| Permeability has been and remains a defining characteristic of the border between Mexico and the United States, despite more than a century of efforts by the United States to enforce various border-crossing restrictions on immigrant aliens. This work presents a narrative history of undocumented immigration and border enforcement efforts between 1882 and 1930. As Congress enacted new immigration restrictions in the years after 1882, hundreds of thousands of immigrants responded by attempting to cross into the United States illicitly through Canada and, increasingly after 1900, Mexico. Efforts to enforce immigration laws along the nation's borders during this period---through the designation of official ports of entry and the assignment of federal patrol officers to the international lines---met effective resistance from migrants and smugglers along both of the nation's contiguous land boundaries, but particularly along its border with Mexico.; The resistance to a formal, modernized regime of border control came from a surprisingly multiethnic assortment of migrants, including Asians, Europeans, and migrants from the Middle East. In their efforts to avoid the ever more restrictive provisions of American immigration law during this period, these immigrants availed themselves of the natural advantages of the borderlands environment. At the same time, they created effective traditions of disguise, deceit, and surreptitious entry to carry themselves past the federal officials newly stationed along the U.S.-Mexico line. By the 1920s, these same traditions had become an essential part of the border-crossing strategies of many Mexican migrants as well.; On balance, the abilities of the U.S. government to police entry across the Mexican border measurably increased during this period, yet those abilities remained importantly circumscribed. I argue that federal efforts to fashion an effective system of control over cross-border migration along the southern boundary of the United States were ultimately undermined by the ingenuity and persistence of migrants and smugglers, the physical and cultural geographies of the Mexican borderlands, and, especially after 1900, efforts by American employers in the Southwest to maintain their access to cheap Mexican labor. |
