Green Card Guest Workers: Configuring the Mexican Family as a Site of Containment

This paper explores the history of Mexican “Green Card Commuters,” - workers who were admitted to the US for permanent residence but maintained their homes in adjacent Mexican cities opting to cross the border on a daily or seasonal basis to their place of work. It examines how the status was created by the Immigration Service to relieve Canadian border traffic congestion in 1927 and ultimately evolved into a de-facto Mexican guest worker program by 1959. I argue that, unlike traditional temporary worker programs which were, at least theoretically, governed by a set of binational regulations, bureaucrats managed the Commuter Program through informal and non-statutory policies which provided agricultural industrialists with cheap and tethered foreign labor. Principally, the Service allowed growers to sponsor Mexican contract workers for permanent visas while restricting men’s families from entering the US thus entrenching circular migration and cementing commuters’ status as social, political and territorial foreigners.