Essay On Mexican Immigration

1449 Words6 Pages
Mexican immigration to the United States has occurred throughout America’s history. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo awarded part of Mexican land to America and gave the right to Mexicans in this region to become citizens. Two years later, California passed the Foreign Miners Tax, which taxed the holdings of Latin American and Chinese gold miners. This tax did not affect European miners and was the first legislation separating Latinos and Mexicans from Americans. In 1887 a federal district court in Texas upheld the right for Mexicans to naturalize under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This upheld the notion of Mexicans to be white in the eyes of the law (Routledge 2007). When the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, it prevented the majority of Mexican immigration to the United States. Measures were quickly taken to deny legal entry to Mexican laborers. As a result, during 1930-1940, 600,000 Mexican immigrants were deported. Finally, in 1935, California law was the first to declare Mexican Americans as foreign-born Indians. In 1946, a court case in California, Mendez v. Westminster, found that Mexican American children were segregated due to their appearance and…show more content…
In other words, Latinos and Mexicans are viewed to be the same group of people and are thusly treated the same by most people. They cannot be distinguished by the general public which is why the same study found that when considering immigration, respondents did not distinguish between Mexican and Latino immigration because they “thought Mexican” (Ayers, Hofstetter, Schnackenberg, & Kolody 2009). Due to these findings, this study will consider data regarding perceptions of Latinos to be comparable to data on

More about Essay On Mexican Immigration

Open Document