“Crashing America’s Back Gate”: Illegal Europeans,Policing,and Welfare in Industrial Detroit,1921-1939

“Bootlegged Immigrants”: Smuggling Rings and Crime from Windsor to Detroit

Immigration laws enacted in 1921 and 1924 curbed European immigration to the United States, targeted Mexican laborers, and barred all Asians, making illegal entrance the only recourse for immigrants intent on entering the Untied States. New laws were devised in Congress with the express intention of maintaining the Anglo-Saxon character of the United States. The infamous 1924 Immigration Act set temporary immigration quotas to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census, a deliberate snub to southern and eastern Europeans who began immigrating in large numbers only after the 1890s. The act also included the “National Origins Clause,” a provision that by 1927, promised to limit total immigration to 150,000 and establish a new quota system based on the “national origins” of America’s population. ¹⁶ Of course, when new laws closed the door to formal immigration, they opened an illegal window along the Canadian border. Soon, thousands of excluded Europeans traveled to Canada in the hopes of smuggling across the northern border.

Even before major smuggling operations took off on the northern border, Europeans feared new laws would associate their national groups with undesirability. Although it is nearly impossible to capture the voices of the immigrants most affected by these laws, at the national level, quotas infuriated Jewish and Catholic immigrant organizations. The National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) protested the law in Congress on the grounds that restrictions would hurt Americanization efforts. Instead of creating goodwill among immigrant groups, the NCWC predicted, “restrictions will anger immigrants against America by the patent discrimination, which this proposed bill makes against their country, and by the manner in which it terms their fellow-countrymen.” ¹⁷ Likewise, Jewish publications charged the 1924 Immigration Act with dividing Americans into “class A citizens,” who were native born, and “class B citizens,” who were “born on the wrong side of the Atlantic.” ¹⁸

Policymakers had anticipated organized Catholic and Jewish responses to the quota system and, to strengthen their case for restriction, they began constructing new “national origins” quotas, which were to be based on hard social science numbers. The National Origins Act, which stalled in Congress for two years before going into effect in 1929, involved three important changes to American immigration law. First of all, it capped total immigration at 150,000. Second, it allocated new quotas according to the “national origins” (a deliberately vague concept) of America’s total population rather than its foreign-born population. And finally, because the 1890 census system had faced charges of discrimination from immigrant groups, restrictionists chose 1920 as the year to base America’s new “national origins” system. The system allowed new quotas to appear nondiscriminatory while still favoring Anglo-Saxon nations. ¹⁹

However, because the National Origins Act still made it difficult for most Europeans to enter the United States, a brisk trade in smuggling developed along the northern border, associating many foreign-born Europeans in Detroit with illegal entry, smugglers, and crime. Jacob Smoor, the Belgian immigrant whose illegal journey is profiled earlier in this piece, offers an excellent example of this trend. The moment Smoor agreed to enter Detroit illegally, he became involved with one of the Motor City’s most notorious smugglers, Julius Bennett. Known in Detroit as the “King of the Belgians,” Bennett controlled trade and illegal smuggling within the city’s French-speaking Belgian community. After 1924, Bennett’s gang expanded into the transnational business of alien smuggling, bringing Jacob Smoor and thousands across the Detroit River and into the city. ²⁰

Even after Smoor made it safely to the Belgian east side of Detroit, he continued to rely on Bennett’s smuggling syndicate. The Belgian gang gave Smoor and his fellow aliens housing and steered them toward employment in the beet fields of Michigan Sugar Company. In return, Bennett received sizable bribes from employers. Indeed, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) inspectors complained that by mid-1924, Bennett had smuggled more than five hundred Belgians and Dutch aliens between the beet fields of southeast Ontario and northern Michigan. ²¹ Bennett himself asserted that the number was higher. Although drunk in a speakeasy, he bragged to anyone who would listen that he had no trouble smuggling fifty to one hundred Belgians from Canada every week. ²²

Large smuggling rings like Bennett’s operated on both sides of the U.S.–Canadian border, throwing immigrants like Jacob Smoor into the center of Detroit’s criminal underworld. The proximity between Windsor and Detroit, which is clear in Figure 1, facilitated easy smuggling between the two cities. Moreover, although smuggling began informally, it quickly developed into a sophisticated network of crime that extended not only into Canada, but reached nations in Europe. Major smugglers established networks that built on and sometimes rivaled the bootleg liquor industry along the Detroit–Windsor waterway, involving aliens in a vast network of crime and illegality. By 1929, the INS identified seventy-five major smuggling gangs operating from Lake St. Clair in the north and extending along the Detroit River as far south as Dearborn. The tiny islands dotting the west of the Detroit River served as ideal immigrant transfer points, and no spot of American shore was too remote for the skilled smuggler. ²³

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Figure 1.

The Detroit–Windsor urban border region.

