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 Editorials | Opinions | October 2007 
Chinese Were 1st 'Illegal Immigrants'
 Leon Metz - El Paso Times
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Both El Paso and Juárez became major international population dispersion points during the early 1900s, a period of great Mexican migration.
Poor, transient migrants streamed north through Juárez and into El Paso, there existing no serious limitation on Mexican immigration, although with few records kept, the figures usually cited are anemic and useless.
Workers poured north in hopes of finding employment that even by American standards tended to be demeaning, demanding and low -paying.
During those times, wages for Mexican agricultural workers averaged 36 cents a day. So labor agents literally fought for Mexican males. Workers would be shanghaied off the international bridges, hustled to a company-owned barracks and signed up.
Fights between competing labor contractors occurred. On April 1, 1910, the El Paso Morning Times (as it was called in those days), mentioned 1,500 Mexican laborers being shipped through El Paso to states as distant as Illinois and Nebraska.
Reporters described them as "being herded like cattle to the Union Depot."
Yet, despite sizable numbers, contractors had orders for 5,000 more.
Interestingly, on Sept. 9, 1910, Antonio Ponce de Leon, the Juárez chief of police, warned that "any American caught begging in Juárez, or lying around the saloons, would be put to work grading streets."
So although Mexican labor surged through El Paso undisturbed and unquestioned, such consideration did not apply to the Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s banned their entry into the United States, so they usually disembarked at Guaymas, Mexico, trudging overland to the Mexican Central Railroad (Ferrocarril Central Mexicano).
There they took passage to Juárez, acquired forged United States residence papers, and slipped north across the border.
One enforcement example occurred in mid-December 1910. Immigration officials arrested two Americans and 16 Chinese hiding in a hay-lined boxcar at Ysleta, the hay stacked to resemble a full load.
The human cargo huddled in the center, surrounded by water, ham and potatoes, provisions for 15 days.
So the Chinese were the first "illegal aliens" slipping into the United States, usually first migrating "legally" to Mexico, then slipping north toward the international border where they crossed into the United States.
In fact, if my information is correct, the U.S. Border Patrol agents were first known as "Chinese Immigration Agents," if not formally, then certainly by common discourse.
Restrictions against Mexican intrusions in those days were quite rare.
Interestingly, if I have heard one, I've heard a hundred stories of tunnels under the Rio Grande, or even from one house to another in certain parts of Downtown, a possibility, although I tend to doubt it.
Most authorities tend to equate these alleged tunnels with illegal Mexican intrusions, but if tunnels existed, in my judgment they would have been useful primarily to the Chinese.
However, I can't imagine either faction actually digging tunnels under the river.
The "river" in those days really was a "muy grande" body of water. That's why it's called the Rio Grande (Great River).
Leon Metz, an El Paso historian, writes often for the El Paso Times. E-mail: cmetz48888@aol.com |
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