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The INS on the Line
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center
for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University
The INS on the Line
Making Immigration Law on the
US–╉Mexico Border, 1917–╉1954
S. D E B O R A H K A N G
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Portions of chapters in this book have been adapted from “Crossing the Line: The INS and the Federal
Regulation of the Mexican Border,” Bridging National Borders in North America, edited by Benjamin Heber
Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, 167–198. © 2010, Duke University Press, and “Implementation: How the
Borderlands Redefined Federal Immigration Law and Policy, 1917–1924,” California Legal History:
Journal of the California Supreme Court Historical Society 7 (2012).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgmentsâ•… vii
Introductionâ•… 1
4. An Agency in Crisisâ•… 87
Conclusionâ•… 168
Notesâ•… 181
Bibliographyâ•… 249
Indexâ•… 273
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would not have had the wonderful opportunity to write this book without the
support of many institutions, colleagues, and friends. From start to finish, the
Clements Center for Southwest Studies has been a tremendous source of sup-
port, providing a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed me to begin the process
of transforming my PhD dissertation into a book and a generous subvention
that facilitated the production of the manuscript. Grants from the Huntington
Library and California State University, San Marcos made it possible for me to
conduct additional archival research in Arizona, California, and Washington,
DC. For fifteen months, the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the
University of California, San Diego was my home away from home. I will al-
ways be grateful to David FitzGerald, John Skretny, Ana Minvielle, and Marisa
Evanouski for supplying me with an office and a peaceful place to write as I final-
ized the revisions to the manuscript.
This book is so much the better thanks to the assistance and expertise of
numerous archivists and librarians throughout the country. At the National
Archives in Washington, DC, Suzanne Harris’s efforts on my behalf were noth-
ing short of Herculean. Marian Smith, Zack Wilske, and Charlaine Cook shared
their unparalleled knowledge of immigration policy history as well as the re-
sources housed in the US Citizenship and Immigration Services History Office
and Library. Archivists at the following institutions also provided invaluable
assistance: the Arizona Historical Foundation at Arizona State University; the
Arizona Historical Society; the Bancroft Library at the University of California,
Berkeley; the Charles E. Young Research Library and the Chicano Studies
Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Department
of Archives and Manuscripts at Arizona State University; the El Paso Public
Library; the Georgetown University Law Library; the Huntington Library; the
Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego; the Library of Congress;
the San Diego History Center; the United States Border Patrol Museum in El
vii
viii A ck nowl edg ments
Paso, Texas; the Special Collections at the University of Arizona; the Special
Collections and Archives at the University of California, San Diego; and the
Special Collections at the University of Texas, El Paso.
I also greatly benefited from the insightful commentary of colleagues who
read various portions of this work. Brian Balogh, David Gutiérrez, Benjamin
Johnson, Andrew Needham, Monica Perales, Sherry Smith, the late David
Weber, and members of the academic community from Arlington and Dallas,
Texas graciously provided extensive recommendations during a manuscript
workshop hosted by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies. Through an
incredibly enriching symposium series, Bridging National Borders in North
America, initiated by Benjamin Johnson and Andrew Graybill and sponsored
by the Clements Center, I had the chance to present various versions of chapter
1. Lizabeth Cohen’s Graduate Student Workshop in Twentieth-Century United
States History at Harvard University kindly reviewed an early version of chapter
2. At the University of California, Berkeley, Mark Brilliant and Brian DeLay cre-
ated opportunities for me to present my work in the Department of History, and
at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History as well as
the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians. In these
venues, I received invaluable feedback from Reuel Schiller, Katherine Benton-
Cohen, and Pekka Hämäläinen.
