Mexican immigration to the U.S
(2)Ever since the 1890’s, immigrants have come from many countries, especially Mexico, all the way to the U.S. They came looking for jobs, wealth, safe places to live, and more. Around the 1920’s, Americans encouraged the immigration of these people, mostly because the south needed the cheap labor for their farms and plantations. They were even excluded from the immigration act in 1924 that put quotas on how many immigrants from certain countries could come into the U.S. Mexican-Americans are very important to the U.S. society, economy, and overall stability. (3)The first Mexican migration was not to the U.S., instead, it was from the U.S. After the Mexican-American war in 1846, the United States annexed off …show more content…
as they pleased. There were no limits and no restrictions to be able to go. In 1917, the United States started requiring two things of each immigrant before they could come to the U.S. - a small fee, and a medical inspection. The people who chose not to do that, but still went to the U.S., were the first illegal immigrants. There were multiple reasons for these people not doing these simple and easy checks and fees. One reason why is because they were sick and did not want to be denied from going to America, and another would be that they could not afford the fee of around $8 to be able to get in. Some argue, however, that the first illegal immigrants did not occur until around 1924. At this time, the U.S. had gotten new workers to work as border patrol, preventing people from crossing the border if they had not been checked and paid the fee. During this, quota laws were put on other countries to restrict too much immigration from them, and many people wanted these laws to be extended to Mexico and other Latin American countries as well. These laws were not used against Mexico however, because of how great the Mexican immigrants impacted the labor force in the …show more content…
lost a lot of people to go to the war, resulting in fewer people working. This gave the opportunity for many more Mexicans to come to the U.S. to get a job again. To help increase the number of legal migrant workers in the U.S., the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico called the Bracero program. This program legally allowed immigrants to come to the U.S. for a certain amount of time, and then leave afterward. Southern farm owners loved this idea so much, except they wanted the immigrants for longer. They rallied and protested to have the contracts allow the immigrants to stay longer, because the longer they stayed, the more they could get out of the cheap labor. During this time though, there were still many illegal immigrants. The way that southerners fixed this is they would take these immigrants to the Mexican border, have them step across the line, give them a bracero contract, and had them legally come back to work on the farms for them. This was known as “drying out the wetbacks.” This was the easiest way for Mexicans to get bracero contracts and was used quite often up until 1964 when the contracts ran