supported by him, who sorely alone can be supported. remain, your i friend, victoria. >> recently, american history tv was at the american historical association's annual meeting in denver, colorado. we spoke with professors, authors and graduate students about their research. this interview is about 20 minutes. >> we are with jennifer, a phd candidate here to talk about immigration and student visas.

about mexicanss coming to the u.s. and the 20 century. talk about who was coming and why and how they were able to do that. rachael: actually, mexico soon --came in the 19 century mexican students came in the 19th century. very eliterom mexican families who just wanted the best education for their children. started to change was that the mexican government began to offer scholarships and that opened up the possibility of being in the united states to a broader group of students who came from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. they were offering scholarship students to mexican students to study in the united states. rachel: that's right. they tried to give them to the best students as a reward for academic merits but absolutely social connections. seeing did we start large numbers of mexican

students increase in terms of coming to the united states for their education? the difference between our research is that she looking sheiddle-class migrants as would like to put it as part of the migrant population. but i look at a different sector of the migrant population, the working class and the laborers. my work covers from 1952 forward. i can't really speak to much to middle-class migrations. i can speak more to the bursar of program -- to the bracero program and the influent flow of mexican migrants. >> you go back to 1952. what is particularly important about that date? jennifer: that's when congress law.ied immigration

before that, there had been several statutes that work together, but there came together to codify all of them. in onee really outlining space were kind of enforcement capabilities the ins had, the immigration and naturalization service. >> you are both dealing with two separate entities of immigrants. what are the similarities you see in terms of what is driving mexican immigration in the historical context? rachel: absolutely students were looking, when going to the united states, to do something that was going to improve their future prospects. instead of traveling tour, they got money to go home and build a better house or provided greater -- a better education for their children. they were coming to the united states and get a u.s. degree that they hoped would advance their careers in mexico. however, the difference is between student migrants and labor migrants were not clear.

they could be confused for labor migrants in some situations, which student could take offense because of their own class prejudices. so they were a particular group of migrants, but they absolutely fall in the broader group of mexicans in the united states. were students from better backgrounds come in terms of wealth and their parents, were the way they were treated by the u.s. government, by immigration officials, with a different? jennifer: i would say so. for the laborers, it was very this pointess of, at in the 1950's -- i go forward on the way to 1996 and i-8 can explain that -- and i can expend it later -- but it was a process of screening who would be better laborers and agriculture at the time. it was very fluid with the bracero program. but it would only allow people

period of time, only a season or two and and they were supposed to return to mexico. the question was, as the bracero , more peoplenued were crossing the border without authorization, without being braceros. the government was dealing with those undocumented people. most people have heard of operation went back, in 1954, when people were -- operation 1954.k in any of your research look at how americans viewed migrants, either the labor community or students coming to the u.s., in terms of our reaction to immigration through that period of time in history?

jennifer: i am very much tracking that. feelings much mixed program.e bracero as we get to the end of a 1964, there are some people saying that this is a humanitarian problem. people are not being treated well. we need to have some are enforcement in the way that the department of labor is handling this. other people are feeling like this is competition for labor, so they wouldn't that -- rather not have the program. so for those two reasons, the program ends. its not really until the 1970's that we start to see, as some scholars have pointed out, by looking at the covers of national magazines, the ways in which the american public is truly concerned about tidal waves or this influx of mexican laboring people that are undocumented that are a threat to the country. >> was it somehow safer for mexican students on college campuses? was there less pushback from the american public?

rachel: absolutely. speaking in general terms, people were excited to have mexican students on campus. that is something that dates back to the early 20th century. but particularly in the 1930's and 1940's, because there was to actuallympulse promote friendship between the united states and the rest of people were very excited to have mexican students as representatives of their country, of mexico culture, and they were eager to form friendships with them as kind of a microcosm of the friendship that we were trying to create between the united states and mexico. >> in 2017, you hear a lot about over stays of visas. how difficult -- how lenient has they government been for students in particular? visa restrictions for students are real and they affect the ability to perform certain types of work while they are in the united states.

>> so they can only do limited amounts of hours? rachel: and only certain types of work. so only on campus jobs are allowed. we see students running into problems with their student visas. but there's a difference between what we have found. generally, when student have visa trouble, there is some kind of leniency and understand that we are in a bureaucratic era -- error as opposed to a criminal act. i have a story of a student in the university of wisconsin in the 1940's. he had come to the united states with the wrong visa, a tourist and it expired. he said that an fbi agent came to his apartment, asked him what said,sa situation was and next time you go back to mexico, be sure to get the right visa. but i'm not going to do for you. i'm not going to ask anything. i asked around the university. you're a good student. you are a good person. we will just let this go.

i'm not really sure the fbi agent was the government agency involved, but he gives us the more understanding treatment of the student received. their visas were more of a formality than anything else. about the length of visas for laborers. starting in 1954, as an agency that is very much interested in humane treatment of the people it deals with, particularly relatingto visas and the process and the way s enforcement. in 1954, the attorney general decided to make this announcement, that the ins is no longer in the business of detaining anybody. in fact, he wanted to downsize the tension. and he said -- downsize

detention. he wanted to see the service letting people coming in with missing paperwork, with bureaucratic problems, continue on, that they could take care of it, that they believed in the integrity of every migrant. take to meant i that he is really thinking about middle-class people coming in, coast. the east i don't think he was so much thinking about laboring classes from mexico. yet, between 1954 and 1961, detention really declined to its significant -- most significantly to its lowest number. were the teen on any given day was call the average population. 1960's,jectory over the you heard johnson call the ins to government the heart.

