Immigration Spying Has an Inglorious Past

Immigration Spying Has an Inglorious, Xenophobic Past - Bucks County Beacon

In the early 1900s, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration created a special “Chinese Division” to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first major U.S. immigration law to ban entry based on race and nationality. Federal agents were sent to Mexican border towns and tasked with secretly photographing, tracking, and cataloging Chinese migrants—in a word, to spy on them.  Years before the Border Patrol was formally created in 1924, fede…

Immigration Spying Has an Inglorious Past

Today's surveillance of immigrants in the United States has roots in nineteenth-century discriminatory policies.