Tests made in the schools of southern California, in which the language handicap was discounted as far as possible, indicate that the average Mexican child was about as far below the average Negro child in abstract intellect as the average Negro child was below the average white child.
Physically, the race is conspicuous by its low resistance to tuberculosis, which has exterminated so large a part of the native population of the Western Hemisphere during the last four centuries. The New World had not been subject to tuberculosis and therefore offered a fertile field for the germs of this disease. The population of the Old World had been ravaged by it for many centuries, and in each generation the low resistants had been killed off so that a more immune stock had been gradually produced by natural selection.
Such studies as have been made in the Southwestern States indicate that the average Mexican family is at least half again as large as the average white family. Thus there is every reason to expect that, without a sharp limitation of such immigration, the Southwest will become more and more Mexicanized.
By 1928 Los Angeles County had more than a quarter of a million Mexicans, and the City of Los Angeles had the largest Mexican population of any city in the world, with the exception of Mexico City. Whole industries and whole agricultural areas had come to think themselves largely dependent on Mexican labor, while millions of American citizens were out of employment in every State of the Union. The dependence of agriculture in the Southwestern States on cheap Mexican labor, largely of a migratory nature, is particularly disastrous from a racial point of view, since the maintenance of American civilization depends largely on the maintenance of a healthy and prosperous farm population.
DISTRIBUTION OF MEXICANS
The figures represent distribution of Mexicans by states per 100000 of population in 1930
Distribution of Mexicans by States. Except in the border States Mexicans are chiefly concentrated in large urban centers.
Nearly all of the Mexicans who came to the United States were seeking to better themselves economically and to avoid the murder and plunder that had been going on in their country for a score of years under the guise of revolution. Most of them intended to return home as soon as conditions became more satisfactory, but as conditions from year to year failed to improve, the Mexican population tended to become a permanent one. At the same time few of the Mexicans became American citizens, and in every community where they settled in racial groups there were unsatisfactory standards of education and sanitation.
Most of the Mexicans come with their families, thereby differing markedly from some of the other foreign groups, as the Bulgarians, Greeks, Spanish, and Filipinos, which consist mainly of unmarried men. These latter either return home after making money, or else intermarry with the other immigrant groups. The Mexican community, on the other hand, perpetuates itself and increases without much intermarriage with the other population.
Since the depression beginning in 1929 there has been a repatriation of a portion of the Mexican immigration of unknown size but undoubtedly considerable. Lack of work has led many to go home where they can live more economically and be among friends, and at the same time American authorities began to offer free transportation back to Mexico for those dependent on public charity, and willing to leave. Thus trainload after trainload returned, and at the same time a tightening of the immigration restrictions and procedures on the border cut down the flow of immigrants to almost nothing.