition by the far right to any attempt at immi- gration reform, spearheaded by slogans such as “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” and “Whose country is this anyway?,” resulted in the permanent blockage of any path to regularization for the undocu- mented population. As this population established roots in local com- munities and their children grew up American, the situation became ever more absurd and inhumane. On the one hand, the country shifted to temporary programs that brought in, legally, migrants to do the labor that the undocumented were doing already. In parallel fashion, as we shall see, other programs imported thousands of temporary profes- sionals to do work that the children of the undocumented, educated in American schools and colleges, could have performed equally well.60 The second consequence of national populism was a drastic decline in refugee admissions. Refugees and would-be asylees became targets of nationalist anger under the slogan “America First.” For decades prior to 2016, the American immigration system had included a humanitar- ian component that allowed the entry of persecuted peoples from coun- tries as diverse as Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia, and Burma. For illustration, table 7 presents the ten largest refugee nationalities arriving in 2015. This diversity makes clear that the policy governing refugee admissions was not determined by narrow geopolitical interests but by a humani- tarian stance toward persecuted minorities all over the world. Things started to change with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. One of his first acts was to bar refugee admissions from Syria and other Muslim countries. As his administration pro- gressed, the annual ceiling for refugee entries was drastically reduced. As seen in table 8, by 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, refugee admissions dropped to just 11,800, less than 20 percent of what they had been in 2015 and about 10 percent of the 100,000-plus refugees admitted to the country in successive years during the early 1990s.61 The Trump policy toward refugees was naturally applauded by the nationalist far right, which also egged him on to complete his massive wall along the southern border. The rise of national populism marked the end of the compassionate stance that had characterized U.S. refugee policy in the past and, with it, the disappearance of the moral authority of America in the world. This happened at a particularly critical time in the evolution of the glo- bal system and in the forces impelling mass out-migration. 34 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration table 7 refugee arrivals by selected countries of nationality, 2013–2015 2013 2014 2015 Total 69,909 69,975 69,920 Afghanistan 661 753 910 Bhutan 9,134 8,434 5,775 Burma 16,299 14,958 18,386 Congo 2,563 4,540 7,875 Cuba 1,829 1,488 1,596 Ethiopia 765 726 626 Iran 2,579 2,846 3,109 Iraq 19,487 19,769 12,676 Somalia 7,608 9,000 8,858 Sudan 2,160 1,315 1,578 source: U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, 2015 Yearbook, table 14. table 8 refugee arrivals and admitted asylees in the united states, 2015–2019 Refugees Asylees 2015 69,909 26,124 2016 84,989 20,455 2017 53,691 26,568 2018 22,405 38,687 2019 29,916 38,687 2020 11,800 — source: U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, 2015–19 Yearbooks; Monin, Batalova, and Tianjian Lai, “Refugees and Asylees in the United States.” A Broken World Table 8 also shows an interesting trend: the number of asylees in recent years has not declined but, at least until 2019, actually rose. In contrast to refugees that are processed by U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad before coming to the United States, asylees show up at points of entry, generally at the southern border, and request entry into the country for humanitarian reasons. The pressure of these human waves in recent years has been such as to compel agencies of the U.S. government to let in thousands of these claimants despite the avowed intention of the Trump administration to prevent their entry.  The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration | 35 Forces behind the “caravans” of would-be asylees marching toward the border are of two kinds, both reflecting the growing fracture of the global system between stable and rich countries and those left behind in the “Global South.” The first is the rise in relative deprivation among the populations of these countries, triggered by the mass spread of com- munication technologies. As noted at the start of this chapter, most peo- ple today have mobile phones and, with them, ready knowledge of the living standards in wealthy nations in contrast to those they endure at home.62 Relative deprivation underlies what the economist Michael Piore termed “inexhaustible supplies of labor.” Countries in the Global North only need to signal that some entry avenues exist for those ave- nues to instantly fill up with applicants. The process underlies, among other things, the ease with which the United States is able to recruit foreign workers at both ends of the labor market—from low-skill agri- cultural workers to software engineers and technicians.63 Yet people marching in caravans toward the U.S. border are impelled by more than relative deprivation. The second force motivating them is the implosion of the state in sending countries, generating situations of widespread violence, fear, and immiseration. State implosion has become increasingly common in the Global South, leading to desperate escapes by large segments of its populations. Syrians, Afghans, and Somalis risking their lives in the Mediterranean and then in immensely long treks toward Western Europe exemplify this trend. So does the one-fourth of the Venezuelan population that has abandoned its coun- try seeking refuge in nearby Andean nations.64 The instantly created wave of Moroccans seeking entry into Spain, mentioned at the start of this chapter, provides another vivid illustration. In comparison with the Syrian and Venezuelan mass flights, the cara- vans crossing Mexico are relatively small. They come from smaller countries in the Northern Triangle of Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—plus Haiti. Notice that they do not come from Mexico itself because, although often seen as teetering on the brink, the Mexican state has