Between 1924 and 1929, Detroit smugglers brought roughly two thousand Europeans into the United States each month, making undocumented European immigration in Detroit a key concern for U.S. policymakers. ²⁴ Colonel Richard Davenport, head of the U.S. Border Patrol, reported that Detroit and its surrounding territory constituted “the most vulnerable point in the U.S. armor against smuggling.” ²⁵ He informed the Detroit News that the Detroit and Windsor accommodated “a vast army of expert boatmen” who profited off the thousands hoping to work in United States’s automobile industry or continue on to other cities. Although the Department of Labor never compiled official data concerning illegal immigrants in Detroit, Davenport’s obvious concern over smuggling in America’s automobile capital suggests that smugglers had more success in this region than in other popular smuggling spots like Buffalo, El Paso, or Havana. ²⁶

Immigrant smugglers and their European clients learned from the Chinese, who for decades had slipped across America’s northern and southern borders to become America’s first illegal immigrants. ²⁷ Along the northern border in particular, many Chinese residents had relocated to Canada for work on the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the 1870s and found themselves barred by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. ²⁸ Exclusionary laws left Chinese hoping to return to the United States with no choice but to smuggle across, opening a vast smuggling network that stretched from Niagara Falls to the Pacific Northwest. ²⁹ By the 1910s, Chinese began to mix themselves in with the tens of thousands of migrants passing between Windsor and Detroit each day, giving America’s Motor City an early reputation as the “principal gateway” for smuggled Chinese. ³⁰ Moreover, World War I passport regulations jumpstarted a small, yet steady European smuggling industry along the U.S.–Canada border. ³¹ Opportunists in Windsor and Detroit’s underworld seized the chance to organize smuggling rings that brought Chinese to the United States in boats, cars, and in some instances, packed between furniture in freight boxcars. ³²

In 1919, when Congress ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, trade in illegal liquor eclipsed the human smuggling industry. In response to new laws, organized gangs of liquor smugglers developed a prosperous illegal industry designed to transfer alcohol from Canada to Detroit. As the criminal trade developed, the strip of water between Port Huron and the St. Clair River gained a reputation as the “high road of rum.” ³³ In fact, 75 percent of all liquor smuggled into the United States during Prohibition crossed into the United States using what became known as the “Windsor Detroit funnel.” ³⁴

Foreign-born immigrants controlled the liquor smuggling industry, giving particular ethnic and national groups a reputation for crime. Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang, a syndicate run by Jewish immigrants from Russia, rose to power by importing and distributing illegal liquor throughout the Midwest. Gang leaders Carl Jacoby and Abe Bernstein maintained control over the nation’s liquor trade by relying on the St. Clair River to ship or drive hundreds of thousands of gallons of alcohol across the water and in the winter, across hardened ice. Beyond supplying local saloons, the Purples chartered vessels to take alcohol to other Great Lakes ports like Cleveland, earning them the title, “the Jewish Navy.” ³⁵ Thus, even before smugglers began to transport aliens across the Detroit–Windsor waterways, Russian Jewish immigrants’ involvement in the transport of illegal liquor laid the foundation for linking eastern Europeans to the city’s growing criminal underworld. By 1920, when Henry Ford’s International Jew reached mass distribution, he most likely looked out on Detroit for evidence that “the liquor business of the world had been in the hands of the Jews.” ³⁶

After 1924, alien smugglers copied and often worked alongside bootleggers, and alien smugglers became known as human bootleggers, a label that associated foreigners with a new vice. In 1928, the Detroit News called the city both the “rum capital of America and the nation’s greatest port of entry for smuggled aliens.” ³⁷ Superintendent of Border Patrol William Carmichael confirmed that sometimes liquor smugglers brought aliens into the United States, using nearly five years of experience to negotiate crossings while giving Detroit’s foreign born an increasingly shady reputation. ³⁸ The Detroit News also connected immigrants, illegal liquor, and criminality, complaining that the “bootlegging of humans across the international boundaries” had become a pressing problem unique to Detroit. ³⁹ The fact that many new immigrants not only came into the United States in direct violation of the law, but also entered in collusion with ethnic gangsters and liquor smugglers cast a subtle shadow of undesirability and potential criminality over many Europeans in urban centers across the nation. ⁴⁰ Although today on the U.S.–Mexico border local authorities emphasize the link between Latinos and a rising narcotics trade, this pattern can be traced to the 1920s, when police and policymakers on the northern border labeled foreign-born Europeans “bootlegged aliens,” connecting them to the illegal liquor trade. ⁴¹

During the 1920s, a mix of European, Canadian, and American smugglers controlled the northern frontier, feeding the workforces of America’s largest cities. Each smuggling operation managed an established territory, invented its own methods, and specialized in certain combinations of ethnic groups. For a pre-set fee, smugglers took immigrants from Windsor to Detroit, before offering them passage to popular industrial centers in Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Flint, or Pittsburgh. ⁴² The industry mushroomed after the 1924 Immigration Act, ensuring that America’s ethnic neighborhoods would receive newcomers. A number of ethnic European communities dotted with central synagogues and churches (seen in Figure 2) helped newcomers hide from authorities. Although they found a shelter in ethnic pockets across the city, those who slipped through the cracks of new border walls remained acutely aware that they could be deported at any moment. ⁴³

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Figure 2.

Ethnic places of worship in Detroit, 1930.