In the Department of History at California State University, San Marcos,
Anne Lombard, Michael Henderson, Katherine Hijar, and Olga Gonzalez-Silén
helped me to improve the introduction, while Jeff Charles and Jill Watts supplied
essential advice regarding the production of the manuscript. Philip Wolgin, a
former classmate from graduate school and the managing director for the im-
migration policy team at the Center for American Progress, encouraged me
to think more rigorously about the implications of my work for policymakers
and policy historians. Illuminating conversations with Andrea Geiger, Raphi
Rechitsky, Martin Shapiro, and Rachel St. John helped me to reframe various
aspects of the book. In my immigration history classes at Harvard University
and the University of California, Berkeley, and my Chicano/a history class at
California State University, San Marcos, my students taught me just as much as I
taught them about what it means to be an immigrant in America. Their insights
on US immigration policy and personal experiences with the INS and the
Border Patrol transformed my own perspectives on these subjects. The anon-
ymous readers at Oxford University Press offered deeply substantive remarks
that guided the revision of the manuscript. Susan Ferber, my editor at the Press,
prepared comments and line edits that were breathtaking in their genius.
I am very grateful to Jeremy Toynbee and his team at Newgen UK for their
expert handling of matters related to the production of the book. I would also
like to thank Patty Cañas, California State University, San Marcos, for her deft
A ck nowl edg ment s ix
1
2 The INS on the Line
of early twentieth-century immigration laws, they reflected his view that the
borderlands were different. Wilmoth understood that the region presented a
unique set of enforcement challenges that would render his officers unable to
replicate the achievements and approaches of their peers at Angel Island and Ellis
Island, the most restrictive immigration stations in the country prior to World
War I.4 He subsequently explained the need for a distinctive approach to im-
migration law enforcement in a 1934 training manual: “While the Immigration
Service of the Mexican border, of course, conforms to general practice, the wide
differences in physical conditions, in the local situations, and in the nature of
our contacts with various foreign peoples make imperative noticeable departure
from the general practice in several material respects.”5 For much of the twen-
tieth century, immigration officials in the Southwest followed Wilmoth’s ex-
ample by creating numerous local departures from the federal immigration laws.
The INS on the Line traces the ways in which the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) on the US–Mexico border made and remade the
nation’s immigration laws over the course of the twentieth century.6 In so doing,
it argues that the INS functioned not only as a law enforcement agency, but also
as a lawmaking body; the agency not only administered the nation’s immigra-
tion laws, it also made them. These lawmaking endeavors furnished local agency
officials with a critical tool, deployed in response to a set of enduring challenges
surrounding immigration law enforcement on the US–Mexico border. These
included a lack of political, financial, and even moral support from policymak-
ers in Washington, DC; intraagency conflicts and debates; tremendous opposi-
tion from border residents, including Asian, European, Mexican, and American
nationals living on both sides of the line; and the seemingly impossible task of
policing the rugged terrain of the 2,000-mile international boundary. In the face
of these obstacles southwestern agency officials amended, nullified, and even
rewrote the nation’s immigration laws, producing new laws and policies for the
border region. As early as 1920, the agency’s resort to legal innovations was so
extensive that one local immigration leader observed that a “sectional” immigra-
tion policy existed in the borderlands.7
Yet despite the contingent and local quality of these legal innovations, they
shaped the capacities of the American state on the US–Mexico border. Over
time, the agency’s repeated resort to the law resulted in the creation of a com-
plex approach to immigration regulation in the borderlands. This approach
closed the border to unwanted immigrants but simultaneously opened it for
the benefit of local residents, tourists, and trade. Meanwhile the Border Patrol,
the mobile enforcement unit of the INS, redefined the border as a policing
jurisdiction, stretching the geographical limits of its authority to pursue un-
documented immigrants from the international boundary to public and pri-
vates spaces far north of the line. More broadly, the agency’s legal innovations
Int roduc tion 3
Over the past fifty years, INS operations on the US–Mexico border have gen-
erated much interest among scholars, policymakers, and pundits. Despite their
different approaches to the study of the agency, their works have produced two
competing and even contradictory interpretations. One argues that the INS was
weak and ineffectual and failed to seal the border against the entry of unwanted
immigrants.8 The other casts the INS as a strong and effective agency that de-
veloped highly aggressive tactics to deter illegal border crossings.9 For decades,
these two interpretations have regularly traded places as the prevailing account
of the agency’s history. Yet this bipolar characterization of the INS obscures a
more nuanced understanding of agency operations in the Southwest. As policy-
makers in Washington, DC debated (and continue to debate) the successes and
failures of border enforcement, American immigration law and policy quietly and
steadily took shape in the hands of borderlands administrators. While outsiders
often construed the work of the INS in narrow enforcement terms, the agency on
the US–Mexico border defined itself not only as a law enforcement agency, but
also as a lawmaking body. As such, the agency played a profound role in shaping
our conceptions of immigration law and policy, immigrant rights, and the border.
