Quota for Mexico

Across the Rio Grande into Texas has swept for years an unchecked tide of Mexican immigration. Throughout the Southwest great gangs of dark-skinned peons can be seen repairing tracks on the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe, plodding head down through beet sugar fields, tending endless rows of cotton, mucking about the dirtiest jobs in oil fields. In five years the U. S. has counted, on an average, 56,000 Mexicans per year coming across the border, has failed to count many a thousand more who sneaked over informally. Only one such Mexican immigrant out of a thousand becomes a U. S. citizen.

Last week the Senate, singling out Mexico from among all the countries of the Western Hemisphere which now have free entry into the U. S., passed (51-to-16) a bill slapping a national origins quota upon Mexican immigration. Recent unemployment had given sharp political point to the long-standing complaints of organized labor that Mexicans were driving its members out of jobs. Dismayed were large employers of cheap labor in the South-west who count on these aliens to work their fields, repair their tracks, do their meanest chores. By quota Mexican immigration would be cut from 56,000 to about 1,700 per year.

Sentiment in the House to which the Senate bill was sent for further action was ripe for enactment of this first enlargement of the quota system west of the Atlantic Ocean. The voice of Labor in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico was louder at the Capitol than the voice of Business.

Objection to a Mexican quota on diplomatic grounds was heard from the Department of State.

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