Alongside Belgian mobster Julius Bennett, Mike Haluchinski ran one of Detroit’s largest Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian smuggling syndicates from the shores of Canada. Haluchinski was born in Canada to Russian parents and though inspectors suspected he was responsible for thousands of eastern Europeans’ entrance into the United States, he never personally stepped onto U.S. soil, nor was he ever charged with a single crime. Instead, Haluchinski established a hierarchical system of runners, lodgers, and boatmen on both sides of the river who ran a complex business of alien smuggling using the Wabash Railway Ferry. ⁴⁴ By exploiting the railway system, Haluchinski and his gang avoided the patrolled port regions on both sides of the border and did not have to offload their human cargo until they were miles from border checkpoints.

From the Canadian side, Haluchinski sent men like Polish-born Sam Zeleski to find prospective clients in Windsor’s ethnic Drouillard Road area. Once Zeleski located five to six Europeans eager to enter the United States, he collected $100 from each ($20 he kept himself) and hid them in an appointed boxcar bound for Detroit. Once the boxcar reached the United States, railroad inspector Herbert Girard received $30 per immigrant to let the boxcar pass without inspection. On the outskirts of the city, it was up to Zeleski to offload the immigrants and usher them into an awaiting taxi to a barbershop in the center of Detroit that fronted an “alien depot.” From here, Zeleski returned to Canada via boxcar, leaving the immigrants in the hands of Russell Scott, an American known as Haluchinski’s representative on the U.S. side of the border. ⁴⁵ Within several years, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended Zeleski, Girard, and Scott, deporting the Canadians and imprisoning Scott for several months, but Haluchinski could not be linked to the ring. The ambiguity did not stop the Detroit press from publicizing articles on Haluchinski’s “boxcar ring,” a syndicate that claimed to have brought “nearly one thousand aliens from Canada in less than two years.” ⁴⁶

As inspectors and Border Patrol officers became more vigilant, smugglers invented ingenious ways to stay one step ahead of the police and Border Patrol. Beyond rowboats, speedboats, airplanes, and boxcars, smugglers hid immigrants in everything from secret truck compartments to linen closets in Pullman railway cars. ⁴⁷ One group even succeeded in getting immigrants across the border in ventilated coffins. ⁴⁸

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Figure 3.

Detroit’s foreign-born population density, 1930.

Some smugglers chose to hide the foreignness of European immigrants, bringing them across the border in plain sight. These smugglers dressed immigrants in clothes and styles meant to make them look less foreign. Immigration Service reports on illegal immigration noted with alarm that instead of shawls and kerchiefs, Russian women were wearing silk hose and laces. Smugglers sewed American manufacturers’ labels into their clothes and taught them rudimentary English in case officials probed them with questions. ⁴⁹ More than a simple change of clothes, this interchange taught new immigrants that their foreignness would become a liability in America. As soon as immigrants reached Detroit’s Russian region where families crowded into apartment blocks along Russell Street, they donned the clothes of their homelands and resumed conversations in Russian, Yiddish, Ruthenian, or Hebrew, but they did not forget that along the border, markers of their foreignness had labeled them as potentially illegal and criminal. ⁵⁰

One of Detroit’s most infamous smuggling rings, the Ghost Walking Gang, copied the long-established methods of local bootleggers by taking advantage of the area’s harsh winters. Just as modern coyotes lead Latino migrants across the Rio Grande, the northern gang guided Europeans across the Detroit River. When snow blanketed the borderland and the St. Clair River thickened with ice, smugglers led by Harold Fontaine covered their clients in sheets, dressed them in plasterers’ suits, and gave them steel-cleated sandals to prevent them from slipping on the ice. ⁵¹ The gang then led immigrants across the solid river to the safety of Michigan’s shore. Border Patrol and police referred to this practice as “ghost walking,” and complained that even the most powerful binoculars could not detect “white-sheeted figures creeping over the snow-blanketed ice.” ⁵² The Border Patrol captured Harold Fontaine in 1927, sentencing him to a $2000 fine and six years at Leavenworth Penitentiary, but later, gangs copied Fontaine’s methods, and the sensational practice of “ghost walking” continued to appear in dozens of newspaper reports. ⁵³

Smuggling became an international concern when rings expanded abroad to solicit prospective immigrants in Europe. Between 1924 and 1929, U.S. State Department officials discovered major gangs in Hamburg, Brussels, Paris, Prague, and Naples. These international syndicates stationed men outside American consulates and embassies to take advantage of locals who had been rejected by filled quotas. ⁵⁴ Here, they promised falsified visas and passports along with a steamship ticket to Canada. ⁵⁵ In 1926, the state department cooperated with Polish police to arrest Joseph Rubinsky, a successful smuggler who for more than two years had helped aliens enter the United States. An American citizen of Polish descent, Rubinsky traveled across eastern Europe with seals, consular stamps, immigration forms, and falsified visas, all of which proved nearly indistinguishable from the real forms. He then sent prospective immigrants to Canada and put them in contact with local smugglers who brought them to Detroit in boxcars, boats, and even planes. ⁵⁶ Indeed, international smugglers situated Detroit at the center of a network connecting immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to gangs of criminals, bootleggers, and smugglers wanted throughout the world. Consequently, press reports from across the nation called for the government to check the “interloping and menacing aliens” who brought their “tradition of banditry and private vengeance” to the shores of America. ⁵⁷ By 1930, the press regularly printed the term “alien” alongside the words “criminal,” “gangster,” and “undesirable,” giving non-citizens a reputation for any number of crimes. ⁵⁸