As a lawmaking entity, the INS is no different than the many bureaucracies
that populate the American administrative state. Its lawmaking authority has its
origins in Progressive-era notions regarding the role of expertise in American
governance.10 Defenders of administrative agencies specifically argued that the
courts and Congress lacked the capacities to understand and regulate a com-
plex modern society. Regulation, then, belonged in the hands of experts trained
in the social sciences, who possessed specialized knowledge about the various
facets of the nation’s economic, political, and social institutions.11 At the turn of
the last century, Congress charged these experts to address some of the nation’s
most pressing crises as bureaucrats within the fledging administrative state. By
delegating its lawmaking authority to the new administrative agencies, Congress
ensured that agency administrators had the authority to translate their ideas into
laws and public policies.12
While the INS shared with other administrative agencies the ability to make
law, over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its very
approach to lawmaking gradually departed from the mainstream of American ad-
ministrative practice. In the late nineteenth century, as the federal courts began
scrutinizing the lawmaking authority of the nation’s administrative agencies, the
Supreme Court, in a series of now foundational cases referred to as the Chinese
4 The INS on the Line
exclusion cases, largely exempted the Bureau of Immigration from judicial re-
view of its admissions and deportation procedures.13 By the early twentieth cen-
tury, the Court also excused the agency from the application of constitutional
norms to its own internal hearing procedures.14 The explosive growth of the
administrative state during the 1930s prompted a fresh round of criticisms re-
garding its impact on representative government and individual rights.15 In re-
sponse, Congress passed the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 (APA),
which articulated a basic set of standards regarding agencies’ lawmaking activ-
ities, specifically their rule-making procedures and internal hearing practices.16
In an ideal world these standards would ensure that agencies, as they devised
laws and policies, remained responsive to the American public.17 Yet the INS
remained exempt from the provisions of the APA.18 Unconstrained by the pro-
cedures stipulated by the APA and judicial review of its administrative practices
and internal adjudications, the INS became, in historian Lucy Salyer’s words, an
“ ‘outlaw’ in American legal culture.”19
These legacies of the Chinese exclusion era and the New Deal created the
framework within which Bureau of Immigration officials in the Southwest made
the nation’s immigration laws. Cognizant of the breadth of their authority, im-
migration inspectors and Border Patrol officers devised a wide array of policies
pertaining to admissions, deportation, enforcement, and even immigrant rights.
