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The Price of Entry: Immigration Economics in the 1920s
Who Paid, Who Profited, and What Restriction Cost

Book Details
About this book:

The Price of Entry: Immigration Economics in the 1920s Discover the hidden ledger behind America’s 1920s immigration crackdown—a story where quotas, head taxes, and border fences became lucrative business ventures for steamship lines, smugglers, corrupt officials, and agribusiness alike. *The Price of Entry* reveals how the nation’s shift from open doors to rigid national‑origin caps turned migration into a high‑stakes financial gamble, reshaping labor markets, spawning underground economies, and laying the groundwork for today’s border enforcement industry.

Through vivid chapters—from the frantic race of transatlantic liners chasing monthly quotas to the desert “coyotes” of the Rio Grande, from the rise of the first Border Patrol to the profitable cellblocks that housed detained migrants—this book traces the money, the motives, and the human cost of a policy that promised protection but delivered profit. Readers will see how Northern factories mechanized or recruited domestic labor, how Southwest growers secured exploitable Mexican workforces, and how kinship networks, forged papers, and remittance flows became the invisible economy of restriction.

If you want to understand the true economics behind the “illegal alien” label, the origins of modern border militarization, and why the debate over foreign labor still hinges on century‑old financial incentives, *The Price of Entry* delivers the definitive, eye‑opening account. Don’t just read about the Roaring Twenties—uncover the price paid for entry and who has been collecting the dividend ever since.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Open Gate Shuts: The Postwar Panic and the Emergency Quota of 1921
  • Chapter 2 Paper Barriers: The True Cost of Consular Visas and Head Taxes
  • Chapter 3 Steerage Economy: Transatlantic Steamship Lines and the Loss of Human Cargo
  • Chapter 4 Calibrating Exclusion: The 1924 Act and the Architecture of National Origins
  • Chapter 5 The Shadow Ledger: Forged Visas, Stolen Passports, and Black-Market Papers
  • Chapter 6 Bootlegging People: Rum-Runners and Migrant Cargo in the Florida Straits
  • Chapter 7 Across the Northern Line: The Underground Railroads of the Canadian Border
  • Chapter 8 Desert Coyotes: The Rise of Professional Smuggling Syndicates along the Rio Grande
  • Chapter 9 The Southwest Exception: Agribusiness and the Carve-Out for Mexican Labor
  • Chapter 10 Green Gold: Imperial Valley, King Cotton, and the Economics of Disposable Field Hands
  • Chapter 11 Birth of the Green Uniform: Budgeting and Deploying the First Border Patrol
  • Chapter 12 Hardware of Exclusion: Cars, Guns, Wire, and the Lucrative Border Security Industry
  • Chapter 13 The Wages of Whiteness: Organized Labor, the AFL, and the War on Cheap Hands
  • Chapter 14 Steel, Coal, and Automaking: How Northern Factories Adapted to the Labor Drain
  • Chapter 15 The Great Internal Shift: Domestic Migration Fills the Factory Floor
  • Chapter 16 The Toll of Detention: Ellis Island as a Federal Holding Pen
  • Chapter 17 The Profitable Cellblock: County Jails and Federal Contracts for Alien Custody
  • Chapter 18 Shipboard Repatriation: The Lucrative Business of Deportation Logistics
  • Chapter 19 Kinship Economies: Remittances, Smuggler Debts, and the Immigrant Family Budget
  • Chapter 20 Chinatown in the Shadows: Paper Sons, Merchant Exemptions, and Legal Defense Funds
  • Chapter 21 Subterranean Labor Markets: Sweatshops, Tenements, and Undocumented Paychecks
  • Chapter 22 Bribes, Badges, and Border Towns: Public Corruption in the Prohibition Era
  • Chapter 23 The Act of 1929: Making Unlawful Entry a Felony and Criminalizing the Migrant
  • Chapter 24 The Crash: Wall Street, the Great Contraction, and the Scapegoat Economy
  • Chapter 25 The Restriction Dividend: Calculating the Human and Economic Costs of a Closed Border
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Author:

Samantha G. Payne

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

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