National policymakers also circulated reports on threats of foreign espionage emerging on the peripheries of the nation. As early as 1924, Director of the Bureau of Investigation William Burns warned Commissioner General of Immigration William Husband that his forces needed to keep an eye on Detroit in particular, where reports had emerged that the Communist Workers Party of America intended to smuggle Russian communists into the United States. In the same brief, he warned Husband to be wary of Polish radical organizations in New York and Detroit, which hoped to smuggle radical Polish students into the country to strengthen America’s Polish communist movement. ⁵⁹

Although this report never reached the local or national press, fears over radical alien communists remained at the forefront of nativist discourse over the next several years. By 1930, the national nativist organization, the American Coalition, claimed to have special information leaked from the Department of Labor that confirmed 85 to 90 percent of America’s communists were aliens, most of whom were not legally in the United States. ⁶⁰ Thus, by the beginning of the 1930s, non-citizen Europeans had earned a reputation as bootleggers, criminals, and also potential radicals.

In the eyes of many Americans, Detroit was turning into America’s back door for Europe’s undesirables. ⁶¹ By the close of the 1920s, local reports disparaged, “How are we to know whether these newcomers are criminals, bootleggers, or suspect people? Their communities are no doubt harboring unsavory characters at this very moment.” ⁶² Thus, the rise of smuggling criminalized foreignness itself, making anyone with an accent or foreign dress appear suspicious in the eyes of many Detroiters.

Policing the Northern Border after 1924

The persistence of smuggling made Detroit a key site in the formation of an urban enforcement apparatus on the northern border. Little attention has been given to the U.S. Border Patrol’s role on the northern border, but in 1924, the Department of Labor established important outposts in in Montreal, Niagara Falls, and Grand Forks. ⁶³ In Detroit’s District 11, which spanned from Lexington, Michigan, to Port Clinton, Ohio, men patrolled in pairs, equipped with a .45 handgun, handcuffs, and a flashlight that doubled as a club. ⁶⁴ Using their nine boats, fourteen motorcycles, and three Chevrolet sedans, the U.S. Border Patrol kept “thousands of immigrants” from entering through “America’s Back Gate.” ⁶⁵ In coercive raids and deportations, federal border police harassed and criminalized immigrants in urban Detroit regardless of their legal status.

Patrol officers militarized the Detroit–Windsor region, casting suspicion over recently arrived Europeans on both sides of the border. The new force was modeled on the U.S. Army, and recruits received training in military techniques and wore distinctive uniforms. ⁶⁶ As the force took shape, newspapers likened patrolmen to military officers, claiming, “Shots in the dark and hand to hand encounters with desperate criminals are every-day possibilities in the work of border patrol.” ⁶⁷ During the Progressive Era, nativists had protested against immigrants for their lack of morals or hygiene, but now, new quotas and enforcers turned potential immigrants into criminals, a far more dangerous prospect for the nation. ⁶⁸ Indeed, patrolmen played growing fears within and outside immigrant communities to their own advantage. By 1929, Detroit’s patrol deputized a “legion of friends,” encouraging Detroiters to inform on potentially illegal acquaintances and neighbors, a system that had involved ordinary Detroiters from all walks of life in a collective practice of border enforcement. ⁶⁹

Although the Border Patrol criminalized immigrants along the border, deportations brought policing into the heart of Detroit. In an era punctuated by economic crisis, federal officers joined forces with local police and concerned citizens to force thousands back to Europe. A rich historiography of Mexican Repatriation credits the Great Depression with prompting policymakers to repatriate Latino workers regardless of their citizenship. ⁷⁰ Examining the northern border reveals that even before the Depression, policymakers and enforcers deported immigrants and that many of those expelled from the nation were European. On the northern border, early immigration practices cast a wide net of exclusion, making the Southwest Border Patrol’s later focus on Latino migrants far from inevitable.

Even though Department of Labor reports sparked national concern over an influx of illegal immigrants, official numbers varied wildly. In early 1926, Assistant Secretary of Labor Robe Carl White informed the House Committee on Immigration that the United States contained 250,000 immigrants subject to immediate deportation. However, Commissioner of Immigration Harry E. Hull asserted there might be as many as 1,300,000 undocumented aliens hidden in America’s cities, a number he calculated using a complicated formula involving returned immigrants and excluded aliens. ⁷¹ These estimates, which were published in newspapers across the nation, alarmed ordinary Americans and intensified nativist campaigns in borderlands like Detroit, where the issue of undocumented workers seemed particularly pressing, and as mentioned earlier, local policymakers contended that more than twenty thousand deportable aliens resided within the city. ⁷²

