The first step toward a systematic immigration code came with the Immigration Act of 1917. Previously, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Foran Act of 1885, and a series of additional laws in the early 1900s deemed unfit for entry Asians, foreign contract laborers, anarchists, prostitutes, the diseased, and anyone "likely to become a public charge." The new law doubled the head tax for entry to eight dollars per person and added a literacy test (in their native language) for heads of household while maintaining all of the older restrictions.3 Along the U.S.-Mexico border, many applicants immediately withdrew their applications. Presumably, many simply entered as undocumented migrants across the largely unguarded southern border.4 Not surprisingly, the growers of South Texas, in the process of building their agricultural empires, angrily decried the legislation. Picking up the refrain that they had an inherent right to Mexican labor, the growers fretted that the immigration restrictions would ruin them. The U.S. Department of Labor, the Immigration Service, congressmen, and senators received an almost endless stream of letters and telegrams from farmers and other Texans who demanded an end to immigration restrictions. A mine manager in Central Texas, for instance, wrote to Senator Charles A. Culberson that it was "the 'hewers of wood and carriers of water' class of Mexicans that we are after." In other words, he and other employers wanted precisely the sort of immigrants the head tax and literacy test were meant to exclude. "Lots of these Mexicans are in Mexico today and want to return to Texas but can not," he complained. "All labor in every line is very short, and scarce, high prices are being paid, and you cannot get the labor because the labor is just simply not there." Similar urgent pleas for help came from all over the state, as chambers of commerce, often rechristened as "councils of defense" during World War I, begged for more labor from Mexico.5
This pressure quickly had its intended result. Eighteen days after the immigration act went into effect on 5 May, Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson bowed to these insistent calls for increased immigration. Wilson issued a departmental order that suspended the literacy test, head tax, and contract labor exclusion for Mexican agricultural
1994). These studies, however, ignore Texas and fail to connect the deportations with the nativist agitation of the 1920s. Too many other studies to list have accepted the traditional narrative of deportations following the economic collapse, including two recent books that deal specifically with the history of U.S. deportation policy: Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA, 2007) and Deirdre M. Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy since 1882 (Chapel Hill, 2012).
3 Nativist forces sought a literacy test for decades but failed to secure its passage since first attempting such a bill in 1897. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1955), 162.
4 Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900-1940 (Westport, CT, 1976), 24.
5 E. S. Orgain to Charles A. Culberson, n.d., file 54261/202, box 271, Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2004, Record Group 85, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter Policy Files). This file contains many similar letters. The vast majority of these entreaties to the federal government came from Texas. Complaints came from other states as well but not on the same scale.