Patrick Ettinger

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Patrick Ettinger | "We sometimes wonder what they will spring on us next": Immigrants and Border Enforcement in the American West, 1882–1930 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2 | The History Cooperative

"We sometimes wonder what they will spring on us next": Immigrants and Border Enforcement in the American West, 1882–1930

Complex patterns of unsanctioned immigration emerged along the Mexican and Canadian borders in the late-nineteenth century, spurring federal efforts to fortify the borders. Despite the elaboration of federal border controls, illicit entry flourished. Individual immigrants and transnational smuggling syndicates demonstrated tireless ingenuity in subverting the official border.

Patrones complejos de migración ilícita emergieron a lo largo de las fronteras mexicana y canadiense a finales del siglo XIX, impulsando esfuerzos federales para fortalecer las fronteras. A pesar de la implementación de controles fronterizos federales, el fenómeno de la entrada ilícita prosperó. Inmigrantes individuales y sindicatos de contrabando transnacionales demonstraron incansable ingenio en la subversion de la frontera oficial.

IN JANUARY 1929, WILLIAM WHALEN and G. C. Wilmoth, United States Immigration Service supervisors employed on the U. S.-Mexico border, traveled north to Washington, D. C., to a conference addressing the problems of the Immigration Service. Drawing on his experience supervising south Texas ports of entry on the border, Whalen contributed an hour-long address, "Mexican Border Problems." He spoke in an exasperated but bemused manner of the resourcefulness of migrants attempting to circumvent U. S. immigration laws along the U. S.-Mexico border in south Texas. Wilmoth gave a similar talk about border crossings in West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Together, their speeches detailed the host of ruses, disguises, deceptions, and tricks that northward immigrants, predominantly Mexican, used to make their way past U. S. immigration inspectors on the border. Migrants and smugglers, Whalen confessed with a mix of admiration and chagrin, had demonstrated such ingenuity that "[w]e sometimes wonder what they will spring on us next."¹

Their 1929 conference reports no doubt reflected well the experiences of the dozens of immigration inspectors working along the southern U. S. border—and perhaps too the sentiments of many of the newly commissioned Border Patrol agents who worked in the vast expanses between formal ports of entry. For historians, they provide a glimpse of the everyday shuffle of life on the international boundary line joining the United States and Mexico in the 1920s. But they also offer insight into the complex history of undocumented immigration, in particular the persistent difficulty of effectively enforcing immigration laws on land boundaries. For Whalen, Wilmoth, and their Immigration Service colleagues on the Canadian and Mexican border were not initiating a system of border inspections in the late 1920s. Rather, their 1929 status reports came on the heels of a forty-five year, multi-million dollar effort on the part of the federal government to establish and enforce immigration regulations on the nation's international borders. In detailing the difficulties attendant to the enforcement of the national boundary and highlighting the continued permeability of the border, their reports nicely conveyed the state of the American border control regime. They also relate the enigmatic nature of the "official" border as it stood in the late 1920s. Border inspection stations were both highly visible, commanding features of the borderlands and, for many a determined migrant, almost insignificant.

Whalen and his colleagues on the border were active agents in the ongoing construction of what Patricia Nelson Limerick has called the "social fiction" of the U. S.-Mexico border.² The U. S. Immigration Service's border enforcement regime in 1929 had developed, in part, out of a set of practices first adopted by customs officials in the 1880s to halt unsanctioned immigrants from entering the U. S. from Canada and Mexico. This article looks closely at evolving patterns of illicit border crossing on the Canadian and Mexican borders at the turn of the twentieth century, providing a snapshot of the concomitant rise of unsanctioned immigration and border-crossing controls. In terms of border enforcement, remarkable transformations occurred along the American sides of both borders in this era. But amidst dramatic change came stubborn continuities as well. Border-crossing patterns changed, but practices of illicit entry survived, practices that had profound implications for the history of the twentieth-century American West.

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