To a great extent, these lawmaking activities resembled those described by his-
tories of agency operations on Angel Island and Ellis Island.20 In these locales
as well as along the US–Mexico border, the INS relied heavily on its admin-
istrative discretion, interpreting the nation’s immigration laws in the broadest
terms possible so as to maximize their restrictive impact.21 Yet these works fail
to recount the many other forms of lawmaking undertaken by the INS in the
borderlands. This book fills this gap by describing the varied uses of administra-
tive discretion in the Southwest that simultaneously enhanced and diminished
the exclusionary aspects of federal immigration laws. In addition, southwestern
immigration officials played a central role in the preparation of internal agency
regulations, which effectively constituted an operations manual for the agency,
and the drafting of federal immigration statutes.22 Finally, local agency officials
engaged in legal debates that informed conceptions of immigrant rights and,
ultimately, curtailed the already limited constitutional status of immigrants in
the United States.23 Through these disparate means, the INS in the borderlands
demonstrated the breadth and depth of its ability to make the law.24
While the agency’s lawmaking endeavors were unmoored from the over-
sight of Congress and the courts, they were not conducted in a vacuum. Instead,
the agency’s legal innovations responded to and reflected the complexities of
the US–Mexico borderlands. INS officials stationed in Arizona, California,
and Texas—a region long distinguished by its cultural diversity, transnational
Int roduc tion 5
In the simplest terms, The INS on the Line is an institutional history of the INS on
the US–Mexico border. As such it offers a holistic account of the agency, produc-
ing one of the first comprehensive accounts of its admissions, deportation, and
enforcement procedures on the nation’s southern line.29 It also recounts changes
in the agency’s mission and operations over time, particularly with respect to its
border crossing policies, the guest worker programs of World War I and World
War II, its strategies for border policing, and, most prominently, its lawmaking
activities. Through a detailed examination of agency operations in California,
Arizona, and Texas, this book affords comparisons and contrasts between the
regional branches of the agency as well as the conflicts that suffused the relation-
ship between the local and national offices. Finally, as a study of the agency’s law-
making functions, it primarily follows the work of entry and mid-level agency
6 The INS on the Line
The INS on the Line draws upon a variety of archival sources from Arizona,
California, Texas, and Washington, DC, relying most heavily upon the agency’s
own policy, or correspondence, files.39 Even though these files primarily convey
the viewpoints of the agency, they offer a wealth of detail regarding its daily op-
erations. For instance, they allow one to discern the differences between agency
offices in Texas, Arizona, and California; observe the competition for resources
and prestige that frequently occurred between the immigration inspection force
and the Border Patrol; and track developments in the agency’s admissions, de-
portation, and enforcement policies over time. Critically, they record disagree-
ments and conflicts between the agency’s central office in Washington, DC, its
regional branches in the borderlands, and border residents living on both sides
of the line. These disputes form the core of this narrative, for they reveal how
local immigration officials departed from the federal immigration laws and, con-
versely, how national immigration policies evolved from what were once local
and improvised administrative practices.
This book begins in the borderlands, with an account of the social, polit-
ical, and even geographical challenges faced by immigration officials in the first
decades of the twentieth century. In the first three chapters, I explain how im-
migration inspectors and Border Patrol officers in the Southwest responded to
these obstacles by devising new policies pertaining to admissions, deportation,
and enforcement. Chapter 1 describes how the bureau, through the World War
I agricultural labor program, border crossing cards, and what I refer to as a lit-
eracy test waiver, sustained the transnational character of the borderlands for
the benefit of local residents. By 1924 Congress, as I explain in c hapter 2, created
the Border Patrol, a mobile enforcement unit charged with the duty of closing
the line to unwanted immigrants. Yet the unit found itself working at cross-
purposes with immigration inspectors who promoted the regional economic
boom of the 1920s by creating new border crossing procedures. In response, the
Border Patrol began a thirty-year effort to expand its legal jurisdiction beyond
Int roduc tion 9
the international boundary and well within the nation’s interior. Lacking the po-
litical support of local and national policymakers, southwestern Patrol officers
resorted to the law to define an institutional identity and enhance their enforce-
ment capacities. But by the 1930s, the agency’s enforcement practices, partic-
ularly its deportation procedures, drew the criticism of reformers both inside
and outside the bureau. As I discuss in c hapter 3, the agency, unbound by the
oversight of the courts and Congress, developed a highly aggressive approach
to border enforcement. As a result, for a moment in its history the INS in the
Southwest considered the implications of its policies and procedures for im-
migrant rights and instituted a series of reforms. More broadly, these reforms
revealed the range of the agency’s lawmaking activities. Local INS officials not
only devised internal agency procedures and drafted congressional statutes; they
also played a role in shaping and, ultimately, constricting constitutional norms
pertaining to unauthorized immigrants.