yet you see all levels of metrics increasing for detention. so one of the things i am pointing out in my research, despite this rhetoric of humanitarian service, the ins, especially with one partaker he -- with one particular population, not necessarily so humane. and i point out the way in which the detention process becomes more of a criminal justice courtion in immigration rooms come in the way the deal is bonding, and the date -- the way they deal with interagency efforts to find criminal mexicans, which were actually in the decline. they were working to find them because they believed they were there. >> what fueled your field of research? rachel: i did a previous project thet migrant children, children of migrant workers in the state of mutual on -- of were laborers.

i kept finding all these references to scholarship for students. i hadn't really heard about this before, but i knew that many of my mexican friends in the net is states had the scholarships. so i wondered if anybody had written a history of that and no one had. so i pursued that topic. jennifer: it came out of a situation. i had been living in brazil for a while and i ended up bringing back the man who eventually is my husband and the father of my son. and the process that he went arough in order to have fiancee visa and then do the process of becoming a permanent resident a fiancee and then citizen, i served to question the way that the whole policy work. and i wanted to see how it changed over time. >> rachel mentioned flows of migration. how is mexican migration broadly different from other countries? what about this flow of back-and-forth between the

united states? what is the historical context for that? jennifer: it has a lot to do with the fact that the western region used to be mexico. so for more than a century, there has been a circular migration just with families, with mercantile kinds of circuits, this sort of natural human travel where the border did not really have any significance in a political way to these people that were making this circular migration. what happened over the 20th century, with the invention of the border patrol in the 1920's, and then with increasing enforcement efforts starting especially in the 1960's, what starts to happen is people start to decide that it's too risky to return to mexico for fear of being able to come back in, to border.ed at the if they already have a family established here come if they have other ties and other interest, it's better to stay

here than to go back. haveat some scholars called the unintended consequence of immigration the 1960's, which was meant really at the end of program to discontinue these flows, the flow didn't really discontinue in the way they intended. the circulation kind of stopped, but on the side, with more growing.ommunities through that particular avenue but also in ways in which families of mexicans through changes in 1965 could migrate to the u.s. legally as well. >> what about in terms of students, obviously, a lot more immigrants coming to the country now of different nationalities. has this presented a challenge for students of mexican heritage, from mexico, coming to the u.s.? are they having as many opportunities as they used to?

rachel: mexican students have always been a big group of foreign students in the united states. but it had never really been the largest student group of foreign states. in the united the numbers have grown significantly over time. today, we are talking about maybe 17,000 mexican students in the united states. in terms of obstacles and i would say probably the biggest one has to do with funding. it's very difficult to afford an education in the united states, unless you have one of the scholarships. i think that will be the biggest barrier for a young person in mexico thinking of coming to study here. >> how far along are you in your research? what do you hope, when it's done, that will happen? what do you hope people will get out of it? rachel: i met the states now for writing up the research. i've done all the archival and interview work. now i'm producing the chapters. i'm hoping to eventually turn into a book. i think today, we have to think hard about the current climate climate of--

anti-mexican sentiment promoted by the administration and the impact that could have on not just mexican students, but all mexicans thinking to come to the united states, whether it is to work, to do travel, to study. i think we could see some real changes going forward. historicaln the context i can provide can give us something to think about that. >> and where are you and what you hope the next step is for you? the exact same stage as rachel. i am in the writing up process. i expect of a den in the next year. i also intend to turn this into a book. connecting toit the present is really on two different levels. one is come in the larger study of the growth of what is called mass incarceration or hyper incarceration -- there are 3.2 million people incarcerated in this country. emigrant the tension makes up less than 2% of that. though what i argue in my work over all is that immigrant

detention grew earlier, grew faster, and grew much -- to a much bigger scale than regular criminal detention or incarceration. in other words come over the period of 1950 until today, i grew 15 timesion and it was only nine times for criminal incarceration. so we can see through this that it is something of a cautionary tale to look at the way that immigrant chin the tension grew and how -- immigration detention grew and what is going on with this in terms of even its connection to the privatization of detention space. it happened before the privatization of criminal detention space. overall, i'm hoping people see through my work not only the historical the trajectory of

this, but begin to question the foundations of what is in place today. research, iff your there is an area where you think the american public or the general public isn't aware enough about or least understood, what would you say that is? that peopleink don't necessarily understand how important scholarships are for promoting student migration and the exchanges between countries that those can allow. we often have an image it not our minds of international students being the sons of princes. but in many cases, the scholarship is what makes it possible for people to come. and if we want to have a diverse europe of mexican students in the united states, we need to continue to support scholarships tom governments, foundations keep that student population growing. >> does the government still have that scholarship program going? rachel: absolutely. scholarships have been protected, even in moments when there have been budget cuts to

science and other parts of education. p rep. grayson: newman, jenniferndidate and collison, phd candidate. thank you for being with us. >> thank you. >> you are watching american history tv, 40 hours of american history every week and on c-span 3. follow us on twitter for information on our schedule. and they keep up with the latest history news. tv,ext, on american history former law clerks to supreme court justice thurgood marshall examine his legacy. he served from 1967 to 1991. panelists, including elena kagan, remember their time working for the first african-american member of the court and discuss his opinions on landmark cases. we recorded this at