The strange career of the illegal alien: immigration restriction and deportation policy in the United States, 1921-1965

Abstract

The United States Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 established numerical restrictions for the first time, which made illegal immigration the central problem of U.S. immigration-law enforcement. This article examines the advent of illegal immigration as a mass phenomenon and the development of administrative-law policies to identify, apprehend, and deport illegal aliens, as well as reforms that enabled some illegal aliens to legalize their status. It examines illegal immigrants from Europe and Mexico and how policies towards each group diverged, creating different short and long-term consequences for their respective racial status, legal standing, and social legitimacy. The article argues that these racialized trajectories did not result entirely from existing racism but were in the main generated by administrative-legal distinctions between criminal aliens and unlawful-border crossers that selectively made and unmade (?) illegal aliens (?).

Immigration; Deportation; Border