Mexican Immigration Pre & Post World War 2

Coming from a life of poverty and despair would cause anyone to search for a better life; a life in which there is the belief that all of your dreams can come true. This is the belief that many Mexican immigrants had about "El Norte," they believed that the north would provide them with the opportunity that their life in Mexico had not. Many Immigrants believed that the United States was "the land of opportunity," a place to find a successful job and live out the life that one only dreamt about living. The North was an open paradise for the immigrants. They were told by the people who had already ventured to the north that the United States was a "simple life, in which one could live like a king or queen, but in reality immigrants were treated like slaves in the new country that promised them their dreams.

Most Immigrants who enter the United States are searching for work and the opportunity to live a better life. They are from small towns deep within Mexico that do not offer much opportunity for the people of the town to live a prosperous life and to provide for their family. In the small town of Sierra Mixteco, men women and children arrived in town at various times of the day bent over loads of fire wood gathered from the mountains to sell in the town market. For those who did not sell fire wood, they spent their time making straw hats to sell in the markets of larger towns, both of these jobs only provided pennies a day for the families to survive on. So the stories that the men brought back from the North gave the people of the small towns the hope that a better life did exist.

It was typical for the men to travel to the north first in order to find a job and set up the life for his family. In the town of San Geronimo, 85% of all men over the age of 15 had left the village in search of work in other parts of Mexico and in the United States. The men would make the trip alone and would send the money that they had made to their wives and children back in the village. The trip to the North was long and very dangerous. For the men who entered the country illegally, the trip could even be deadly. For the men who did have some money, they would hire a "coyote," a man who would help them cross the border for a price. Sometimes coyotes were legitimate people who sought to help others, while sometimes these were men who were simply out to take advantage of the desperate immigrants. Once the immigrants were across the border, they were on their own to deal with the hardships that the north provided primarily the Border Patrol. Some border patrols were kind to the immigrants while others treated them like animals. For those immigrants who could escape the patrol, they were off to find jobs in the "land of opportunity." Many immigrants once entering found themselves working in low paying agricultural jobs working 12-hour day shifts for $3.50 a day. The little money that was made was sent to the wives and families back at home. The extra that left over was used to improve the villages and towns where they came from. Many of the towns were now able to improve the roads, create electric lines, have better water systems and open up new schools. Some women did decide to immigrate alongside their husbands; if the women had children it was better to migrate to the north while the children were young because it was easier to strap a small child on the mother's back while picking in the fields. The women who eventually migrated to the United States aspired to work their way out of the fields and into domestic service jobs because the women felt that these jobs were not as demeaning as working long hours out in the sun; men on the other hand dreamed of working their way from the back-breaking row crops to the tree crops.

Looking back over the decades at Mexican immigration, the reasons for immigration have always been the same, job opportunity, and prosperity. In the early 19th century, American contractors went down into Mexico to recruit for cheap labor. Men were needed to build the future of the United States by laying track, mining, dredging and working on the harvest. As a year's contract was extended, and as economic independence was established, sons began following their father's north with the hopes of prosperity for themselves.

During World War I, President Wilson called on Americans to increase U.S. manufacturing and agricultural production to meet wartime needs; this meant an increase in work needed by Mexicans in the fields. However, when thousands of young men marched off to war, this left a gap in the workforce and so the U.S. Food Administration asked the Department of Labor to ease the restriction of migrants to agricultural work. As a result, many Mexicans began to enter the skilled professional