moon ♪ announcer: you're watching american history tv, 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter at c-span schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. american history tv was at the american history denver,ion meeting at colorado. we spoke to professors, authors, and graduate students about their research. this interview is about 20 minutes. >> we are with jennifer who is a phdcandidate and rachel, a candidate at columbia. here to talk about immigration and student visas in the 20

century. rachel, your research is on mexican immigrants coming to the united states during the 20th century. tell us about who was coming and why and how they were able to do that. ms. cullison: actually mexican students started coming to thee united states from the 19th century. most of them came from elite mexican families who wanted the best education for their chosen. what started to change as the mexican government began to offer scholarships, and that opened up the possibility of studying in the united states to a broader group of students who came from middle-class backgrounds. host: they were offering scholarships to mexican students to study in the united states?

ms. cullison: that's right. their own government supported them to study abroad. and they try to give them to the best students as a kind of reward for their academic merits, but absolutely social connections played a role. host: when did we start seeing large numbers of mexican students increase in terms of coming to the united states for their education? ms. cullison: the difference between rachel's research and minor she is looking at students and middle-class migrants as she would like to consider them as part of the migrant population, but i am looking at what i would call a different sector of the m -- the working class and the laborers. my work covers from 1952 forward, right in the middle of

the program. i can't really speak too much to middle-class student migration, i can speak to the project of dealing with the income and outflow of mexican migrants. host: you go back to 1952. what's particular important about that date for you? ms. cullison: 1952 was basically when congress codified immigration law. before that, there had been several statutes that work together but they came at that point with the the karen -- mc caren-walter act to codify all of them. that is important because they are outlining in one space what kind of enforcement capabilities the ins has. host: you're both dealing with two separate entities of immigrants. where are the similarities you see in terms of what is driving mexican immigration in the historical context? ms. newman: absolutely students

were looking at when going to the united states to do something that was going to improve their future prospects. instead of perhaps traveling to work, they had money to go home and build a better house and provide a better education for their children. they were coming to the united states to study, get a u.s. degree that they hoped would advance their professional careers in mexico. however, the differences between the labor and student migrants were not always so clear. sometime students work in similar jobs that labor migrants did. they could be confused for labor migrants in some situations, which students could take offense at, because of their own prejudices. there wy fall within the broader group of mexicans in the united states. host: were students, obviously come from better backgrounds and perhaps laborers in terms of their wealth and their parents, were the way they were treated by the u.s. government, by immigration officials, were they different? ms. cullison: i would say so. for the laborers, it was very much a process in the 1950's, i go forward to 1996 and i can explain that more later, but it

was very much a process of screening who would be good potential laborers and agricultural and some industry at the time. and it was very fluid with this program but the program would only allow people to be here for a certain restricted period for a season or two. then they were supposed to return to mexico. the question was, as the program continued from 1942-1954, more people were crossing the border without authorization, and so, what i start to track is how the government deals with that increasing number of undocumented people. and rounding them up. most people have heard of operation in 1954, when 1 million people are apprehended. have of those are detained. and most of them are returned to mexico through voluntary departure.

but i focus on the pieces that are over this period. host: does any of your research look at how americans view this wave of migrants, either in the labor community or students coming to the u.s. in terms of our reaction to immigration through that time in history? ms. cullison: yes, yes. i'm very much tracking that. it's very much mixed feelings in the, during the program. as we get to the end of it in 1964, there are some people saying this is a humanitarian problem, people are not being treated well. we need to have some more enforcement in the way that those, the department of labor is handling this. other people are feeling like it is a competition for labor, so they would rather not have this program. so, for most of those two reasons, the program ends. it is not really, though, until

the 1970's 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. host: was it somehow safer for mexican student on college campuses, was there less pushback from the american public? ms. newman: absolutely. speaking in general terms, people and united states have been interested to have mexican students on campus. that's something that dates back to the early 20th century. but i would say particular in the 1930's and 1940's, because there was this broad inpulse to actually promote friendship between united states and the rest of latin america, people were very excited to have mexican students as representatives of their country, as mexican culture, and they were eager to form friendships with them as kind of a microcosm of the friendship we were trying to create between united states and mexico. host: in 2017 you hear a lot about overstays visas. how, difficult, how lenient has the government then for students in particular we start with you.

in terms of visa overstays. ms. newman: visa researches for student for absolutely real and they do affect students ability, for example, to perform certain types of work in the united states. host: so, they can only do a limited amount of hours? ms. newman: and certain types of work. on-campus jobs are allowed. and we see occasionally students running into problems with their student visas, but i think we will see a real difference between what i found and what jennifer has found because when students do have visa trouble there is some kind of leniency an understanding that this is a bureaucratic error rather than a criminal act. i have a story about a mexican student studying at the university of wisconsin in the 1940's. he had come to the united states with a tourist visa and it expired. in his memoirs he wrote decades later, he says an fbi agent came to his apartment, asked him what his situation was, and said, all right, look, well, next time you go back to mexico, be sure to get the right visa. but i'm not going to do anything because i have asked around at the university, you are a good student, you are a good person.

