From an employer point of view, the system was almost flawless. The large number of illegal aliens who came to work provided a strong supply of vulnerable workers who would accept depressed wages and labor standards, thereby keeping employer costs down and preventing formation of any effective labor organization. The growers of perishable fruits and vegetables particularly appreciated a loose labor market since they never knew how many workers they would need, depending upon the vagaries of weather. Nor were they pushed to invest in labor-saving equipment or to spend more for domestic labor. Those Americans who used low-cost, foreign unskilled help for menial tasks, such as hospital orderlies, dishwashers, and housemaids, directly benefited from their presence, and American consumers paid less for their produce. Only American farm workers, an especially weak group politically, suffered directly from the competition. Hence, growers could rely on the flow of undocumented labor and also on the cooperation of government in managing that flow as their needs required.
French Canadian workers who came to New England throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were most like the Mexicans in the ease with which they moved back and forth across the border, in their reluctance to put down roots in American life, in their strong sense of cultural identity with their homeland, and in their difficulty in acquiring English literacy and fluency. But there were also differences between the two groups. French Canadians were lighter in skin color, and they came to an area where labor unions were relatively strong and where there were large numbers of immigrants from other countries who had already become active participants in American life.
Sojourners from Puerto Rico, like Mexicans in the Southwest, moved frequently back and forth from the mainland. They also had difficulty in acquiring effective use of English. And they, too, suffered from racial prejudice. Large growers’ associations often negotiated contracts for Puerto Rican farm workers, after 1948 with the migration division of the Puerto Rican government’s Department of Labor. But compared to Mexicans, the scale of migration was small, and Puerto Ricans working in the post—Second World War era were American citizens with recourse to protection from the Constitution and laws of the U.S., especially in the civil rights era.33
Puerto Ricans, French Canadians, and Mexicans shared a sojourner mentality. Armando B. Rendon, a Chicano activist of the 1960s, explained that few Mexicans would buy a house, even when it was to their economic advantage, because most believed they would return soon to Mexico. Others shied away from adult education courses. What sense did it make to learn English if they were returning home? Politics was for those who had a future and a stake in the country. Even lawful resident aliens saw little point in being naturalized. Families as far away as Chicago and New York visited their Mexican home towns at least once and sometimes twice a year for a few weeks on vacation.34
By the 1980s, research on the effects of the sojourner mentality of illegal aliens had become more sophisticated, confirming Rendon’s impressionistic interpretation.35 The sojourner mentality was well suited to the needs of growers, ranchers, and other employers of unskilled labor in the South west and elsewhere; it made it easier for whites generally to think of Mexicans as stoop labor or “wetbacks” or in racist terms as “greasers,” and not as persons. Anglo-Europeans could accept the need for sudden roundups, deportations, and contract labor programs and ignore the miserable conditions under which Mexicans and Mexican-Americans often lived and worked.
The circular pattern of Mexican migration, driven in large measure by employer demand with the cooperation of the government, was entrenched early in the century. When workers reached a certain savings goal or when they could not adapt or were terribly lonely for relatives or friends, or a combination of these, they often returned home on their own. The system of sojourner pluralism was distinctive in the Southwest to the extent of government cooperation in amending and administering the immigration law for the benefit of employers without regard to the immigration statutes. For example, the Immigration Acts of 1903 and 1907 imposed head taxes of two dollars and four dollars on immigrants, except for Mexicans, ensuring the Southern Pacific Railroad and others a steady supply of Mexican workers.36 Laws forbidding entry of contract laborers, the diseased, the insane, and certain classes of criminals were enforced weakly in order to cater to western employers’ need for labor; and until 1908, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration did not even bother to count incoming Mexicans except for the few who said they intended to remain permanently.37 When workers were no longer needed, they would be repatriated, as in the recession of 1907, when several thousand railroad track laborers in California lost their jobs. Mexican officials cooperated with the railroad, which gave workers free transportation to the border city of Juárez, where they received food and free rail passes back to their homes.38
By 1917, when the U.S. enacted the most restrictive (so far) immigration statute in its history, including a literacy test, the law made a special exception for employers in the West. It authorized the secretary of labor to permit otherwise inadmissible persons to enter the country as temporary workers, and in May 1917 the first bracero program for Mexican workers was created (later expanded to allow some to be employed in nonfarm work). Regulations called for the braceros to return home after their work was done, but the rules were incompletely enforced; of the 76,862 Mexican workers admitted under the program, only 34,922 returned home.39
Labor recruiting agencies, deprived of European workers after the restrictive immigration legislation of 1921 and 1924, sought Mexicans for outside the West as well. Because of its central position in the midwestern railroad system, in the 1920s Chicago became a central point for Mexican labor. In 1927, sixteen labor contractors reported that they had placed 75,400 Mexicans in jobs in the Chicago area alone for a fee the employers paid them. A less expensive way for employers to obtain labor was to use smugglers, “coyotes,” who, operating along the border, put the workers on a train for Chicago, after which the employer sent the coyote a check for each worker who arrived.40
Once in Chicago and other cities, Mexicans were outside the system of sojourner pluralism enforced in behalf of growers and ranchers in the Southwest and California. In the East and Midwest, there was the possibility of joining strong labor unions, and the situation of Mexicans in Chicago or Detroit resembled that of other sojourners in the North and Midwest, as, for example, dark-skinned West Indians who came to the mainland, many illegally.
The system was particularly brutal in Texas, where around the turn of the century vigilante bands attacked Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.41 By the early twentieth century, Texas Rangers had replaced the local police as principal enforcers of the system of sojourner pluralism, and later, the Border Patrol of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and local police forces took over from the Rangers. Although the Border Patrol itself was not brutal, it developed informal arrangements of cooperation with agricultural employers from the 1920s on through the 1950s. The INS would go easy on enforcement until picking time was over, making only a few raids to indicate that they were doing their job in order to justify federal appropriations. Sympathetic to the needs of the local economy and amenable to political pressures, the INS stepped up enforcement as in its crackdown after the “wetback strikes” of 1951 and 1952.42
Turning