HispanicVista Columnists
The Mexican Border Situation (1924)
- HISTORY
- Researched and Written by John P. Schmal
- Note: “The War” is “World War I.”
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- Copyright © 2006 by John P. Schmal. All Rights Reserved.
- Source: John P. Schmal and Donna S. Morales, Mexican-American Genealogical Research: Following the Paper Trail to Mexico (Heritage Books, 2002).
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- Contact John P. Schmal at: JohnnyPJ@aol.com
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John Schmal was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He
attended Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles and St. Cloud State
University in Minnesota, where he studied Geography, History and Earth
Sciences and received two BA degrees. Mr. Schmal has been a
life-long history buff and is also a skilled genealogist. His
genealogical specialties including tracing lineages in Mexico, Puerto
Rico, and the Southwestern U.S.A. He is the coauthor of
"Mexican-American Genealogical Research: Following the Paper Trail to
Mexico" (Heritage Books, 2002). He has also coauthored three other
books on Mexican-American themes, all of them published by Heritage
Books in Maryland. He is an Associate Editor of
www.somosprimos.com and a board member of the Society of Hispanic
Historical and Ancestral Research (SHHAR). Presently, in addition to
writing weekly columns for HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com),
he is writing a book on the indigenous peoples of Mexico and on the
ports of entry along the Mexican-US border. Mr. Schmal has a
passionate love of Mexican history and has been writing short histories
of each state, which are being compiled at the following link:
http://www.houstonculture.org/mexico/states.html - © Copyright 2005, by John P. Schmal.
It is difficult, in fact impossible, to measure the illegal influx of Mexicans over the border, but everyone agrees it is quite large. The United States territory immediately adjacent to the boundary has been a natural habitat of the Mexicans from the beginning, and residents of the borderland in Mexico, particularly of the laboring class, for a long time moved back and forth across the dividing line practically at will.
Illiteracy is common among them and comparative poverty is widespread, but until the general law of 1917 was enacted these conditions were not serious barriers to their legal admission in the United States. Under that law, however, illiterates are denied admission, and a head tax of $8 per person is assessed, and these barriers have naturally stimulated illegal immigration to such an extent that, as already stated, it is not possible even to estimate the number of Mexicans who enter the country without inspection over the long and largely unguarded stretches of border that lie between stations of our service….
Until within quite recent years comparatively few Mexican laborers got beyond the border States, but during the war they were taken in considerable numbers to the Middle Western States, where many of them were left without employment by the industrial depression which followed. It is said that most of these eventually returned to Mexico or the Southwest, but the demand for common labor in the North and East during the past year brought large numbers into industrial centers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere as substitutes for European laborers whose unlimited admission had been checked by the quota law….
As previously reported to the bureau the inspection force at ports of entry – and this is particularly true of El Paso, Tex., and Nogales, Ariz. – is not sufficient to handle all arrivals daily during the seasonal influx of Mexican laborers, with the result that it is oftentimes necessary for hundreds, even thousands, of them to wait for days and weeks before their turn at immigration inspection arrives. In the meantime their slender resources become exhausted, and, though willing to stand inspection and pay head tax, they are forced to resort to illegal entry in order to avoid starvation….
There is now, and has been for years, a band of criminals on this border, known in the smugglers’ jargon as “coyotes,” who gain a livelihood by preying upon persons desiring to enter the United States. Since the increase in the number of European aliens desiring to enter from Mexico these smugglers have reaped large financial benefits, for a majority of that class of aliens have ample funds to pay well for any assistance rendered them to enter illegally, and it has been reported that several European aliens have offered as high as $1,000 to anyone who would get them past the border and enable them to reach their destination in the eastern part of the United States…
The Mexican border smuggler is an extremely dangerous person to deal with. He goes “armed to the teeth” and does not hesitate to fire upon officers at sight. A number of Federal and State officers have been killed on this border in the recent past by these smugglers, and it has been more luck than anything else that many of our men have not been killed. There is hardly a week goes by that they are not fired upon.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor: Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1924 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1923), pp. 16-18.