Amid nationwide concern over illegal immigrants, nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) shifted their focus from African Americans to undocumented immigrants and the criminal threat they might pose to the nation. In Detroit, the KKK had incited a wave of violence in 1926, when an African American doctor attempted to purchase a bungalow in a white neighborhood of the city. ⁷³ Several years later, the same working-class white Detroiters refocused their energy on a perceived spike in illegal immigrants, foreign-born Europeans and the crime they supposedly brought to urban centers. In September of 1929, Detroit’s KKK welcomed Alabama Klan leader Senator Richard Heflin to speak at Danceland Arena, a venue in the heart of the city, to endorse Republican Mayoral candidate Charles Bowles. Heflin addressed Detroit’s white middle and working classes in a Southern drawl, citing the evils of “evolution, bootlegged aliens, and the Catholic Church.” Amid applause, Heflin passed out nomination sheets featuring Bowles’ photo and a promise to rid the city of crime and aliens in the same sentence, suggesting the issues were inextricably intertwined. ⁷⁴

Detroit’s chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) agreed that undocumented immigrants presented a troubling urban social problem. Working in Detroit’s alien detention and deportation center, society ladies complained that detainees were “illiterate and largely degenerate,” unable to appreciate the magazines their organization donated. ⁷⁵ Jessie Dunham Crosbie Ballard, the DAR’s head of Americanization, noted that detainees were unlikely to become good Americans and that when caught, they needed to be sent back to “preserve the integrity of Nordic America.” ⁷⁶ For these Detroit ladies, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe represented groups marked by foreignness, a trait that was fast becoming a crime in and of itself.

Soon immigration officials regularized deportation proceedings through Boards of Special Inquiry, which presumed a suspect’s guilt and laid the burden of proof on the immigrant. While from the Southwest to the Midwest deportations and “repatriations” targeted Mexicans, in Detroit, Europeans also faced new deportation proceedings. In such cases, rather than lingering over suspected aliens’ guilt, immigration inspectors devoted the majority of deportation proceedings to determining the cheapest and fastest way of getting apprehended immigrants out of the country. The process ran with harsh efficiency, suspending the basic rights of suspects and giving them little chance to prove their innocence. In fact, only one-sixth of immigrants facing deportation received legal representation. ⁷⁷

The case of Lucca Casabella demonstrates a typical proceeding. On December 17, 1928, the Border Patrol caught Casabella, in the trunk of a smugglers’ car with three immigrants from Hungary, Greece, and Yugoslavia. After arresting the group, officers brought Casabella and his cohort to the Detroit police station where the immigrants waited in a cell for three days. On December 20, the police ushered Casabella into the offices of the Immigration Service, a formidable building on Detroit’s main thoroughfare, Woodward Avenue. Here, the Italian waited in a holding room before an interpreter, and chief inspector summoned him for questioning. After a short interrogation, Inspector Robert Jones decided that Casabella had entered the United States illegally and ordered him deported to Italy on the steamship Dori at the expense of the steam liner. ⁷⁸ With his fate sealed, Casabella still had to wait two months in a Detroit detention center before joining an eastbound deportation train that began in Chicago and picked up deportable Europeans at several cities before ending in New York. ⁷⁹

Casabella’s case illuminates several trends that can be traced to early deportation practice against alien Chinese and by the 1920s, came to characterize the evolving process of deportation in America. ⁸⁰ First, it shows that officials entered proceedings with the assumption that an immigrant was guilty. Second, it demonstrates the administrative nature of hearings, which rarely involved more than the immigrant’s testimony and almost always ended in deportation. Instead of debating his guilt, administrators in the Bureau focused on whether to send Casabella to Europe or Canada, how the deportation was to be funded, and which deportation train could best accommodate Casabella’s journey to New York. ⁸¹

Even the most straightforward U.S. government-funded deportations meant immigrants might be held in detention centers for months. Detroit had a short-term detention room at the foot of Woodward Avenue and at the city police department next to the ferry dock, but the nearest long-term detention facility stood sixty miles south in Toledo’s Lucas County jail. ⁸² Canadian officials visiting the jail reported that conditions inside were deplorable and that deportees were treated not as citizens of a friendly nation, but as common criminals. ⁸³

Deportation proceedings also popularized a discourse linking foreignness to state dependence with a single phrase: “likely to become a public charge,” or LPC. Immigration inspectors had used what became known as the LPC clause since 1882 to exclude the poor and immigrants suspected of homosexuality or immorality. They argued that if let into the nation, these “degenerates” were likely to fill the state’s jails and insane asylums. ⁸⁴ In the late 1920s, inspectors began to apply the LPC clause more broadly, excluding immigrants from the nation by the hundreds of thousands. ⁸⁵ By using this clause as a major factor in determining deportations, federal inspectors popularized the connection between foreigners, charity, and relief even before the Great Depression.

