Bootlegged Aliens

Immigration Politics on America's Northern Border

Ashley Johnson Bavery

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812297379
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In contemporary discourse, much of the discussion of U.S. border politics focuses on the Southwest. In Bootlegged Aliens, however, Ashley Johnson Bavery considers the North as a borderlands region, demonstrating how this often-overlooked border influenced government policies toward illegal immigration, business and labor union practices around migrant labor, and the experience of being an illegal immigrant in early twentieth-century industrial America. Bavery examines how immigrants, politicians, and employers helped shape national policies toward noncitizen laborers. In the process, she uncovers the northern industrial origins of an exploitative system that emerged on America's border with Canada, whose legacy remains central to debates about America's borders today.Bavery begins in the 1920s to explore how that decade's immigration restrictions launched an era of policing and profiling that excluded America's foreign born from the benefits of citizenship. On the border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, this process turned certain Europeans into undocumented immigrants, a group the press and policymakers referred to as bootlegged aliens. Over the next decade, deportation and policing practices stigmatized entire communities of ethnic Europeans regardless of their legal status. Moreover, restrictive laws allowed manufacturers to exploit workers in new ways. By the Great Depression, citizenship had become an invisible boundary that excluded hundreds of thousands of laborers from New Deal entitlements. Accepted wisdom suggests that the 1924 Immigration Act had allowed ethnic Europeans to shed ties to their homelands and assimilate into the "melting pot" of American culture by the 1930s. Bavery challenges this perspective, finding that, instead of forging a common culture with their fellow workers, European immigrants coming through Canada to Detroit faced statewide registration drives, exclusion from key labor unions, and disqualification from the Works Progress Administration, the cornerstone of America's nascent welfare state. In the heart of industrial America, Bootlegged Aliens reveals, citizenship was highly contingent.

Chapter 1

“Illegal Immigrants” in an Industrial Borderland

One January afternoon in 1923, Immigration Inspector Earl Coe stood on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue Ferry Dock with a pair of binoculars raised toward Windsor, Canada. As Inspector Coe watched his breath freeze in the winter air, he detected a slight movement across the river. The inspector squinted, and just as he lowered his binoculars, four figures “shrouded in white sheets” loomed toward him across the frozen Detroit River. When Coe approached the apparitions and asked them to disrobe, he discovered two Belgians and one Italian accompanied by a Canadian liquor smuggler. The group had planned to slip into the United States undetected, but Inspector Coe stopped their journey toward American jobs and homes. The inspector formed part of a growing state apparatus tasked with policing immigration on the Detroit-Windsor border, and to many Americans, the shivering Europeans and their guide represented a criminal threat to the United States and Canada that, during the 1920s, could be characterized by a single word: foreignness.

As a key borderland for unauthorized immigration in the industrial North, Detroit became central to an emerging struggle over nativist demands, federal immigration restrictions, and their regulation on the ground. Inspector Coe questioned the smuggler and learned the man was a Polish immigrant himself and a member of a larger smuggling ring that brought liquor and immigrants over the frozen Detroit River daily.¹ When snow blanketed the borderland and the Detroit River thickened with ice, the smugglers covered their clients in sheets or white plasterers’ suits, gave them steel-cleated shoes to prevent them from slipping on the ice, and guided them across the river to Detroit’s ethnic neighborhoods, where the newcomers sought work in automobile factories.² The practice became such a problem that immigration inspectors began referring to it as “ghost walking” and soon identified dozens of “ghost-walking gangs” operating on both sides of the international boundary.³ Officials in Detroit complained that even the most powerful binoculars could not detect “white-sheeted figures creeping over the snow-blanketed ice.”⁴ The “ghost walkers” represented one sensational group in a growing industry that specialized in smuggling people into the nation. These smuggling operations developed in response to America’s new immigration regime, which, in turn, created a regulatory apparatus on the U.S.-Canada border that would bring policing and federal regulation to local communities for the first time.

The new federal immigration laws of the 1920s prompted a rise in smuggling, but in Detroit, a key site of illegal immigration, employers, immigrants, smugglers, and federal enforcers determined the consequences of new laws. In 1921, responding to nativist lobbies set in place by local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan and patriotic societies, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, temporarily curbing immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act established permanent quotas for immigrants from these European nations and barred all Asians from the United States.⁵ But despite the federal legislation, automobile companies resented the restriction on their labor. To ensure that the Detroit-Windsor border would continue a long-standing tradition of open trade and border crossing, major employers established branch plants in Windsor and, in some cases, disregarded new laws altogether by employing smuggled immigrants in their factories. By the mid-1920s, immigrant smuggling became a major underground industry in the Detroit-Windsor region, and immigration inspectors like Earl Coe soon joined forces with local police and new Border Patrol officers to find and deport undocumented immigrants.

