In contemporary discourse, much of the discussion of U.S. border
politics focuses on the Southwest. In Bootlegged Aliens, however,
Ashley Johnson Bavery considers the North as a borderlands region,
demonstrating how this often-overlooked border influenced
government policies toward illegal immigration, business and labor
union practices around migrant labor, and the experience of being
an illegal immigrant in early twentieth-century industrial America.
Bavery examines how immigrants, politicians, and employers helped
shape national policies toward noncitizen laborers. In the process,
she uncovers the northern industrial origins of an exploitative
system that emerged on America's border with Canada, whose legacy
remains central to debates about America's borders today. Bavery
begins in the 1920s to explore how that decade's immigration
restrictions launched an era of policing and profiling that
excluded America's foreign born from the benefits of citizenship.
On the border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, this process
turned certain Europeans into undocumented immigrants, a group the
press and policymakers referred to as bootlegged aliens. Over the
next decade, deportation and policing practices stigmatized entire
communities of ethnic Europeans regardless of their legal status.
Moreover, restrictive laws allowed manufacturers to exploit workers
in new ways. By the Great Depression, citizenship had become an
invisible boundary that excluded hundreds of thousands of laborers
from New Deal entitlements. Accepted wisdom suggests that the 1924
Immigration Act had allowed ethnic Europeans to shed ties to their
homelands and assimilate into the "melting pot" of American culture
by the 1930s. Bavery challenges this perspective, finding that,
instead of forging a common culture with their fellow workers,
European immigrants coming through Canada to Detroit faced
statewide registration drives, exclusion from key labor unions, and
disqualification from the Works Progress Administration, the
cornerstone of America's nascent welfare state. In the heart of
industrial America, Bootlegged Aliens reveals, citizenship was
highly contingent.
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