The migration of Mexicans north into the United States steadily increased between 1900 and 1930. The number of Mexican immigrants officially recorded as entering the United States grew from 49,000 between 1901 and 1910 to 219,000 from 1911 to 1920, and 459,000 in the 1920s. The ease in crossing the border between the United States and Mexico has always made it difficult to have an accurate count. Between 1900 and 1930, the number of Mexicans entering the United States far exceeded the “official” count. While a number of factors contributed to the movement of Mexicans north after 1900, much of the migration had its origins as a response to economic development in Mexico under President Porfirio Diaz during the last quarter of the 19th century.
Upon becoming president in 1876, Diaz faced two options for national development: either reorganize the agrarian sector to raise capital internally or leave domestic agriculture alone and turn instead to foreign investors for capital. Diaz favored the latter option. He quickly worked to improve the image of Mexico in an effort to increase foreign investment. In his first major initiative, Diaz expanded the national railroad system. Financed largely by American investors, this project linked the Mexican economy to the world market. Ignoring internal demands for an east-west railroad network, U. S. capital instead built in Mexico rail lines running north-south to ensure better American access to Mexico’s cheap raw materials. The mining district of Sonora, for example, became better linked to the United States than to Mexico City. Moreover, the rail network facilitated the northward movement of Mexican workers displaced from the Mexican countryside. In his effort to modernize the country, Diaz established an export-based economy, making the country dependent on world market conditions. His program of development offered limited benefits to the country as a whole. Rather, the small economic elite received the major economic benefit of Diaz’s policies. By 1910, the country sent 80 percent of its exports to, and received 66 percent of its imports from, the United States.
Although the expansion of Mexico’s foreign trade brought new consumer goods and economic opportunities, widespread dissatisfaction appeared throughout the country. In urban areas, the growing wage labor force worked under extremely poor conditions, and the middle class resented the extent to which foreigners filled new professional jobs. Because the peasant population suffered large losses of land to foreign investors and Mexican elites, they lost their capacity for self-sufficiency. By 1910, the transformation affected nearly all of the rural population, creating an enormous, landless workforce and stimulating a massive migration of rural individuals to Mexican cities. While Diaz’s program of foreign investment increased the wage labor sector, it failed to provide adequate resources or opportunities for laborers and the new landless class. Mexico’s export-based economy further prevented the emergence of a substantial industrial sector that might have absorbed rural to urban migrants. In addition, the country’s population grew by 50 percent between 1875 and 1910. This growth contributed to the limited wage labor opportunities available within Mexico.
The frustration caused by this economic development contributed to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Subsequent political instability motivated many Mexicans to migrate to the United States. Concurrently, the American Southwest (principally Texas, Arizona, and California) experienced rapid economic growth, largely in the labor-intensive areas of agriculture, mining, and railroads. In order to compete in the national market, industries sought ways to minimize their production costs. Because Diaz’s economic development had resulted in better transportation connections between the United States and Mexico, American employers increasingly relied on Mexico as a cheap reservoir of both labor and raw materials. By the 1920s, the promise of higher wages easily attracted Mexican laborers to the United States. The average daily wage differed substantially between the two countries. In 1910, male agricultural workers in Mexico could anticipate making between 20 and 25 cents daily while their peers in the United States could expect to earn between 50 cents and one dollar per day. By 1920, the daily wage in the United States had risen to between $1 and $2, while in Mexico it remained virtually unchanged.
Higher wages were not the sole reason for the steady increase of Mexican immigrants to the United States during the 1920s. While the federal government enacted legislation that capped the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States annually, emigration from within the Western Hemisphere remained untouched by the Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924. More than 450,000 Mexicans entered the United States during the 1920s, representing nearly 11 percent of the total immigrant population for the decade. In addition, thousands more took advantage of the relatively porous border and entered without the necessary visas. Although the 1924 National Origins Act did not apply any quotas on the number of Mexican immigrants, it did establish the Border Patrol under the authority of the U. S. Bureau of immigration. Nevertheless, migrants still found ways across the border under the assistance of “coyotes,” as the border-crossing experts came to be known.
For the most part, Mexican immigrants settled in Texas, Arizona, and California. The bulk of the American population was either unaware or unconcerned with this group. Through the 1920s, the response to Mexicans was varied, but it never reached the level of hostility that had been witnessed by Asian immigrants. The volume of Mexican immigration to the United States declined around 1928 as American consulates in Mexico started to enforce the literacy requirements of the Immigration Act of 1917. More than this stricter enforcement, the Great Depression brought a noticeable halt to the movement of Mexicans into the United States. Not only did large numbers of Mexicans voluntarily decide to return home, but also the
United States forcibly repatriated many Mexicans who did not hold the proper documentation when many localities argued that immigrants were a drain on limited resources. The patterns of Mexican migration to fill the employment needs of such industries as agriculture, were well developed from 1900 to 1930. Following the Great Depression, employers in the southwest quickly turned to the federal government to create programs to supply them with sufficient numbers of employees from across the border in Mexico.
See also ethnic organizations; race and racial conelict.
Further reading: David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
—David R. Smith
World History
