Sin Fronteras9. Ch?canos, Mexican Americans, and the Emergence of the Contemporary Mexican Immigration Debate, 1968 1978
IN OCTOBER 1977, more than two thousand individuals representing a spectrum of Mexican American and other Hispanic interests, ranging from community groups and elected officials to militant ethnic separat ist and Marxist organizations, assembled in San Antonio, Texas for the First National Chicano/Latino Conference on Immigration and Public Policy.1 Called in response to President Jimmy Carter's recently an nounced immigration reform legislation, the conference provided dra matic evidence of the extent to which the immigration controversy had become a major civil rights issue in the 1970s. In three days of meet ings, the conference participants passed a series of unanimous resolu tions condemning the "Carter Plan" as discriminatory against both citi zens and aliens of Latin descent. With Mexican American organizations leading the way, the delegates specifically criticized the administration's call for the imposition of legal sanctions against habitual employers of illegal aliens, and lambasted other aspects of the proposal, including the provisions for extending a limited amnesty to hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens already in the United States.2 The unanimous negative response to the Carter Plan by Mexican American community groups, elected officials, and virtually every ma jor civil rights and political advocacy organization, represented a dra matic departure from traditional Mexican American positions on the immigration issue. Indeed, dating from the period of the first mass mi grations of Mexicans into the United States after the turn of the century, most Mexican American political activists and organizations had con sistently demanded many of the same reforms that they now rejected. Accepting the premise that immigrants undermined the life chances of American citizens of Mexican descent by competing with them for em ployment, depressing wages, and retarding their assimilation into the American social and cultural mainstream, most Mexican American ad