so, we are going to let this go. i'm not sure an fbi agent was a government agent involved, and the story may be embellished but i does think it does give us a sense of more of understanding treatment that students received. their visas were more of a formality than anything else. host: tell us about the dynamic of visas and length of stay for mexican laborers in the united states. ms. cullison: the ins is really selling itself during this period, especially studying in 1954 as an agency that is very much interested in humane treatment of the people it deals with, particularly relating to visas in the process and then also in the way it does enforcement. at the end of that year, the

attorney general decided to make this announcement that the ins is no longer the business of detaining anybody. he wanted to downsize. and he said that what he would like to see is the service, as they called it, the ins letting people who were coming in with missing paperwork, with bureaucratic problems, continue on. that they could take care of it. they believed in the integrity of every migrant. that statement i take to mean, he is thinking about middle-class people coming in, maybe even to the east coast. i do not think he was so much thinking about laboring classes from mexico. yet, between 1954 and 1961, detention really, really declined to its lowest number in 1961, to 791 people on any given day were detained. and so, this humanitarian trajectory, though, over the 1960's you are here lyndon baines johnson called the ins the government with a heart, yet we see all levels of metrics increasing for detention. so, one of the things i'm pointing out in my research, despite this rhetoric of humanitarian

service, the ins was especially with one particular population, working-class mexican migrants, not so interested in being so humane. i point out some ways in which the detention process becomes even a little bit more of a criminal justice kind of situation in immigration courtrooms and the way they deal with bonding and in the way they deal with the interagency efforts to find criminal mexicans, which actually we are in decline in terms of detentions over the period, but they were working to find them believed they were there. host: what brought you both to your field of research?

ms. newman: i actually did a previous project about migrant children who were the children of farmworkers and the state in mexico who went to the united states for six months every year to harvest and then came back. i was interested in education and the flows across the border. while it was looking for some more sources to expand that project starting my phd, i kept finding all these references of scholarships for students. i had not heard about this before but i knew that many of my mexican friends and united states had these scholarships. i said, wonder if anyone had written history of that. no one had. i got very interested and pursued the topic. ms. cullison: it came out of a personal situation. i had been living in brazil for a while, and i ended up bringing back the man who eventually was my husband and the father of my son. the process that he went through in order to have a fiance viassa and thneen to become a permanent resident and a citizen, i started to question the way the whole policy worked. and i wanted to see how it had changed. host: rachel mentioned flows of migration. how is mexican migration broadly different from other immigration, a border country? what about this flow of back and forth between united states.

what is the historical context for that? ms. cullison: the historical context has a lot to do with the fact that much of the u.s., the western region used to be mexico. so, there has for more than, you know, more than a century, been a circular migration of people for families, just with mercantile kinds of circuits, this natural human travel where the border to 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 border patrol in the 1920's but 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 be stopped at the border. if they have already got a family established here, if they have other ties and interest, it is better to state her -- stay

here. what some scholars have called the unintended consequence of immigration policies set in the 1960's, which was meant really at the end of the program, to discontinue these flows, the flow did not really discontinue and the way they intended. the circulation kind of stopped, but it stopped on the side, with more mexican communities growing. through that particular avenue but also through ways in which families of mexicans through changes in 1965, could migrate to the u.s. legally, as well. host: what about in terms of students? 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? ms. newman: certainly mexican students have always been a big group of foreign students in the united states, but it has really

never been the largest student group, group of foreign students in the united states. the numbers have grown over time. today we are talking about maybe 17,000 mexican students in the united states. and in terms of obstacles, 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 those scholarships. i think that is going to be the biggest barrier for a young person in mexico thinking of coming to study here. host: you are half all along on your research, and what you hope when it is done that will happen with it? what you hope people get out of it? ms. newman: i am at the stage of writing up the research. i have done all the archival and

interview work. now i am producing the chapters. i am hoping to eventually turn it into a book. i think that today we really have to think hard about the current climate of anti-mexican sentiment that is being promoted by the incoming administration. and the effects that could potentially have on not just mexican students but all mexicans thinking of coming to the united states, whether it is for work, for travel, to study. i think we could see some real changes going forward. so i am hoping the historical context i can provide can give us some ways to think about that. host: same question, where are you and what you hope the next step is? ms. cullison: at exactly the same stage as rachel. i am in the writing process. i expect to be done and about the next year i do also intend to turn this into a monograph, into a book. the way i see it connecting to the present is really on two levels. one is in the larger study of the growth of what is called mass incarceration or hyper

incarceration. today, there are 2.3 million people incarcerated in this country. and immigrant detention makes up less than 2% of the. but what i argue in my work 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, over the period of 1952 today, i think immigrant intention grew something like 15 times, and it was only nine times for criminal incarceration. so we can see through this that that it is something of a cautionary tale to look at the ways in which immigrant detention grew and maybe apply that overall to the -- particular population to anti-immigrant sentiment and the question of what is going on with this in terms of even as connection to the privatization, the privatization of detention space actually happened before the privatization of criminal detention space. and so overall, what i am hoping is that people will feature my work, not only the historical trajectory, but begin to question the foundations of what

>> rachel, in terms of your work, is it -- if there is something the public are not as aware of, what would you say that is? not would say they are aware of exchanges between countries. we have an image of international students being but in many times scholarships allow them to come. if we want to have a diverse group of mexican students in the united states, we need to con tinue to support scholarships. host: does the mexican government continue to keep up the scholarship or grant? absolutely. i think the scholarships have been protected even when there are budget cuts. newman andl grace

jennifer collison. thank you for being with us here on american history tv. >> thank you. >> you are watching american history tv, all weekend every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like is on facebook. on lectures in history, shepherd university professor benjamin bancfirst teaches a class on appellation in the american imagination. he describes how the stereotype has changed over time from being hillbilliesackwards " to people respected for their folk culture. hour.asses about one benjamin: all right. let's go a a