Newcomers who were caught smuggling became entangled in a local immigration apparatus geared toward facilitating fast and easy deportation. When, for example, Inspector Coe caught the two “ghost-walking immigrants,” he sent them to Detroit’s main police station for interrogation. Another immigration inspector, Earl Watson, questioned the men and determined they were both “likely to become a public charge” in the United States. Watson then sent them to Toledo’s Lucas County Jail to await a deportation train running from Chicago to New York, where they left the United States on the ocean liner America as convicted criminals.⁶

The rise of smuggling, policing, and deportation gave nativists who had long practiced grassroots harassment a legal outlet for their xenophobic ideas. After the federal legislations established new immigration quotas, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), which had traditionally favored mob violence and letter-writing campaigns, respectively, began to condemn immigrants with a new label: “illegal immigrant.” Soon smugglers, their immigrant clients, and even the inhabitants of ethnic neighborhoods across the city came to be indiscriminately associated with criminality. Over the next decade, hooded vigilantes protested Catholics and Jews on the streets of the Midwest, and nativist politicians passed federal immigration laws aimed at the immigrants they most associated with crime, liquor consumption, and general undesirability. Thus, politicians and congressmen crafted new immigration laws, but it was the employers, Border Patrol officers, and immigrants of industrial borderlands like Detroit who determined precisely how new federal regulations would operate on the ground.⁷ These local actors created America’s immigration policy by inspecting, interrogating, and profiling European groups, associating southern and eastern European nationalities with foreignness and crime.

Detroit and Windsor Before Immigration Quotas

The rapid growth of the automobile industry brought thousands of newcomers to the city, prompting Detroit’s established residents to demand immigration laws aimed at closing the border. In the 1910s and 1920s, southern and eastern European, Arab, Mexican, and African American migration changed the ethnic and racial makeup of the city. Once new migrants reached Detroit, they found jobs, established neighborhoods, and, in certain cases, organized politically and gained a reputation for liquor smuggling and anarchist radicalism. These changes incited a nativist backlash from groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Daughters of the American Revolution, whose members sought to close the border and restrict immigration from groups they saw as undesirable.

By the early 1920s, the presence of an international border had come to characterize Detroit, but it also exacerbated concerns over immigration. Before the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts, the Detroit metropolitan region spanned two nations, defied international boundaries, and attracted thousands of workers from around the world. According to Detroit’s Chamber of Commerce, the Woodward Avenue ferry dock represented a “gateway to America” for any foreigner crossing between the United States and Canada. Through this gateway, the Detroit Chamber noted that over eleven million Canadians, Americans, and other national groups crossed freely to work in the “many mercantile and industrial establishments of the city.” On their way to coveted jobs in the auto industry, Canadians, Poles, Italians, and African Americans passed “ramshackle buildings, the relics of the older city,” before the art deco hotels and department stores of Woodward Avenue drew their eyes upward to stained glass windows and gilded adornments, markers of wealth and success in a city that was fast becoming one of the most important in the nation.⁸

As Detroit expanded, it became America’s third largest manufacturing city and its fourth largest in population, attracting a diverse coalition of workers from across the nation and the globe. The men and women beginning to consider themselves Detroiters hailed from rural Michigan, Italy, Poland, and Alabama; punched time cards at Packard and Cadillac; built engines and car bodies on a moving assembly line; and boarded streetcars and ferries home to bungalows in Detroit’s east side, Highland Park, Hamtramck, and Windsor, Ontario. The common denominator among new and established Detroiters was the automobile, an invention that was in the process of changing from an item of luxury item to one of necessity in modern American life. Rather than allegiance to a common nation, a shared race, or even a single city, new inhabitants of the Detroit industrial borderland shared economic goals, hoping a job sweeping the floors of Saxon or Briggs Motor Company might yield enough savings to ensure a prosperous return to Europe or a mortgage in Detroit.

