The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

In April 1917, the month the United States entered the war, Wilson signed into law a set of sweeping constraints on immigration, which included literacy tests, entrance taxes, and quota restrictions. The legislation mostly applied to Europeans and Asians. Mexican migrant workers, who were needed to labor in the fields and mines of the Southwest and the West, were exempt from the quotas (“Western farmers were completely dependent on Mexican workers,” as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández writes). They were, however, supposed to go through established checkpoints, where they were subjected to health inspections and delousing.* It was an odd system, half enforced, half not—half water, half metal. Border towns turned into waiting rooms, as thousands of Mexicans every day submitted to the new rituals.22 Nearly half a million Mexicans entered the country legally between 1920 and 1928, according to immigration records.23 But probably at least that many just quietly walked over Tijuana’s unguarded chaparral or ferried across the Rio Grande, going back and forth every day to jobs in smelters, mines, fields, and households.