Concern about immigrants also increased as numbers of deportations rose, making it appear that America’s urban centers were crawling with deportable immigrants. Deportation numbers had increased steadily after 1924, and by 1928, deportations doubled to 11,625. ⁸⁶ Moreover, although Congress ruled that unemployment was not a sufficient reason to deport a legal immigrant, in March of 1929, Congress targeted “illegal immigrants” by passing a new Deportation Act that created harsher punishments for border crossers and undocumented workers. ⁸⁷ The 1929 Act required an alien to testify against himself in a criminal proceeding for the first time and also stated that once deported, an alien was no longer eligible to apply for legal re-entry under immigration quotas. ⁸⁸

In Detroit, where deportations targeted large neighborhoods of Europeans, local police and officials advertised deportations as a measure that would battle not just poverty, but also urban crime. In the winter of 1929, Immigration Bureau Director John Zurbrick instituted a “deportation war” resulting in more than twelve hundred European deportations from Detroit over the next two years. ⁸⁹ To wage his “quiet war,” Zurbrick organized a partnership with the Detroit Police Department and Police Chief Thomas C. Wilcox to interrogate anyone arrested or even suspected of “suspicious activity.” ⁹⁰ The Detroit Saturday Night Magazine applauded Zurbrick’s efforts, declaring him a local hero for investigating the 2,815 deportable aliens in Detroit area penitentiaries and asylums. ⁹¹ Every day, Zurbrick and his inspectors visited the Police Headquarters, selecting “foreign looking” suspects, and prying them with “astute questions” meant to uncover whether they had entered the country illegally. ⁹² Bolstered by the local press, Zurbrick assured the public that because of his policies, “the word is being passed that Detroit is not a safe place for the foreign-born crook.” ⁹³

Zurbrick’s attempts to battle urban crime with deportations caught the attention of policymakers and reporters across the urban north. The New York Herald Tribune noted that Detroit’s crime had dropped noticeably in the wake of harsher deportation laws. The Chicago Daily Tribune lauded enforcers in Detroit and claimed the automobile capital offered a model system that had the potential to address mafia crime. ⁹⁴ The use of deportation as a crime fighting strategy across the urban north branded foreign-born Europeans, particularly those of southern and eastern European descent, as potential criminals.

In the first years of the Depression, deportation raids criminalized foreign spaces by targeting ethnic neighborhoods and workplaces. ⁹⁵ By 1930, Border Patrol conducted raids hundreds of miles from the border and increasingly cited crime prevention as a reason to target certain populations. The NCWC reported that immigrant inspectors across the nation conducted “sensational raids” on foreign-born gathering places prompted by only “the slightest suspicion, often claiming rumors of foreign mobsters had created the impetus for the raids.” ⁹⁶ On February 14, 1930, Secretary of Labor James Doak sanctioned a raid on a Finnish dance hall in New York, after which he held nineteen suspects without warrants and interrogated hundreds more. ⁹⁷

In Detroit, where police and immigration inspectors had long attempted to root out illegal aliens, raids in ethnic neighborhoods proved especially frequent. On June 23, 1930, a group of police officers raided Robert Dysarz’s real estate office, overturning the Polish American’s furniture and embarrassing him in front of nine customers. Two months later, police raided his office a second time, accusing him of malpractice and questioning his citizenship. The raids not only caused Dysarz “great embarrassment and humiliation,” but several of his loyal clients left without closing their deals. Furthermore, because Dysarz grew up and lived several blocks from his real estate office, the raids caused family and friends to question his reputation and legality. ⁹⁸

Dysarz’s experience was hardly an isolated case. In fact, immigration inspectors regularly raided Ford Motor Company. In such raids, inspectors took suspected illegal workers from the shop floor and into the Immigration Bureau for questioning. ⁹⁹ Although not every raid ended in deportation, police harassment caused employers and foremen to think twice about hiring workers with an accent. ¹⁰⁰ Regular raids caused many foreign-born Detroiters, regardless of their citizenship, to fear for the stability of their jobs and the welfare of family members. ¹⁰¹ This growing association between foreign-born Europeans and urban crime left these nationalities vulnerable to harassment, profiling, and layoffs. Across Detroit, police patrolled ethnic neighborhoods and raided factories, ensuring that the border extended far beyond the Detroit River and cut across shop floors and foreign-born churches of the industrial city.

“Eliminate the Welfare Chiselers”: The Foreign-Born Face a New Deal

A decade of redefining foreigners as suspect outsiders and criminalizing foreignness itself along the border made it possible and politically popular to exclude non-citizens from relief during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, the scarcity of jobs in both Detroit and Windsor reduced border crossing, but new federal welfare benefits intensified the controversy over non-citizens. In the early days of the Depression, a Republican city administration launched a campaign that branded foreign-born Detroiters with not just crime, but also welfare fraud. This connection eventually barred foreigners from certain New Deal programs. Non-citizens with jobs were still welcome to pay into social security and even receive unemployment and Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits, all entitlements linked to work and payment. ¹⁰² However, politicians objected to non-citizens’ participation in the WPA because it was the entitlement most connected to relief. Moreover, because the WPA required workers to labor in public, local politicians became particularly concerned with visibly employing foreigners over citizens. This section suggests that the charges connecting non-citizens to criminality and “public charge” status in the 1920s shaped policy in the 1930s, allowing politicians to further define non-citizens as outsiders by associating them with welfare fraud and excluding them from New Deal relief programs.

