The Diplomacy of Immigration Restriction in U.S.-Mexican Relations

Abstract

The study of U.S.–Mexican relations in the post-revolutionary period has long been dominated by what Linda Hall aptly summarized as “oil, banks, and politics.”1 With the military phase of the Mexican Revolution concluded, Mexican leaders spent the 1920s and 1930s rebuilding state and nation under the sign of the revolutionary 1917 constitution, which extended a range of new rights to workers and peasants and radically redefined property rights as vested not in the individual, but in the nation. That new property rights regime and Mexico’s default on its foreign debts put post-revolutionary leaders on a collision course with capitalist interests in the United States that, in important ways, structured the diplomatic relations of the time. As oil companies, mining interests, bankers, and bondholders in the United States pressured their government to protect their interests south of the border, successive U.S. administrations had to decide how they would contend with...