Lifetimes of Instability: the Consequences of Excluding Syrian Boys on the Progressive Era US-Mexico Border

Abstract

In the first decade of the twentieth century, United States immigration inspectors at the US-Mexico border excluded hundreds of young Syrians, turning many toward unstable lives as unauthorized migrants in North America. Inspectors combined Progressive Era concerns about child labor with orientalist and racist views of migrants from the Ottoman Empire to conclude that unaccompanied young Syrians posed a threat to the American family and workplace and should be sent back across the Atlantic. And while some excluded boys did return to Syria, the majority found ways to enter the United States without authorization. Some sought the help of smugglers and others obtained falsified papers that claimed uncles, brothers, and family friends as their fathers and accompanied them across the border. While these tactics worked, illicit border crossing launched young migrants into an unauthorized life marked by precarity and fear. In fact, oral histories conducted by the author have revealed that young boys who entered the United States without authorization often ended up in unstable professions connected to urban underworlds. Ultimately, this article seeks to demonstrate the ways hardline immigration policies of the early twentieth century targeting young boys set them on paths toward precarity as they navigated lives in the United States.