The WPA welfare purge affected hundreds of thousands of immigrants across the nation, but it hit Detroit with particular force. In a city where about seventy thousand legal immigrants had no naturalization papers and another thirty thousand had filed for their papers within the last two years, an overwhelming number of unemployed immigrants found themselves barred from the benefits of the state-sponsored relief program. ¹⁰³ Because a single WPA worker often supported an entire family, the purge meant that hundreds of thousands of dependents lost their only means of support. In short, the measure crippled Detroit’s ethnic communities, reaffirming nativist rhetoric that non-citizens brought nothing but poverty and dependence to the streets of American cities.

Concern over limited resources began in the early years of the Great Depression, when the mayor of Detroit implemented a welfare initiative that offered limited help to families. However, the city programs could not provide for the tens of thousands out of work. A family of five on relief rarely received more than $6.50 a week for food. To place things in perspective, this meant the median earning for a family dropped from $33.05 to $10.82. Neighborhood fire houses distributed stew, bread, and coffee each evening, creating lines that stretched for miles, sometimes attracting seventeen hundred Detroiters at a time. ¹⁰⁴ As single men lost their jobs and the ability to pay for boarding houses, major factories set up cots in open warehouses that at the very least provided shelter from icy winter winds and summer rain. Fisher Body factory opened “Fisher Lodge,” housing fifteen hundred men and Studebaker packed another thirteen hundred jobless men into its drafty buildings. ¹⁰⁵ However, these efforts offered partial and temporary relief to an economic situation that showed no signs of abating.

As Americans stopped buying automobiles, the Depression hit Detroiters harder than any city in the nation, and the foreign-born had some of the highest rates of unemployment in the city. In largely Polish Hamtramck, city welfare administrators refused to offer relief to families with less than three children, meaning four families often crowded into single-family homes. ¹⁰⁶ Single immigrant Wladyslav Sciecki relied on the charity of a family friend from the “Old Country.” After he lost his factory job and his part-time work as a farm hand in Smith Creek, Michigan, Sciecki moved into Anna Krazucewsky’s boarding house. As he searched for employment for two years, Sciecki lived off the charity of his friend, compiling a debt of more than $600 for his room and board. When Krazucewsky’s husband lost his own factory job in 1932, Krazucewsky told him she did not want Sciecki to starve, but that he would have to leave, complaining, “We have our family to support.” ¹⁰⁷ Indeed, even amid a nationwide economic crisis, the foreign born became particularly associated with joblessness and poverty.

Just as local police touted deportations as a means to control crime in the 1920s, politicians advocated purging non-citizens from welfare rolls to preserve precious city resources. Republican Mayor Richard Reading championed a thinly veiled anti-foreigner campaign to “eliminate the chiselers” from city welfare rolls. ¹⁰⁸ The term “welfare chiseler,” which gained traction across the nation among anti-New Deal advocates, suggested that undeserving freeloaders threatened to erode the foundations of America’s nascent welfare state. However, in Detroit, the city’s Republican government associated “welfare chiseling” with foreign birth, a local move that prompted the federal government to re-examine policies toward entitlements and citizenship.

When the federal government implemented the WPA in 1935 to create public works jobs with federal funding, Mayor Reading redoubled his efforts against non-citizens and welfare cheaters, claiming that precious federal funds could not fall into the hands of the undeserving. He assured Detroiters, “We want to furnish welfare relief to all who deserve it, but we intend to eliminate the chiselers!” ¹⁰⁹ Despite the fact that only 30 percent of Detroit’s 10,275 welfare recipients were not citizens, the campaign soon targeted foreign-born Detroiters as the group most likely to “chisel” at the city’s budget and undermine the welfare system. ¹¹⁰

To garner support, Mayor Reading leaked the cases of people he felt were taking advantage of the federal government’s generosity. For example, in an early speech against “dole chiselers,” Reading introduced the German Jewish Wasserman family. According to Reading, Thomas Wasserman shared a two-story brick house with his wife Minnie and sons Simon, Nathan, and Leo, who worked on a Civilian Conservation Corps project outside the state. To pay for their three-bedroom section of the home, Minnie worked for the WPA and Thomas in a local clothing store, jobs that brought in $150.25 each month. Although Leo, the eldest son, had not lived at home for a full year, they claimed a five-person household, and the Detroit Welfare Department granted them $44.05 each month. Moreover, because Minnie worked outside the home, the Welfare Department hired a housekeeper to cook and clean for the family at the rate of $10 per month. The case appeared more scandalous when Mayor Reading revealed that Thomas Wasserman housed a border in his back room, earning the family another $30 each month. Presenting the Wassermans as archetypical “welfare chiselers” stoked widespread fears that foreigners, especially Jews, sought to manipulate the city and state’s generosity. In a radio address, Reading lamented, “We welcomed this family into our nation and fed them from our pockets. Now they are chiseling at the city and government’s rolls.” ¹¹¹

By March of 1938, Mayor Reading tasked a squad on the police force to root out dishonesty among the poor and unemployed in the same ethnic neighborhoods police had searched for non-citizens in deportation raids. This “Special Investigation Squad,” headed by Lieutenant George McLelland began carrying out Reading’s request to “recheck every welfare and WPA case in order that we might be assured that not one dollar of relief was being expended unnecessarily.” ¹¹² Over the next seven months, McLelland investigated 1,363 cases and arrested 140 individuals for welfare fraud. Of these, 115 individuals were convicted, about two-thirds of whom had Slavic names like Grabowski, Kaminski, and Nalepka. ¹¹³

