One Hundred Years of Border Control
A new special issue of California History commemorates the centennial of the Border Patrol and the Immigration Act of 1924. The issue includes new research that critically examines the troubled origins and history of the U.S. Border Patrol and the restrictive immigration legislation that created it. We asked the issue's guest editors Benny Andrés, Jr., and José M. Alamillo to tell us more about the issue and how it can inform our current political moment.
What motivated you to assemble this special issue?
We started with these fundamental questions:
- Who should be allowed to immigrate to the United States?
- Whom should we turn away at our borders, which individuals are fit or unfit to live among us?
- Which immigrants already living among us should be rounded up, deported, and returned to their countries of origin?
These are not academic questions, as is clear to anyone watching the 2024 run for the U.S. White House. As immigration historian Kelly Lytle Hernández remarked in her October 26, 2024, presidential address before the Western History Association, our nation’s hostility towards immigrants is the focal point of discussion in its final week before the election, when the Republican candidate for President of the United States “has repeatedly referred to immigrants as ‘pet eaters’ and ‘murderers,’ as people with ‘bad genes’ from ‘shit-hole countries’.” Now is the time for all of us to think deeply about our nation’s borders and our historical fixation with keeping out those we fear.
This ongoing debate about immigration got us thinking about the year 2024, which marks a century of U.S. efforts to control our borders under the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act. Congress passed that act under the influence of eugenicists and other White supremacists who were committed to preserving the United States as a majority-White nation. They believed immigration from Asia, eastern and southern Europe, and other parts of the world threatened White power. We thought also about this anniversary in light of Black Lives Matter and ongoing discussions about Confederate monuments, for example, and whether it is appropriate to honor individuals who stood for anti-democratic, White supremacist values. As we observed plans being made across the country to commemorate the centennial of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, we opted for a special issue of California History focusing on the Border Patrol, created in that same year to enforce national restrictions on entry into the United States. The result was a special issue focusing on the origins, evolution, and deeply problematic nature of the U.S. Border Patrol.
How did you recruit and select the essays for the special issue?
We reached out to scholars and invited them to submit original research or research-in-progress on topics related to immigration and the Border Patrol with a connection to California. In particular, we preferred submissions with innovative approaches and fresh perspectives that used new or underutilized archival sources. Simultaneously, we solicited top scholars to peer review special issue manuscripts. Once we had selected our issue’s three research essays, we secured a Public History essay exploring exciting archival sources, and we approached a distinguished scholar for the issue’s Leading Edge piece, an essay that frames the special issue and provides a sweeping interpretation drawn from secondary and primary sources as well as his own decades teaching immigration history.
What are key themes and issues raised by the essays in this special issue?
The first essay explores the use of electronic technology in human surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Border Patrol efforts to expand its surveillance capabilities represent an unprecedent expansion of state power that spills beyond the agency’s role at the border. Broadened Border Patrol surveillance activities threaten the civil rights and liberties of private citizens who pose no threat to border security. Our second essay tells the untold story of female anarchist organizers who spread maternal anarchist ideologies on both sides of the border, resisted the Mexican government and the Catholic Church in Mexico, and articulated labor demands from a maternal perspective. Learning more about these activists encourages us to think more deeply about all the unknown women who have inhabited, challenged, transgressed, and violated immigration laws and state power in their efforts to become members of the nation. The third essay illustrates how restrictive laws, policies, and actions impact immigrants and their families and inform the nation’s most dramatic expressions of public art. Finally, our Public History essay reveals the importance of oral histories in capturing the stories of immigrants, immigrant advocates, and border patrol agents, whose personal narratives are typically left out of formal immigration studies.
What was something surprising or unexpected that emerged from these essays?
We were surprised by the new sources discovered by the authors, including the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Magazine and Photographs Collection, its History Office, and Library; records of the Department of Homeland Security; the state archives of Mexico, such as Estado de San Luis Potosí and Instituto de Cultura de Baja California; and Oral History Collections of the Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso. Speaking of the latter, we were fascinated by the oral histories discussed in our Public History essay. Oral histories are more than just memories of past events: they show us the spirit, motivations, and dreams of those crossing our nation’s borders, an underexplored aspect in formal studies of immigration history. Despite our collective decades spent studying immigration, we did not know that these sources existed. We were overwhelmed by the richness of the untapped sources explored in our special issue, and by the quality and originality of the authors’ work. We believe this issue provides an exciting roadmap for future scholarship into studies of immigration and border control efforts.
What is the key message the journal’s readers will take away from this special issue?
These essays speak to the present anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States. That candidate has consistently attacked people of color as unworthy of entry to the United States, as criminals who should be turned away from our borders and, where that fails, persons should be rounded up and expelled. The candidate continuously repeats debunked, disproven, and rejected eugenicist narratives about “undesirable” immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He routinely calls for mass deportation of individuals that he deems unworthy of immigration to the United States. Our nation’s long indulgence in anti-immigration rhetoric is remarkably resilient. Our national xenophobia endures despite a century of proof that these sentiments have no basis in fact. The presidential campaigns of 2024 reveal how desperately important it is that Americans think critically about immigration tropes and to understand how the shrill insistence on closing our nation’s borders festers at the heart of American political discourse.
We invite you to read California History's special issue, "1924–2024: One Hundred Years of Border Patrol," for free online for a limited time.
Print copies of the special issue (issue 101.4) can be purchased on the journal’s site. For ongoing access to PHR, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.
About the Authors
Benny J. Andrés, Jr. is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He teaches courses on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Latino/a history, U.S. history, the American West, and U.S. food history. He is the author of Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Nature, Agribusiness, and Workers on the California Borderland, 1900-1940 (2015). He is writing two monographs, an environmental history of the lower Colorado River region and a historiographical study on the legacy of Mexican Repatriation.
José M. Alamillo is Professor and Chair of the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University Channel Islands at Camarillo, CA. His research focuses on labor, immigration, gender, leisure, and sports in ethnic Mexican communities. He is the author of Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town (2006) and Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora for Rutgers University Press (2020). He is currently researching floods and disaster relief organizations in ethnic Mexican communities along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.