By the 1940s, the reform movement of the 1930s gave way to the sheer lo-
gistical demands presented by the Bracero Program and the unprecedented in-
crease in the number of immigrants who entered without inspection. Chapter
4 describes how the INS, once again, found itself operating from a position
of weakness and buffeted by competing pressures. On the one hand, growers
demanded that the border remain open to bracero workers while, on the other
hand, the Mexican government emerged as the most vocal proponent of an
aggressive enforcement policy and a closed border. Yet as I explain in c hapter
5, the contingencies and crises generated during the first decade of the Bracero
Program led the INS to change, engaging in a series of lawmaking activities
that bolstered the immigration enforcement capacities of the American state in
the borderlands. More specifically, southwestern agency leaders sought polit-
ical support at the national level, particularly from the executive branch, for its
border enforcement duties. In the process, they successfully lobbied for legisla-
tion that rendered local practices national policy and federal law. Among these
included procedures once excoriated by legal reformers and the INS itself in the
1930s. By the 1950s, all the tactics that local immigration officers had devised
over the years were put into play with the sanction of Congress and the president
in a mass deportation campaign known as Operation Wetback, which I discuss
in chapter 6. The campaign not only legitimized mass deportation as a response
to undocumented immigration, it also institutionalized a regulatory approach
to border enforcement, an approach that simultaneously closed the line to the
entry of unwanted immigrants and opened the border for the sake of labor and
trade.
The conclusion provides an overview of developments in contemporary
American immigration policy from 1954 to the present. Faced with the same
dilemmas—how to open the borders to the free flow of trade, travelers, and
10 The INS on the Line
11
12 The INS on the Line
Without the resources and, many times, the will to adequately enforce the
new laws, southwestern immigration officials facilitated the waiver of old policies
or creation of new policies that made their lives and the lives of border residents
much easier. The most prominent of these was the wartime labor importation
program, initiated to overcome the objections of southwestern industries to the
restrictive provisions of the Immigration Act of 1917 and the Passport Act of
1918.5 In addition, the service modified the new laws for ordinary border resi-
dents as well as the rich and powerful. When thousands of locals complained
about the literacy test provisions of the Immigration Act of 1917, the bureau cre-
ated “border waivers” for illiterate Mexican nationals who lived on both sides of
the border. As the administrators of the Passport Act of 1918, southwestern im-
migration officials devised additional exemptions, specifically a border crossing
card program for local residents. Although the border crossing card primarily
assisted Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, it also benefited Americans
and Europeans, as well as Asian, Asian American, and Asian Mexican mer-
chants. Together, these policy innovations—to the chagrin of anti-immigration
advocates—sustained the transnational character of the borderlands.
All of this is not to deny the bureau’s vigorous efforts to bar Mexican, Asian,
and European nationals from admission for permanent residence or to expel un-
wanted immigrants in this period. Instead, during World War I and well into the
1920s, the bureau was concerned not only with the restriction of immigrants
but also with the regulation of the local border population. While immigration
historians have provided extensive accounts of those migrants seeking entry
for permanent residence (formally referred to as “immigrants” by the Bureau
of Immigration), this chapter shifts the focus of attention from immigrants to
border crossers (officially categorized as “nonimmigrants”). This population typ-
ically included laborers, tourists, local residents, dignitaries, and businessmen
who crossed and recrossed the border on a regular basis for short periods of time.
Their presence led the agency to construct an immigration policy for the border-
lands, a policy that departed from the restrictionist tenets of the federal immigra-
tion and passport laws but met the needs of border society and its economy.
