Bootlegged Aliens: Immigration Politics on America's Northern Border

Urban lore in Detroit has it that after immigration restriction in the 1920s, Polish immigrants slipped into Michigan across the Detroit River, which separates the city from Canada. During the heyday of Prohibition, restrictionists called the people who crossed the country's northern border in this way, and whose movements lent substance to these stories, “bootlegged aliens.” In her book by the same name, Ashley Johnson Bavery, associate professor of history at Eastern Michigan University, offers readers an account of American immigration policy as it affected—and, before that, created—“illegal immigrants,” as some (although not Bavery) would call them today. Along the way, Bavery graphically illustrates that it was not just the country's southern border that was permeable but the northern border as well, in particular highlighting cross-border migration along one portion of what Michiganders proudly refer to as America's “Third Coast.”Bootlegged Aliens examines the development of the immigration quota system of the 1920s and the way it created a class of inferior and undesirable “foreigners” and, at both the national and local level, “excluded them from the benefits of citizenship” (the latter, not particularly surprising since they were not “citizens”). The anti-foreign “employment practices and precedents established in this northern industrial borderland,” Bavery argues, “shaped national immigration policies” (p. 1). Immigration policy was crafted at the national level, but it was left to local immigration inspectors, social workers, and others to implement and thus work out how it would operate. Given Detroit's proximity to Windsor, Ontario, Canadian immigration policies, Bavery shows, also influenced American actions. Challenging customary narratives on the 1930s that saw the New Deal as a route toward immigrant incorporation, Bavery argues that “New Deal policies incited nativist backlash that linked ‘the foreigner’ to communism, union activism, and welfare cheating” (p. 6), although despite the author's rather strange choice of a verb, it was local business resistance to the New Deal, rather than the New Deal itself, which caused these assaults on reform. Unfortunately, imprecise writing, like the examples cited above, confuses the arguments of the book.Bavery elects a blended chronological and thematic organization scheme to develop these topics. The first three chapters discuss the operation of immigration quotas, border control (and the newly created Border Patrol), immigrant smuggling, the opposition of African Americans and the older immigrant groups to the eastern and southern Europeans, and the carving out of exceptions for Anglo-Canadian and British commuters within the border-control system. The fourth chapter looks at the New Deal and the rise of the Left in Detroit, and on the liberalization of government policies as they pertained to the foreign-born new arrivals. The last three chapters of the book examine the conservative backlash to these policies on the part of older immigrant groups and some elements of business and of organized labor, which pressured Roosevelt to pull back from an earlier liberal posture and, amid a growing anti-communism, unraveled New Deal protections of immigrants.The numerous photographs Bavery includes are an appealing feature of this book. Some readers may find other aspects annoying. Bavery mentions the “Delray region” of Detroit when she means section or area, a peculiar use of a word that itself has generated a large literature in American studies and the social sciences (p. 16). Elsewhere, “day laborers” are not the same as “commuters” (chap. 3); Halifax is in Nova Scotia, not Ontario (p. 152); and the name of the congressional committee was not the “House on Un-American Activities Committee” (the “on,” of course, being superfluous and incorrect; p. 193). Bavery also had some trouble with the spelling of eastern European surnames in this book (“Januszwieski” [Januszewski], p. 255n65; “Stanley Novak” [Nowak], p. 255n56 and p. 256n74; and “Mike Chaykoswki” [Chaykowski], p. 263n120), which apparently also challenged the skills of her University of Pennsylvania Press copyeditor. Would it be a stretch to suggest that these errors are also unintended evidence of the place—and social respect—still accorded to some white ethnics to this day?It is, though, what the author leaves un- or under-explored that presents the greater problem for this study. Bavery repeatedly asserts that native-born Americans discriminated against eastern and southern Europeans because of their “foreignness,” begging the question, What does she—and did they—mean by this term? Bavery neither asks nor explains. Her brief and gratuitous intervention in the whiteness debate—whether any European immigrants were ever considered non-white—serves only to reveal the limits of her expertise on the subject, as her assertion that “Europeans could live where they wanted” (p. 7) ignores a history of housing discrimination against the likes of Italians, Poles, and Jews. Bavery thereby seems to want to compare but also draw sharp distinction between this inchoate anti-foreignism directed against these “white” Europeans and the racism experienced by African Americans and immigrants of color in more recent decades. But the aim of the Allied Patriotic Societies in 1929, to “preserve the blood of the United States in its present proportions” (p. 72; italics added), was clearly a racialist formulation. And how is it that, as Bavery observes, that nativist “lobbies suggested that no matter how many generations these immigrants lived on American soil, they would never become full Americans” (p. 68)? This Bavery also does not say, but the answer can be only their putatively (inferior) race. While Bavery mentions the term “racism” a few times in passing while writing about immigrants in the twenties and thirties, she seems unaware of the literature on the racialization of eastern and southern Europeans and the racism that lay at the heart of anti-foreignism during this period, as it still does today, making the two eras more of a piece than not. It is race that knits together the various strands of “foreignism.”These criticisms are not meant to be wholly damning, as writing and publishing this book on a relatively understudied topic was an accomplishment. Bootlegged Aliens is an informative study that students, general readers, and scholars not already familiar with the topics it covers should find interesting and even enlightening.

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