Creating a “Mass Production Technique”: Anti-Mexican Racism and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952

The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act is the most recent compilation of the nation’s immigration laws and continues to serve as the basis of our immigration laws and policies to this very day. In the decades since its passage, the Act has been extensively litigated and amended. Perhaps most famously, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act eliminated the racist national- origins quota system that had been reinscribed into the nation’s immi-gration laws under the McCarran-Walter Act. Hailed alongside the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for eradi-cating racism from the nation’s laws, the Hart-Celler Act largely ended the conversation about the 1952 law. This article, however, unearths an overlooked dimension of the McCarran-Walter Act. While policy-makers and scholars have long criticized the measure for perpetuating the racism of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, few have identified how anti-Mexican animus constituted a motivating force in the law’s passage. Drawing on an extensive set of previously unex-amined archival and legislative materials, this article traces the multiple ways that anti-Mexican racism informed the work of the McCarran-Walter Act’s drafters and sponsors. In so doing, it challenges character-izations of the law as one step in a longer history of the liberalization of U.S. immigration law and policy that culminated in 1965 and in-stead argues that we ought to see the law as foundational to the expansion of various forms of racialized social control long applied to people of Mexican descent.