history tv, 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span 3. to follow the conversation, like us on facebook at the span history. -- c-span history. >> recently, american history tv was at the american historical association's annual meeting in denver, colorado. we spoke with professors, officers and graduate students about their research. this interview is about 20 minutes. >> we're with jennifer cullison who is a phd candidate at the , university of colorado, also rachel grace newman, phd candidate at columbia university here to talk about immigration , and student visas in the 20th century. rachel your research is on , mexican students coming to the u.s. during the 20th century. tell us about who was coming and why and how they were able to do that. ms. newman: actually mexican students started coming to the united states in the 19th century. it is a long-term phenomenon. at that time, most of them coming were from elite mexican

families who wanted the best education for their children. what started to change is 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. newman: that's right. their own government supported them to study abroad. and they tried 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 mine is 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 migrant

population 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 particularly 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 the point with mccaren-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 come of the immigration an -- had.

both 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, save up money to go home and build a better house and provide a better education for their children. instead, 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. sometimes student migrants to -- were working 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 class prejudices. they were a particular group of migrants, but they certainly fall within the broader group of mexicans in the united states. host: were students, obviously come from better backgrounds and inthen perhaps laborers

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. again, rachel can speak to the 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 agriculture or some other industry at the time. bests very fluid with the arrow program. -- the program. but that program only allowed people to be here 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 of how the government deals with a number of undocumented people and rounding them up. most people have heard of operation wetback. in 1954, when 1 million people are apprehended. house of them -- half of them are detained. and most of them are returned to mexico through voluntary departure. but i focus on the pieces that are detention 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

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 students on college campuses? was there less pushback from the american public? ms. newman: absolutely. speaking in general terms, people in the 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 particularly in the 1930's and 1940's, because there was this broad inpulse to actually promote friendship

-- broad impulse 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 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 who was studying at the university of wisconsin in the 1940's. he had come to the united states with the wrong visa 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 am not going to deport you or 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 am not sure if on -- an fbi agent was a government agent involved, and the story may be embellished somewhat 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 life is stay for -- like them stay -- length of

stay for mexican laborers in the united states. ms. cullison: the ins is really selling itself during this period, especially studying in -- starting 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 its enforcement. in 1954, what is so adjusting is 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 really 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 most significantly lowest number in 1961, to 791 people on any given day were detained. that is the average daily population. so, this humanitarian trajectory, though, over the 1960's you would hear lyndon calling 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, laboring 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 -- were in the decline in terms of detentions over the period, but they were working to find them because the 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 i 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. that's in the united states -- in the united states had these scholarships. i said, wonder if anyone had written history of that.

no one had. i got very interested and pursue 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 visa and then to become a permanent resident and a citizen, i started to question the way the whole policy worked. and it 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 the 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 just with families just with , mercantile kinds of circuits, this sort of natural human

travel where the border to not -- 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 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 interests, it is better to stay here. so 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 this side with , more mexican communities growing. through that particular avenue but also through ways in which families of mexicans through changes in could migrate to the 1965 u.s. legally, as well. newman 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 significantly. 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 to study her. -- thinking of coming to study here. along on are how far 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 -- in about the next year, and i 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 that. but what i argue in my work is that overall 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 to today, i think immigrant detention 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 alizationation -- raci of particular populations 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. overall, what i am hoping is that people will feature my -- see through my work not only the historical trajectory, but begin to question the foundations of what is in place today. host: rachel in terms of your , research, is there an area where the think the general public does not is not aware enough about or understood, what would you say that is? ms. newman: i think that people do not necessarily understand how important scholarships are for promoting student migration

and the exchanges between countries that those can allow. we often have an image of our international students being the sons of princes. but the scholarship makes it possible for people to come, and if we want to have a diverse group of mexican students in the united states, we need to continue to support scholarships from government, from foundations and universities to keep that student population host: does that mexican government keep up that scholarship program? >> absolutely. it has been protected even in the midst of budget cuts. thanks for being with us on american history tv. >> you are watching american history tv all weekend, every