Stateless Within the State: Gossip, Informal Law, and Intra-Class Discipline in Migrant Labor Control

In the wake of the Bracero Program’s termination in 1964, U.S. growers quietly restructured immigration and labor regulation to sustain agricultural labor without settlement. A key workaround emerged: sponsoring Mexican workers for permanent residency while ensuring they remained seasonal commuters.

These green card commuters—Mexican nationals granted U.S. residency who continued to live in adjacent Mexican towns and crossed the border daily or seasonally for work—embodied a paradoxical legal status. Formally classified as immigrants, they were structurally excluded from settlement through informal enforcement of the public charge provision, employer housing practices, and the economic precarity of agricultural wages. This commuter status was not codified in statutory law but created through administrative fiat.

Agencies across the Departments of State, Justice, and Labor governed the program informally, bypassing legislative oversight. Mechanisms like the Rule of 25 allowed consular officials to waive labor certification requirements, while growers exploited regulatory ambiguity to legalize former braceros en masse. Informal law thus operated as a deliberate strategy of labor control, enabling agribusinesses to access cheap, legal, and tightly tethered labor precisely when domestic workers were striking and labor protections were expanding.

The United Farm Workers (UFW) responded by supporting a regulation barring non-resident green card holders from entering the U.S. if bound to a struck field. Through a “chismesito”—gossip—network, UFW members identified strikebreakers and denounced them to the INS for deportation. This bottom-up deportation campaign reveals that the migrant carceral turn of the 1960s was shaped not only by conservative politics, but also by labor organizing from the Left.

This work reframes permanent residency not as a pathway to integration, but as a tool of regulatory evasion. It shows how legal inclusion was informally repurposed to limit migrant mobility, enforce border discipline, and sustain a transnational labor regime built on mobility without settlement.

Join zoom meeting