not imploded.65 Despite the relatively modest populations of source countries, cara- vans of Central American and Haitians have been sizable enough to put considerable pressure on U.S. government agencies and the country’s judicial system. While the Trump administration deported many and forced tens of thousands to await processing on the Mexican side of the border, many others found their way in. The reluctance of the subse- quent Biden administration to send back mothers and unaccompanied 36 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration minors was seen in sending countries as a welcome opportunity: in no time at all, families and children flooded the border, begging to be allowed in. The fourth moment in the history of migration to the United States thus features a series of contradictory trends and unresolved dilemmas. The size of the American economy and labor market is such as to con- tinue to demand large numbers of foreign workers, increasingly brought under temporary contracts. The regular immigration system continues in place and is still the major vehicle for the arrival of hundreds of thou- sands of relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents every year.66 Simultaneously, the rise of nationalist populism in American politics has prevented the resolution of the plight of millions of undocumented migrants and their children, many of whom could fill labor market needs now met by temporary migrants under contract. The same politi- cal forces have led to a fierce offensive against refugees, significantly reducing their number. Yet, at the same time, the pressure of imploding nations in the vicinity of the United States has produced hundreds of thousands of asylum claimants, at least some of whom manage to gain entry. Refugees and asylees have no ready role in the American labor mar- ket, but, once they regularize their situation, somehow they find their way into it. In time, they will become able to claim their relatives, trig- gering further family reunifications. It is difficult to envision where all of these contradictory and overlapping trends will lead. What seems clear is that the unresolved situation of millions of undocumented migrants and their children, the chaotic scenes at the border, and the resolve of white nativists to keep others out of legal existence and out of the country altogether make for an explosive situation. The nation is living on borrowed time that only a decisive political solution can bring to an end. The question is which side of the political spectrum will suc- ceed and implement its vision for the future of Immigrant America. Immigrants and Their Types There are two main dimensions along which contemporary immigrants to the United States differ: the first is their personal resources, in terms of material and human capital, and the second is their classification by the government. The first dimension ranges from foreigners who arrive with investment capital or are endowed with high educational creden- tials to those who have only their labor to sell. The second dimension table 9 a typology of contemporary immigrants to the united states Human Capital Legal Status Unskilled/Semiskilled Laborers Skilled Workers and Professionals Entrepreneurs Unauthorized Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Chinese, Dominican, and Indian Chinese, Indian, and Mexican operators and Haitian laborers physicians and dentists practicing of informal businesses in ethnic without legal permits enclaves and neighborhoods Legal, Temporary Mexican and Central American Chinese, Indian, and Korean software laborers admitted with H-2A and engineers and technicians admitted H-2B visas with H-1B visas Legal, Permanent Mexican and Central American Argentine, Chinese, Filipino, and Indian Chinese, Dominican, and Korean owners legalized laborers through marriage physicians, engineers, and nurses of legal firms in ethnic enclaves and to a U.S. citizen or permanent admitted under occupational low- income urban areas resident preferences of the 1965 and 1990 Immigration Acts Refugees, Asylees Ukrainian, Syrian, and Somali refugees Pre-1980 Cuban; post-1990 Russian, Cuban, Israeli, and Chinese owners of and Guatemalan and Honduran Ukrainian, Iranian, and Iraqi legal firms in ethnic enclaves and in the asylees professional refugees general market 38 | The Four Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration ranges from migrants who arrive legally and receive governmental reset- tlement assistance to those who are categorized as illegals and are per- secuted accordingly. At present, only persons granted refugee status or admitted as legal asylees receive any form of official resettlement assist- ance in the United States. Most legal immigrants are admitted into the country but receive no help. Since 1996, they have also been barred from welfare programs such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Medicaid to which citizens are entitled. Cross-classifying these dimen- sions produces the typology presented in table 9. Representative nation- alities are included in each cell, with the caution that migrants from a particular country may be represented in more than one. The following description follows the vertical axis, based on human capital skills, not- ing the relative legal standing of each distinct type. A final section dis- cusses the special case of refugees and asylees. Labor Migrants The movement of foreign workers in search of manual and generally low-paid jobs has represented the bulk of immigration, both legal and undocumented, in recent years. These workers are destined to occupy jobs at the bottom of the labor market “hourglass.” The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was aimed primarily at dis- couraging the surreptitious component of this flow while compensating employers by liberalizing access to legal temporary workers. We note the principal ways through which manual labor immigration has mate- rialized in recent years. First, migrants can cross the border on foot or with the help of a smuggler or overstay a U.S. tourist visa. In official parlance, illegal bor- der crossers have been labeled “EWIs” (entries without inspection); those who stay longer than permitted are labeled visa abusers or over- stayers. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security apprehended 1,013,539 foreigners, of which the large majority wer