And like in deportation cases, the police encountered most welfare cases through hearsay and informants, fueling Detroiters’ suspicions over foreign-born neighbors and patrons on welfare. After creating the “Special Investigation Squad,” Mayor Reading issued an appeal to “good taxpayers,” asking, “If you know of any person who is receiving aid to which he is not entitled, please write me a letter about it and I shall see that the case is investigated at once.” ¹¹⁴ In response, 110 Detroiters immediately wrote letters that “charged neighbors with receiving welfare when they were not entitled to it.” ¹¹⁵ The “anti-chiseler” campaign drove Katherine Feeney to spy on her neighbor. She reported to the state that Anthony Kithas, the Greek-born cook living next door, might be abusing his WPA job. Although a healthy gossip network, Feeney seemed well aware that Kithas received $25 a month from his WPA job, but Feeney noted that beginning in the winter of 1938, his household suddenly smelled more often of meat. The charge drew the attention of Detroit’s Special Investigation Squad, which uncovered the fact that Kithas had found a part-time job sweeping the floors at Aviation Barber Shop. Because Kithas had neglected to inform the Welfare Department of his extra $2 a week, he was convicted of welfare fraud and dropped from the WPA. ¹¹⁶

Foreigners came under fire for WPA fraud in particular because it was the most visible New Deal program and also the one most directly associated with relief and expense. In 1939, the Detroit News reported that welfare and WPA programs cost the city and federal government more than $1 million a month. Because many of those reliant on new state benefits were not citizens, the newspaper urged immigration authorities to take “action against aliens found to be illegally residing here,” reminding readers that each citizen deported would save the city welfare department $40 and free up space on WPA for “a more deserving citizen.” ¹¹⁷ Later that month, Mayor Reading agreed that non-citizens undermined the point of the WPA, making “the whole endeavor look terribly foreign.” ¹¹⁸ Indeed, by the end of the 1930s, decades of linking foreigners to crime, welfare, and “public charge” status led politicians and newspapers to position foreignness itself as a potential burden on an expanding state.

Mayor Reading was not alone in his objection to the visible presence of foreigners on WPA programs. In February of 1939, ceding to the pressures of grassroots nativism and welfare campaigns in industrial cities like Detroit, Congress passed a law to exclude non-citizens from the WPA. Nationally, forty-five thousand aliens lost their WPA work and filed into bread lines in New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Boston. However, in Detroit, where Mayor Reading had already tasked a police squad with finding “welfare chiselers” and noting people’s citizenships, the anti-alien drive affected a disproportionate number of non-citizens. Within four months, Detroit’s city government, police, and immigration authorities cooperated to end the employment of twenty thousand WPA workers. ¹¹⁹

Excluded from federal relief programs, many non-citizens turned to illegal work, particularly in the liquor industry. Detroit newspapers noted a spike in illegal liquor production in 1939, charging “foreign neighborhoods” with producing gallons of non-regulated whiskey and moonshine for distribution across the city. ¹²⁰ For instance, Casmir Froncek, an unnaturalized Pole who had lost his WPA job, began to distil and distribute illegal alcohol. In 1939, Michigan police raided Froncek’s boarding house and found a fifteen gallon still, thirty gallons of whiskey, and one-half pint of illegal moonshine behind the bed he shared with four other Polish immigrants. When Judge Arthur Tuttle questioned Froncek’s decisions, he shrugged and said he had come to Michigan to work in sugar beets and chicory. With the onset of the Depression, Froncek lost his job, but he supported himself digging ditches for the WPA. New citizenship regulations meant Froncek lost his only means of support, and instead of returning to Poland, he turned to illegal distilling, a move he said was his “only chance to make a life.” ¹²¹ Although he had a clean record during his early years in America, campaigns labeling foreigners like Froncek a criminal prompted the federal government to exclude him from work programs, a move that ironically, turned the Polish immigrant toward crime.

In Detroit, where an international borderland heightened concerns about illegal entry, this article has examined a shift in national mood that took hold during the 1920s and shaped policies toward non-citizens in the decade that followed. First, it argues that on the U.S.–Canada border, the rise of smuggling and deportations elided the differences between lawful and unlawful migrants, associating all foreign-born Detroiters with illegality, crime, and dependence. By the New Deal Era, when the federal government radically reconstructed the American welfare state, Detroit politicians drew on the discourse of the 1920s to accuse the foreign born of a new crime: cheating the local and federal welfare system. When WPA programs began to employ thousands of foreigners in public spaces across the nation, local and national policymakers lobbied to preserve these jobs for citizens. In Detroit, a city administration bent on linking welfare cheating to foreignness shifted its focus to purging non-citizens from the WPA, the New Deal program most associated with relief. Thus, during the Depression, politicians drew on a decade of redefining foreigners as suspect outsiders to criminalize foreignness itself. Examining the politics of ethnic profiling, exclusion, and deportation in Detroit uncovers the unexpected urban industrial roots of a system that in the decades that followed, shifted to target Latino and Asian border crossers on the U.S. border with Mexico.