Until World War I, the economic and social needs of the borderlands, rather
than immigration regulations, served as the forces driving migration be-
tween Mexico and the United States. As historian Mario T. García explains,
Mexican immigration was “inextricably linked with the growth of American
industrial capitalism.”6 The primary southwestern industries—railroads, min-
ing, ranching, and agriculture—met their labor needs with migrant workers.7
As these industries triggered the growth of border towns, immigrants, once
again, met the burgeoning demand for workers in both the primary (the rail,
mining, and ranching industries) and secondary economic sectors (including
A Sec tional Immig ration Poli c y 13
manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, and construction).8 Given the prox-
imity of Mexico, the passage of the Chinese exclusion acts (which barred the
entry of Chinese laborers in the late nineteenth century), and political upheav-
als in early twentieth-century Mexico (including the land policies of the Díaz
regime and the Mexican Revolution), Mexican nationals comprised the bulk of
the immigrant work force.9
Recognizing the importance of immigration to the border economy, federal
officials took a highly uneven approach to border enforcement at the turn of
the last century.10 While immigration inspectors were vigilant in the applica-
tion of the Chinese exclusion laws, they simultaneously adopted a laissez-faire
stance toward Mexican migration across the line.11 Indeed, at the urging of cor-
porations such as the Southern Pacific Railroad, Congress exempted Mexican
immigrants from the head taxes stipulated under the Immigration Acts of 1903
and 1907.12 Even though southwestern officials possessed other statutory means
to restrict Mexican immigration, they chose not to exercise this authority on
a regular basis.13 Instead, they allowed most Mexican immigrants to cross the
international line without inspection.14 Some immigration officials, according
to historian George Sánchez, even recruited migrant workers for southwestern
industries in exchange for bribes.15 As a result of its lax approach to immigration
law enforcement, the Bureau of Immigration itself sustained the transnational
character of the borderlands.
The porousness of the border not only facilitated the migration of Mexicans
north to the United States, but also allowed them to return home or engage in
an ongoing pattern of circular migration. Indeed, while many of the 1.5 mil-
lion Mexican nationals who entered the United States between 1910 and 1920
settled permanently, demographers and historians agree that hundreds of thou-
sands more entered on a temporary basis, crossing and recrossing the border as
laborers, merchants, or casual visitors.16 This category of migrants, referred to
by the Bureau of Immigration as nonimmigrants or nonstatistical entrants, out-
numbered immigrants (or those entering for permanent residence) by a factor of
three to one.17 These massive demographic shifts attested to the openness of the
border in this period and, more broadly, played a pivotal role in the formation of
transnational communities all along the international line.
While Mexican nationals constituted the largest group of migrants cross-
ing and recrossing the border each day, Anglo-Americans, Asian Americans,
Europeans, Japanese and Chinese nationals, and Japanese and Chinese
Mexicans, among others, also took advantage of the border’s permeability.18
In the late nineteenth century, many of these migrants traveled back and forth
across the border to fill the unskilled job needs of the mining, rail, and agricul-
ture industries that had developed, sometimes in tandem, on both sides of the
line.19 Given the racial segmentation of the workforce, these industries sought
14 The INS on the Line
Anglo-American workers to fill skilled and managerial posts north and south of
the border.20
As Asian, European, and Mexican nationals settled in border communities,
they often lived transnational lives. Mexican nationals regularly crossed the
line to shop for subsistence items in the United States; indeed, these crossings
were an absolute necessity, as one State Department official observed, “if they
[Mexicans] are refused entry into the United States the Mexican population
along the border would starve and the greater number of the shop keepers on
the American side would be bankrupted.”21 At the same time, Mexican immi-
grants and Mexican Americans in El Paso retained their ties to Mexico thanks
to Spanish-language newspapers that provided news coverage about Mexican
politics and advertisements from Mexican business establishments.22
As Chinese and Japanese migrants established their own businesses (in-
cluding laundries, restaurants, grocery stores, pool halls, barber shops, board-
ing houses, farms, and ranches, among others) on both sides of the border,
regular border crossings became essential to the success of their enterprises.23
Merchants in Mexico, for example, sought to replenish inventories through large
purchases north of the line.24 Meanwhile, Chinese business owners, in an effort
to evade the American prohibition against the admission of Chinese laborers,
frequently transported their Chinese employees north from Mexico. Finally, the
very financing of many border business was dependent upon the pooling of re-
sources among relatives and friends in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and
Asia.25 Perhaps most important for the purposes of this chapter, the social status
of Chinese and Japanese merchants widened the possibilities for their physical
mobility across the nation’s borders. While the Chinese exclusion acts and the
Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 barred the entry of Chinese and Japanese labor-
ers, both laws contained exceptions for the entry of merchants.26
Leisure, as well as labor, led primarily Americans and Mexicans to cross and
recross the border each day. The entertainment industry drew Americans south
of the line, particularly with the start of Prohibition in 1920; as historian David
Romo writes of the port of entry at El Paso:
Figure 1.1 The international boundary between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora
in the early twentieth century. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, DC.
