If you depended on Donald Trump’s tweets to learn about our immigration issues, you’d get a tremendously skewed idea of how migration works in this country—and the historical path we’ve taken to get here.

Nonetheless, this much is true: Mexican migrant workers continue to enter the United States in significant numbers, hoping to find work here. In fact, in recent months, under the Trump presidency, the number of unauthorized immigrants crossing our Southern border has spiked. In February, some 66,450 immigrants were apprehended while crossing the border, an 11-year high, though illegal immigration numbers overall have been trending downward.

We can’t highlight that fact, however, without also acknowledging that many U.S. farms, ranches, orchards, restaurants, construction firms, landscaping companies, etc., actively seek to employ these migrants. We encourage them to come here. We arguably even need them to do this work.

Many may not realize, however, that the crude description of these migrants as “illegal immigrants” is a relatively recent phenomenon, especially in the context of our southern border. In fact, until one very specific year in our history—1965—Mexican migrants crossing the U.S. border for work wasn’t considered much of an issue; they just came.

For much of our history, it wasn’t even possible to immigrate here “illegally.” There were no laws to break simply by coming to the United States. From 1880 to 1914, we turned away just one percent of the 25 million European immigrants who made it to our shores. That last year, 1914, served as a watershed year because we choked off transatlantic immigration significantly during World War I.

This remarkably racist poster referencing the Chinese Exclusion Act actually advertises the U.S.-made “Magic Washer.” Photo via Wikimedia

One particularly notable restriction on immigrant flow did happen before then though. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited all Chinese laborers from entering the United States. That act was based in fears and grotesque stereotypes about the Chinese bringing disease and depressing wages. It bears the dubious distinction of being the first act created to prevent an entire nationality or ethnic group from immigrating to the United States. It came on the heels of the Naturalization Act of 1870, which prevented Chinese women from entering the country and prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens.

And then World War I triggered a series of acts, motivated by xenophobic sentiments, that provided justification for a series of new immigration restrictions in 1917, 1921, and 1924.

The Immigration Act of 1917 required all new immigrants to pass a literacy test and pay a tax to mitigate any future expenses they might incur. It created an “Asiatic barred zone,” meaning immigrants were not allowed from many countries in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Interestingly enough, the act excluded immigrants from Canada and Mexico, and Mexican migrant workers did not have to pay the tax because the government assumed they would return home with their earnings.

A 1921 cartoon references the Emergency Quota Act. Photo via Library of Congress

In 1921, the U.S. passed the Emergency Quota Act, which was designed to prevent a stream of Jews fleeing persecution from immigrating to the United States. For the first time in our history, we put caps on the number of people who could immigrate. And we developed a formula that put a quota on how many people from any country could come to the U.S. based on how many people from that country already lived here: three percent. It gave Western Europeans, who were predominately white, a distinct advantage when attempting to immigrate here.

The Immigration Act of 1924 or the Johnson-Reed Act placed even more draconian limits on immigration. It banned immigrants from all of Asia and reduced the quota from three percent to two percent based on population figures from the 1890s. This especially affected Eastern Europeans—Italian, Jewish, and Greek immigrants, many of whom, you may recall, we didn’t consider white. The number of immigrants outside the Western Hemisphere was limited to 165,000 people. According to the U.S. government’s Office of the Historian, “In all of its parts, the most basic purpose of the 1924 Immigration Act was to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” As recently as 2015, Jeff Sessions described that act as “good for America.”

And so our increasingly nativist immigration policy continued to evolve, destined to be endlessly updated and fiddled with. It’s noteworthy, however, that even during this time, we remained particularly open to Mexican immigrants.

Mexicans workers stand in a flax field. Photo: Oregon State University Special Collections

In fact, as late as 1942, the U.S. was enacting legislation that made it easier for Mexicans to live and work here. The Bracero Program was initiated then, and it enabled millions of Mexican men to work here, primarily on farms and orchards, and to return home with their earnings. It also supposedly guaranteed these workers food and sanitary working and living conditions.

However, we shouldn’t romanticize the program. Despite the agreement, the program proved exploitative. Workers received low, often delayed wages, poor quality of food and housing, and little or no health care. They were even fumigated. “They sprayed us like rats, like insects,” said one ex-bracero, Isaías Sánchez. “We left covered in powder.”