Detroit possessed the fastest-growing immigrant population in the nation, and soon vibrant ethnic enclaves developed across the city. By 1920, thirty thousand new Italians, twenty-four thousand Hungarians, ten thousand Belgians, five thousand Greeks, and five thousand Croatians settled in separate yet overlapping regions of Detroit.⁹ In these neighborhoods, each ethnic group opened shops and dance halls and maintained their own native customs amid new industrial surroundings. Many of these immigrants settled in Black Bottom, a region named for its dark, fertile soil, and soon the neighborhood housed thousands of Irish, Italian, German, Romanian, and Russian Jews living in yet overlapping colonies and streets. Soon larger groups began to establish their own neighborhoods.¹⁰ For instance, Hungarians established a settlement of small red brick bungalows in a southwest part of the city named Delray, a region that soon developed the largest Hungarian population outside of Budapest. On Saturday nights, Hungarian churches and clubs held raucous mulatsags, which roughly translated to “good times” and always included beer and dancing.¹¹

Poles represented Detroit’s largest immigrant community. In all, 138,000 Polish newcomers populated entire blocks of the city’s east side, settling close to the industrial plants where they worked.¹² Felix and Teklunia Koscielski remembered how important it had been for them to rent a home in a Polish neighborhood, where they could buy Polish goods at a local store and where Felix could walk to his job at Cadillac. To mask the smell of soot and industrial waste that drifted through their open windows, Teklunia planted a garden with vegetables for canning and many varieties of flowers, which bloomed throughout the spring and summer.¹³ While the Koscielski family remained in the heart of the east side, other Polish settlements extended west along the Pere Marquette railroad. When the Dodge brothers built their factory within the city limits of Hamtramck in 1910, Poles flocked to the region, expanding the small city’s population to just under fifty thousand, 70 percent of whom spoke Polish in their homes.¹⁴

Poles formed the most visible and insular immigrant group in the Detroit region. By 1920, over 80 percent of the Polish population lived in blocks that they dominated, and some never crossed boundaries marked by local meat sellers and Polish churches. Most Poles shared a common working-class background and culture. When they reached Detroit, they took jobs as unskilled factory and railroad workers, attended mass at one of Detroit’s thirty new Polish Catholic churches, and built their own wood-frame houses with three rooms all in a row.¹⁵ City social workers complained it was impossible to integrate Polish newcomers into American society because they spoke Polish at home, married other Poles, and attended meetings of political organizations like the Polish Republican League, which, in 1923, had a membership of five thousand across Detroit.¹⁶ Poles’ commitment to their language and Catholicism would make them a major concern for nativist groups committed to keeping Detroit Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in the years that followed.

Famine, revolution, and pogroms also brought fifty thousand Russians to Detroit, who separated themselves by religion and added to the city’s growing non-Protestant population.¹⁷ Christian Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians settled alongside each other in the growing east side and found unskilled positions in all the major automobile plants. Another small colony of Russian and Ukrainian Christians ran the city’s famed Eastern Market, vending vegetables, eggs, and cured meats to Detroit’s east side immigrant communities.¹⁸ But because 78 percent of Detroit’s Russian immigrants were Jewish, locals began using the categories “Russian” and “Jewish” interchangeably. Jewish Russians settled alongside established Jews from Germany in Hastings Street and held a variety of jobs.¹⁹ They were better represented than any other new immigrant group both in white-collar positions and in unskilled service and peddling work. Many labored as tailors, local vendors, and salesmen, giving them regular contact with other ethnic and national groups across the city.²⁰ Local nativists responded to Detroit’s robust and highly visible Jewish community with virulent anti-Semitism from all levels of society. In 1920, industrialist Henry Ford penned The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a widely circulated pamphlet that blamed Jewish Americans for communism in America, controlling the press, and even launching World War I.²¹

Figure 2. This map depicts ethnic places of worship in the Detroit-Windsor borderland. Note the separate cities of River Rouge and Hamtramck in Detroit and, across the river, the Border Cities of Ojibway, Sandwich, Windsor, Walkerville, and East Windsor. Map by A. Bavery, 2014, based on Floyd A. Stilgenbauer, “A New Population Map of Metropolitan Detroit,” Wayne State University, 1936.

Jews even sold in Detroit’s growing African American neighborhoods. After World War I, Detroit’s black population increased by 611.3 percent, faster than any city in the nation. By 1920, an overwhelming 40,838 black newcomers had crowded into an are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “Illegal Immigrants” in an Industrial Borderland
• Chapter 2. Defining Undesirables and Protesting Quotas
• Chapter 3. The Problem of Canadian Day Laborers
• Chapter 4. Reform, Repatriation, and Deportation During the Depression
• Chapter 5. Registering Immigrants in the Depression Era
• Chapter 6. The Immigrant Politics of Anticommunism
• Chapter 7. Aliens and Welfare in North America
• Conclusion. The Legacy of Restrictive Immigration
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments