An Early History of Mexican Immigration to the United States

By Pooja P. and Sophia D.

November 4, 2022

The topic of immigration, particularly immigration from Mexico into the United States, is a contentious discussion in today’s political sphere. However, the discussion of the history of such topics is often overlooked, despite the fact that it offers an important lens through which to view current controversies. In this article, we hope to shed some more light on the early history of Mexican immigration in the United States.

Mexican immigration largely began in 1848 at the end of the Mexican American war. As part of the treaty’s terms, Mexico ceded present day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado to the US. Nine days before the treaty was signed, though, gold was discovered in Northern California, drawing many Mexicans who hoped to capitalize on the gold rush.

The flow of immigrants would remain fairly constant until the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), which drove many Mexicans to enter the US in the hopes of escaping violence. This coincided with the beginning of World War One, when many American men were drafted and could no longer work in factories and farms. To fill the existing labor gap, many Mexicans took on these jobs, and more and more Mexicans migrated to find work. However, as the US economy collapsed during the Great Depression, unemployment rates rose with many Americans blaming Mexican immigrants for occupying the scarce labor positions they felt they had a right to over Mexicans. As a result, 500,000 Mexicans were deported during this time, along with their American-born children.

However, it was not long before the US would need Mexican labor again. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US created the Bracero program, which provided Mexican immigrants with temporary working visas so that they could be employed on farms and in factories. This would allow US companies access to cheap labor, which was desperately needed in wartime. Although the Bracero program involved certain contractual guarantees, these were often loosely enforced, and many braceros would claim that working and living conditions were bad and wages were often withheld. This was worsened by the fact that the majority of Mexican laborers in the US weren’t actually part of the Bracero Program. From 1942 to 1947, over 219,000 braceros participated in the program. Meanwhile, the Immigration and Naturalization service apprehended 428,000 Mexicans without authorization, indicating that the number of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the US was much higher than the documented immigrants, almost certainly because the Mexican-US border was poorly controlled and relatively porous. As a result, business owners were able to hire these undocumented immigrants, pay them little to nothing and place them in horrible working conditions without fear of retaliation, since laborers knew that a business owner simply needed to report them to the government and they would be deported (a practice that still occurs frequently today). By the time the Bracero program ended in 1964, 4.6 million guest worker visas were issued, and 5.5 million unauthorized Mexican immigrants were deported. It is estimated that only 1:3 Mexican workers were actually authorized.

The pattern of the US government and companies exploiting the labor of unauthorized Mexican workers is one that pervades the working class of the present day. In 1942, the US President's Commission on Migratory Labor said of the Bracero program, “to go to work when needed, to be gone when not needed.”  The kind of philosophy that seeks to only use a group of people when they are convenient is a part of what perpetuates the mistreatment of immigrants. Seeking to unpack and understand such a mindset is the first step towards creating positive change.