Between Advocacy and State Interest: Social Work, Mexican Immigration, and Wartime Naturalization In Chicago, 1920s-1950s

Background and Purpose: Since its formal conception in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social work in the U.S. has been historically involved with immigrant communities through settlement houses, charitable organizations, and aid societies. The WWII years brought dramatic shifts in migration flows, federal immigration priorities, and the relationship between social work organizations and government agencies, as Mexican immigration to industrial centers like Chicago accelerated driven by wartime labor demands. This paper examines how social work responded to these converging pressures through a historical analysis of the Immigrants' Protective League (IPL) in Chicago from the 1920s through 1950s. Specifically: How did the IPL respond to changing social conditions during the WWII era, including wartime labor demands and shifting migration patterns? This inquiry aims to uncover social work's historical relationship with immigration from the Southern Hemisphere, including how the profession constructed immigrants from Latin America as objects of intervention.

Methods: Utilizing the IPL as a single case of social work interaction with immigrants during the WWII era, I take a social historiographical approach to examine the evolving attitudes towards Mexican immigration and the impact of WWII on the construction of the “immigrant problem.” My analysis is based on archival research conducted at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where the majority of the IPL records are housed. I specifically make use of archival documents from the IPL between the years of 1925 and 1960 to examine how norms, behaviors, and trends developed within the IPL around immigration in the years preceding, during, and following WWII. I located and reviewed 26 folders, which primarily contained internal memos, letters from various IPL directors, newspaper clippings relating to IPL publicity, and reports detailed by IPL members regarding various projects. Through these documents, I was able to construct how the IPL viewed and implemented what was perceived as necessary adjustments to their own practice in relation to the pressing demand of the war, federal government priorities regarding labor and national security, and changing neighborhood demographics.

Results: Results indicated that, during the WWII era, the IPL aligned itself with federal naturalization pressures, positioning itself as an intermediary between the government and immigrant communities to facilitate compliance with wartime policies. Through the "Good Neighbor" project, the IPL secured federal funding to rapidly naturalize Mexican immigrants in Chicago, constructing Mexican naturalization as a problem threatening the national war effort. This agenda directly opposed the expressed desires of Mexican immigrants themselves, and was rationalized through racialized, paternalistic language that framed Mexican immigrants as uniquely helpless and unable to advocate for themselves.

Conclusions and Implications: This analysis contributes to ongoing efforts within social work to critically examine the profession's complicity in systems of oppression. The IPL case demonstrates that social work's engagement with immigrant communities has been shaped by economic imperatives, geopolitical strategies, and racial ideologies. In the current environment of nativistic fear, understanding this history is essential for contemporary practitioners and scholars working with immigrant populations.