This book explores part of the history of immigration into the United States, in particular the history of smuggling, undocumented immigration, and border enforcement on American land borders at the turn of the twentieth century. Although popularly conceived of as a relatively recent phenomenon, surreptitious border crossings of immigrants into the United States date back at least as far as the 1880s. I was not looking back that far when initiating my research. Indeed, my initial research plans were considerably narrower. Broadly interested in migratory labor, Mexican immigration, and Mexican-American history—and convinced of the importance of all three to...

At the close of the 1880s, El Paso, Texas, stood on the threshold of tremendous growth. Freshly laid railroad lines linked the small border town not only with major trading centers in the United States, such as New Orleans, San Francisco, and St. Louis, but also with Mexico City and the economically promising borderlands of northern Mexico. American investment in Mexico, which had grown under the liberal economic policies of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, had helped stimulate the railroad network that now led into and out of Mexico through El Paso.¹ In May 1882, as a sign of American commitment...

Eleven months after passage of the 1882 Immigration Act that barred pauper immigration into the United States, theNew York Timesreported that twenty-eight immigrants fresh from Ireland had been found “helpless and starving” in the streets of Buffalo, New York. According to the article, the immigrants had crossed into the United States from Canada, where a “large number” of impoverished immigrants from Ireland were purportedly landing at the ports of Quebec and Montreal with plans to enter the United States. Many of the immigrants were “almost destitute, having neither money nor friends, and . . . too feeble, by...

When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of congressional oversight of immigration in 1889, it did so on the basis of a commonsense understanding of sovereignty. Any independent nation, the court reasoned, ought to exercise “jurisdiction over its own territory.” Such jurisdiction included the power to admit and exclude foreigners from its territory.¹ The effect of the court’s ruling, upholding the ability of Congress to set and enforce federal immigration restrictions, coincided with the political temperament of the day. Amid the economic hardships and national political turmoil of the 1890s, voices demanding further reform of American immigration policy gained...

Between 1891 and 1910, both the scope of federal immigration restrictions and the means for enforcing them on the Mexican and Canadian borders grew tremendously. But while the United States made progress in enforcing immigration restrictions on the Canadian border, progress on the Mexican border was halting at best. The early 1900s witnessed an upsurge in illicit border crossings from Mexico, and not until the 1910 Mexican Revolution interrupted migration patterns did authorities seem capable of stemming the flow of undocumented immigrants through Mexico. For even as the United States began to imagine and put in place the means by...

By 1908, the U.S.-Mexico border had become virtually equated with immigrant smuggling and undocumented entry, and was viewed as the most important battleground between immigration authorities and excludable immigrants.¹ Reports from immigration officers on the border in 1910 suggested that the bureau might soon master the smuggling situation, but the extent to which American immigration authorities could ever succeed in making border administration as effective as seaport administration remained very much up in the air. And as if struggles with Chinese, Japanese, and Lebanese smuggling operations were not enough, profound changes in the American Southwest and in the neighboring Republic...

The 1920s were a watershed in the administration of immigration law along the U.S.-Mexican border. The conflicting pressures on border immigration authorities in the 1900s and 1910s, pressures to create a border administration formidable enough to prevent the illicit entry of “undesirable aliens” flocking to it from around the globe yet flexible enough to accommodate fluctuating demand for Mexican labor, greatly intensified in the 1920s.

The growing Mexican labor migration and revolutionary conditions of the 1900s and 1910s had created unanticipated administrative problems for border immigration officials. Compounding those challenges after 1917 was the fact that smuggling of European and...

On April 26, 1941, theEl Paso Herald Postbriefly related an episode at the international border that, in many ways, revealed the dramatic changes that had been wrought in the preceding decades. The story discussed the unusual circumstances under which Jose Morga, a Mexican citizen, had been barred from entry at the Santa Fe International Bridge linking El Paso, Texas, to Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. The sixty-eight-year-old Morga was apparently an obscure, longtime El Paso resident. He had come to El Paso from Mexico in 1899 as a twenty-six-year-old young man in search of work, crossing the border in the...