Reforming the Back Door: The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 in Historical Perspective
After the abolition of slavery, this chapter observes, agricultural and industrial employers used a variety of “back-door” techniques to bypass restrictions on immigration and bring temporary Asian, European, and Mexican workers to the United States. Contract labor and the Mexican bracer program allowed agricultural employers simply to import workers, like goods, and export them when they were no longer needed. This chapter points out that the Constitution as written, considered imported laborers a category of imported things, not people. When restrictionist policy made labor scarce, for example, when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Restriction Act reduced Asian and European labor supplies, employers found substitutes, such as Mexican laborers.
Keywords: United States, immigration reform, back-door policy, bracero program, restrictionist policy, contract labor
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .