By 
Migrate! A History of the United States Border Patrol by Kelly Lytle Hernandez
University of California Press, April 15, 2010
What could be a more contentious issue today than the conflict surrounding our border with Mexico?
Some would say that the history of the Border Patrol is irrelevant to our problems today, but they would be wrong. Everything about the 2,000 miles that connect us to Mexico, including the establishment of the United States Border Patrol, is critical to solving the problems of human trafficking, cross-border violence, and drug smuggling. Ignoring the past will surely doom us if we don’t learn from it.
Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s in-depth study, “Migrates: A History of the United States Border Patrol” is a thoroughly researched account of the jarring beginnings of what eventually became the official United States Border Patrol.
After the United States-Mexico War of 1846-48, when the United States declared victory and forced Mexico to cede 50 percent of its northern territory to the United States, a new frontier was drawn. The Rio Grande bisected the border between the Gulf of Mexico and El Paso, Texas. From there, the border traversed the west through deserts and mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
Claiming this land ignited the contentious relationship and resentment between Mexico and the United States. What looked like a vast dry wasteland was in fact fertile soil under which thousands of years earlier it had been covered by water from the Colorado River before it dried up.
When the funding produced projects that would re-irrigate the arid soil, the early settlers began cultivating the land producing millions of acres of crops. It quickly became apparent that large numbers of workers were needed to reap the yield.
And so what began as a favorable consequence of the rich land of the Southwest turned into a violent wave of legislation against immigrants and immigrants.
The rapid expansion of early agricultural businesses brought in increasing numbers of migrant workers. Landlords, eager to profit from the agricultural boom, had access to various sources of labor. They hired California Indians and Chinese immigrants to do the job. Yet few Native Americans survived the 1880 genocidal campaign against them, and landowners became dependent on Chinese labor.
Ultimately, the large immigration of Chinese labor along the border areas between the United States and Mexico threatened to take over much of the agribusiness and this prompted the first immigration law, the “Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 “.
From these adverse beginnings, Congress passed Immigration Laws for the next several decades that prohibited “the insane, idiots, convicts, polygamists, epileptics, anarchists, beggars, morons, and the feeble-minded.”
The new guidelines on who was prohibited from entering the United States now included all Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract workers, unaccompanied poor children, sick and defective, alcoholics and beggars.
Hernández offers a meticulous account of immigration restrictions and the effect they had on people living on the US-Mexico border. She tells a haunting story about the violent origins of the U.S. Border Patrol that began when one of the region’s first settlers, John Jackson Tumlinson, proposed the establishment of a roving patrol after several settlers disappeared and later they were found dead.
A sentinel for the peace and security of the settlers became “A Sanctuary of Violence” as Hernández aptly recounts in his chapter on the Border Patrol’s tragic journey killing Mexicans by proxy. In his example of this unfortunate circumstance, Hernández tells the story of two brothers, Jack and Jim Cottingham of Brownsville, Texas, who were farmers before becoming local peacekeepers. A few years later, the brothers joined the newly formed US Customs Mounted Guard which eventually became part of the Immigration Service Mountain Guard. Little training was required and no one outside the border areas observed what was happening inside the local Border Patrol outposts.
One night on patrol, Jim was shot by a Mexican liquor dealer, seriously wounding him. While Jim lay in the hospital, Jack drove back to where the shooting took place. He shot and killed everyone he could see on the Mexican side of the border as revenge for his wounded brother.
Migra is an academic work rich in detail that covers the difficult beginnings and insurmountable problems facing the government to secure our border with Mexico.
Yet Hernandez is obviously and outspokenly critical of the official US Border Patrol story, which she says overlooks the “critical social and political dimensions that shaped US immigration law.” His assessment of Border Patrol violence is underscored by many examples of agents freely using violence as an enforcement method protected by a lack of oversight and a climate of vigilantism. She is also ruthless, and this time rightly so, of the racism that grew unchecked for years and resulted in rampant abuse and rampant massacres of innocent people.
The complications of finding a solution to illegal immigration are directly related to our ability to manage the US-Mexico border. Hernández offers well-documented accounts and analysis that provide considerable value in obtaining a resolution to the problem.