WESTERN HEMISPHERE IMMIGRATION 387

and 10,000 Mexicans already in this country, in the El Paso immigration district
alone, were deported in that same period.
While the basis for organized opposition to restricting Mexican immigration—
aside from diplomatic objections from the State Department—is the danger of
crippling southwestern agriculture; there has been growing evidence in recent
years that exploiters of cheap labor, hiding behind the need of the farmers and
ranchmen, have been taking advantage of the status of Mexico under our imomigration
 laws to cheaper pay rolls of the railroads and interior industrial plants.
That situation has been largely responsible for the rapid spread of sentiment
for greater restrictions.
As a matter of fact, comparatively few of the immigrants of recent years
have stopped on the border to work on neighboring farms and ranches.
"The reason is that the wages southwestern farmers could afford to pay did
not compete with inland industrial wages.
During the height of the seasonal labor influx employment agencies in South
El Paso have been plastered with railway and industrial bids, such as “374%
cents an hour at ——’ or “$4 to $6 a day at — 7” And by the hundreds
the newly arrived immigrants were loaded on cheap day coaches and shipped
to the interior. Even during the crop-planting season last spring when, under
pressure of Government's closer restriction, immigration through the El Paso
port was running as low as 20 to 25 a day, Mexican laborers were being shipped
out by the trainload—virtually all of the new arrivals, along with recruits out
of El Paso Valley, going to make up carload lots.
For, in comparison with the glaring placards in local labor agencies, border
farmers and ranchmen were paying only $1.25 to $1.50 a day, a few of them
offering only 90 cents, accompanied by the requirement that their employees
spend a third of their earnings in ranch commissaries.
“Which means,” as one local labor leader declared, “that if we attempt to
supply the demand for farm labor here on the present basis of operation, we'll
have to admit from ten to one hundred times the number agricultural interests
need so they'll get the surplus after all the loose jobs in the interior are filled.”
Labor agencies, on some classes of employment, collect fees both from employer
 and worker. On some, such as in the beet fields, the employer pays
both fee and expenses of travel. In hiring workers for railway constructivn and
section jobs, the labor agencies’ remuneration is the privilege of the exclusive
operation of commissaries along the road, while the railroads haul both laborer
and cormmissary merchandise free of charge.
Reduced quotas of immigrants and a new Texas law, enacted in the 1929 session
of the State legislature, have combined to cut in on the activities of the labor
agencies—at least on the Texas border, which has been getting 90 per cent of the
immigrants. The new State law provides a State tax of $1,000 a year on labor
agencies which ship laborers out of the State and permits both counties and cities
to add to the tax.
El Paso’s four labor agencies paid their taxes this year, but under protest.
Another lean year of small immigration, they complained, and labor shipments
 to points in the interior will have to be suspended.
How great is the need of southwestern farmers snd ranchmen for new supplies
of immigrant labor?
And how far is this need being capitalized by exploiters of cheap labor for railway
 and industrial employment?
These are questions which probably only an exhaustive study can answer.
And on the accuracy of the answers depends the justice, in so far as agricultural
employers are concerned, of whatever quota restrictions, if any, are placed upon
Mexican immigration.
Department of Labor agents who made local surveys insist that there is plenty
of Mexican labor already on this side of the border to do border districts’ hard
work—that Mexicans already here, supplemented by those who would come in
ander a quota and the ‘‘wet backs” who regularly slip past the border patrol,
will supply that demand for all time to come. The continual cry for more and
more Mexicans, they argue, is merely the big employer's plan of being sure that
he will always have at hand an abundant supply of the cheapest possible labor.
An instance in corroboration: .
During the cotton-picking season in 1028, when Mexican immigration still was
running high, an El Paso Post reporter saw a big down-valley planter near the
city hall. He was climbing into his truck.
“Come up here to get some eotton pickers,” he told the reporter, “but couldn’t
find a one in town.”