Migrations within the Americas
Summary
Immigration from its closest neighbors, the Americas and the Caribbean, was the last target for restriction by the United States. Because of national concern from the U.S. to maintain access to low-wage workers and the lived realities of shared political and economic spaces, transborder communities made legal immigration restrictions detrimental and unnecessary to enforce. Canadians circulated with the greatest frequency, and quite invisibly, as persons considered to be the most capable of becoming Americans. Through the 1950s, the majority of Americans who migrated to the United States hailed from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.
Despite the frequency of their border crossings, these migrants and immigrants were treated differently according to U.S. law. For example, because Puerto Ricans held, and continue to hold, U.S. passports they could travel freely to the U.S. through networks for work and family reunification. On the other hand, Mexicans were imagined to be nonimmigrants who would not settle permanently but were expected to be low-wage workers. Evidence of these ideologies are illustrated through large-scale removal campaigns (1929-1936) and Operation Wetback (1953-1954), which expelled Mexican immigrants and U.S. born citizens of Mexican descent, and the Bracero Program (1943-64) which encouraged Mexican workers to accept short-term labor-contracts as farmworkers. Cubans, following Castro’s Revolution, and Dominicans, after the rise of Trujillo, were understood as political refugees who sought asylum in the midst of the Cold War. As a result, immigration policy that benefitted paths to citizenship for these immigrants emerged during the 1960s.
It was not until the 1965 Immigration Act that countries in the western hemisphere, including the Caribbean, became subject to numeric immigration caps.  [graph of immigration 1821-2000] However, because enforcement procedures and goals had developed to handle immigration from more distant countries in Europe or Asia, the goal of securing the U.S.’s borders from those who share them produced intractable enforcement problems and a burgeoning population of unauthorized immigrants.  Apart from their unauthorized residence, this population is largely employed, in mixed-status families, and paying taxes.
Since the 1980s, intensifying imbalances in economic and political conditions, facilitated by improved access to information and transportation, have increased motives and ability to migrate to the United States from more Caribbean and Central and South American countries. Â The most pressing priorities for immigration reform are to resolve the contradictions between the economic needs of the U.S. economy for workers from neighboring countries, the difficulty of enforcing current immigration policies, and resolving the status of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants who constitute a permanent class of persons with lesser rights and status.
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