itself less with Mexico than with California.29 Seeking to take advantage of the
tourist trade in Tijuana, Americans, Mexicans, Armenians, Syrians, Japanese,
Spaniards, Italians, and Chinese all launched successful businesses.30 As an ac-
knowledgment of the increasingly multinational character of the borderlands,
one Tijuana school opened its doors to the children of these tourists and
traders.31
Taken together, these cross-border demographic, economic, and social ties
led local residents to construe the border as an “imaginary line.”32 Yet on the
eve of World War I, these very ties generated concerns about border security
among federal officials in the Southwest and Washington, DC. In particular, the
cross-border raids of Mexican revolutionaries exposed the weaknesses of federal
authority and the strength of binational loyalties to the rebellion. In American
border towns, revolutionary forces found a safe haven to retreat from advancing
Mexican federal troops, moral support for their political cause, and even a supply
of arms and basic necessities.33 While these cross-border raids had been a feature
of the Revolution from its inception, by 1913 a violent regime change intensified
political rivalries and military hostilities within Mexico and along its northern
frontier.34 By 1916, the increase in border raiding drew the fixed attention of
Washington officials as they sought to bring order to the region.35 In pursuit of
revolutionary leader Pancho Villa and his forces, President Woodrow Wilson
sent General John Pershing and ten thousand troops into Mexico in retaliation
16 The INS on the Line
for the Villistas attacks on American citizens.36 Yet Pershing’s punitive expedi-
tion failed to establish peace along the border and instead, brought the nation to
the brink of war with Mexico.
At the same time, national anxieties about border security were only exacer-
bated by World War I. Under pressure from German submarine warfare in the
Atlantic, federal officials expressed concerns about enemy incursions through
the nation’s seaports and land borders.37 The Zimmerman Telegram lent cre-
dence to fears about a possible German invasion from Mexico.38 In addition,
federal officials suspected that Mexican revolutionaries, acting to avenge Villa’s
defeat, would assist Germany in this effort. Finally, the persistence of the over-
lapping geographical, social, and economic networks between border towns ren-
dered them “logical haven[s]” for enemy aliens as well as revolutionary forces.39
According to Romo, the Emporium Bar in El Paso served as a meeting place for
Pancho Villa and a German spy who allegedly sought leasing rights to submarine
bases in Baja California.40
At the local level, the apprehension surrounding Villa’s raids and the war
increased public antagonism toward Mexican immigrants and, in turn, led to a
tightening of border inspection procedures. In an atmosphere of paranoia, El Paso
city officials alleged that the thousands of refugees fleeing the Revolution would
trigger a public health crisis, specifically a typhus epidemic.41 As a solution, they
initially proposed a quarantine of all new arrivals.42 In lieu of the quarantine, city
officials ultimately conducted health inspections of all the homes in Chihuahuita
(the largest Mexican neighborhood in El Paso), which was considerably less
drastic than El Paso Mayor Tom Lea’s proposal to destroy them altogether.43 By
1917 local representatives of the United States Public Health Service adopted
more austere measures, subjecting 127,173 Mexican entrants to a delousing and
bathing procedure followed by a rigorous physical and mental examination.44
Language: English
I l l u s t r at e d
Introduction ix
I. The Earlier Aërial Scouts 1
II. The Development of the Airship 11
III. Types of Modern Airships: British, French, German,
Italian, Russian, Austrian, and Belgian 18
IV. The German Airship Fleet 37
V. Advantages and Disadvantages of Airships 50
VI. The Advent of the Aëroplane 78
VII. Types of Aëroplanes: British, French, Italian,
Russian, Austrian, Belgian, and Bulgarian 91
VIII. Germany’s Aëroplane Equipment 123
IX. The First Use of the Aëroplane in War—Tripoli—
the Balkans 137
X. The New Arm in Armageddon 144
XI. Present Deficiencies and Future Possibilities of the
Military Aëroplane 166
INTRODUCTION
When years ago we read in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” the following
lines:—
we little dreamt that not very far from the beginning of the twentieth
century the fancy of the poet would become the fact of reality; that in
the great European war in which the nation is so strenuously
engaged, “the wonder that would be” would come to pass.
Though happily, at present, in these isles the din of war is
unheard, yet a semi-darkened London and bright searchlights
playing on the skies tell the tale of prudent foresight against the
advent of the enemy’s airfleet. From the battlefields there daily come
the reports of actual battles in the air, sometimes betwixt aëroplane
and aëroplane, sometimes between the lighter and heavier than air
craft. Often such encounters are death-grip duels. Such conflicts of
the air are the direct consequence of the great and important use of
both airship and aëroplane as aërial scouts. These are the eyes of
encountering armies. To destroy as far as possible this penetrating
vision of the enemy and restore to him the fog of war is the untiring
aim of either side.
During those first anxious days of the present war the public
anxiously awaited news of the doings of the Royal Flying Corps, as
well as those of the aviators of our Allies. Expectation was satisfied
in the reading of Sir John French’s report to Lord Kitchener, dated
September 7th, 1914. Speaking of the use of the aëroplane in the
war he says:—
For those brave heroes of the air our hearts beat with fervid
admiration. In accomplishing their all-important tasks they have not
only to fear disaster from shot and shell of the enemy, but from the
mistaken fire of their comrades and the very forces of nature. These
latter, owing to the imperfections of the flying machines, do not
entirely spare them; the Royal Flying Corps, in order to become
competent to perform the work it is now doing for King and country,
has had in manœuvres at home to pay a high price in the sacrifice of
human life.
It may, indeed, be reasonably thought that the knowledge of the
vast utility of aircraft in the present conflict will dispel the last
remnant of prejudice in this country against the development of
aërial navigation, and the grudging of a liberal national expenditure
on the service of the air. It was, perhaps, this ignoring of practical
utility, so vigorously combated by the pioneers in this country, that
caused Great Britain to be the last of the Great Powers to seriously
take up aircraft for military and naval use. Our delay had been a
wonder to many, since theoretically in the past this nation had been
to the fore. Nearly half a century ago it led the way of the air by being
the first country in the world to found a society for the
encouragement of aërial navigation—the Aëronautical Society of
Great Britain. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the great
principles of human flight were formulated and discussed at the
earlier meetings of that society. The late Mr. Wilbur Wright, when he
came to this country to receive the gold medal of the society, in his
speech testified to the substantial help he had received from the
study of the transactions of the oldest aëronautical society in the
world. As the pioneer in laying the foundations of aërial science, this
country is not without honour amongst the nations.
CHAPTER I
THE EARLIER AËRIAL SCOUTS