|
|
|
Residents by Day, Visitors by Night: The Origins of the Alien Commuter on the U.S.-Canadian Border during the 1920s
by
Thomas A. Klug
|
Late in 1974, in the case of Saxbe v. Bustos, the United States Supreme Court at last ruled in the protracted dispute over the legal status of "alien commuters"—which in this instance were principally Mexican workers who lived in Mexico and regularly crossed the border to their places of employment in the southwestern United States.1 For nearly fifty years, ever since the promulgation of General Order No. 86 by the Bureau of Immigration in 1927, American authorities had carved out a special place for commuters within the framework of the law, treating them as immigrant aliens (not as temporary visitors), who were lawfully admitted for permanent residence (even though they had no actual residence in the United States). This arrangement meant that commuters were regarded as immigrant aliens returning from a temporary visit abroad each time they entered the country (which they could do merely by showing some sort of informal documentation or, later, a "green card," rather than an immigration visa).2 It was this "longstanding administrative construction" that the Supreme Court narrowly sustained in 1974.3 |
1
|
|
By the 1970s interested attorneys, jurists, bureaucrats, politicians, and scholars were well aware of the fact that the administrative origins of this way of processing alien commuters dated to the 1920s. The standard narrative began with the fluid border-crossing practices that were the norm for the Canadian and Mexican boundaries before 1920, followed by restrictive immigration acts in the 1920s, the initial treatment of commuters as nonimmigrants by the Bureau of Immigration, and then the abrupt reversal of the government's position with General Order No. 86.4 These legal accounts, however, almost invariably left out two crucial points necessary for a complete understanding of the alien-commuter issue during the 1920s. First, the maneuvers of the Bureau of Immigration took place in the context of an intense political struggle over alien commuters entering from Canada, not from Mexico as in the 1960s. Second, the force that pushed the commuter issue into public view in both the United States and Canada, and pushed the Bureau of Immigration to act, was pressure from organized labor situated in such northern border cities as Buffalo and Detroit, where for years trade unionists had battled employers for control of local labor markets. |
2
|
|
Given the overwhelming emphasis on the American boundary with Mexico, it is not surprising that the Canadian border roots of the alien-commuter controversy have largely escaped the attention of historians. One exception is the fine study by Donald Avery, which highlights how diplomats in Canada and the United States addressed the crisis provoked by General Order No. 86.5 The present article takes a different approach from Avery's by focusing specifically on the international border at Detroit, which was the destination of most commuters to the United States during the 1920s. It examines the conflict over commuters among interested parties on the local level and the interventions of national bureaucracies, particularly the Bureau of Immigration. As this article will illustrate, the alien-commuter system embodied in General Order No. 86 represented a political defeat for organizations like the Detroit Federation of Labor (DFL), which had pressed for an outright ban on commuting, and a political victory for federal immigration authorities who creatively accommodated commuting to the law and enhanced their overall control of the nation's borders.6 |
. . . |
There are about 8867 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
