In Search of Workers, in Search of Control: US Immigration and the Contract Labor System, 1910–30

In January 1926, S. Parker Frisselle, the head of the Fresno, California Growers Association testified before the US House Immigration and Naturalization Committee investigating the seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico and stated emphatically, “unrestricted immigration ought to be stopped.” Though he advocated for a more restrictive border, Frisselle worked to ensure the indispensable Mexican labor supply remained and proposed the government, in partnership with agricultural interests, created a formalized system to control worker's movement. Under his proposal, agricultural growers would have access to large numbers of Mexican workers, who would return to their native country once labor demands lessened. If the government implemented Frisselle’s plan, growers across the state, and eventually the entire nation, would have access to a circular labor force that never settled, and the United States would effectively end “unrestricted immigration.” Frisselle, and others who supported his idea, relied on the trope of the Mexican migrant as a “homing pigeon” who did not settle but always returned home. His idea was not novel. Instead, agricultural interests and US immigration agents had been suggesting creating a formalize contract labor system since the turn of the century.

Drawing on U.S. congressional records and immigration case files, this paper argues the rise of a contract labor system in the California borderlands in the first half of the twentieth century relied on constructing migrant mobility as both a criminal and desirable attribute, if controlled properly. The contract labor system that Frisselle and others advocated for hinged on the agricultural industries' ability to control workers' movements. However, migrants viewed their mobility as a tactic to deploy in challenging oppressive labor conditions and doomed nation-state attempts to confine them.