Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,102

This is the grave of James Greene.

Born in 1915 in Springfield, Illinois, Greene joined the Navy in 1933. He wasn’t ever in a war, leaving the Navy in 1939. In 1941, he was hired by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, founded in 1933 to enforce the nation’s draconian immigration laws that had come out of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Those laws had exceptions for the southern border since southwestern farmers relied on Mexican migrant workers for their cheap labor. But the nation still wanted to control the land that they had stolen from Mexico to expand slavery from having too many Mexicans on it. So men such as Greene were hired to patrol the southern border. His first assignment was riding in the Arizona borderlands around the town of Amado.

Greene rose in the INS, moving from position to position and moving into administration. By 1968, he was in charge of the borders of both Canada and Mexico. By this time, the INS was changing. The 1965 Immigration Act opened up a lot more immigration to the U.S., but it also kept national quotas. Meanwhile, internal changes in Mexico were convincing a lot of Mexicans to migrate. An endless demand for cheap labor in the U.S. meant they had a reason to come too. Undocumented workers were on the rise. It was Greene’s job to oversee the attempts to stop them, even if both on the supply and demand side, it made sense to just allow them. Such is the paradox of American immigration policy.

What Greene offered in the INS was a good sense of bureaucracy and how to streamline processes when he could. So part of his job was to make it easier for people who had the legal right to enter to have their processes happen much more quickly as they moved toward citizenship. So that’s one of the things Greene did there. He was also focused on smuggling, drugs as well as people. He retired in 1977, but was almost immediately called back in to help on issues around the massive migration of southeast Asian refugees in the years after the Vietnam War, figuring out how to get people from the refugee camps to the U.S. So in 1981, he was part of a State Department tour of the camps. That panel rejected the ridiculous charges coming from Al Haig, then Secretary of State, that the Vietnamese were seeking to destabilize the U.S. through massive immigration. They rejected the idea that these refugees didn’t have very good reason to come to the U.S. and stated they would face persecution and death upon returning. Too bad no one in government stands up to Stephen Miller on those issues today.

One other thing Greene was involved with was denying John Lennon his visa in 1972. Lennon and Yoko were already in the country and the Nixon administration freaked out about that and wanted him thrown out due to his drug conviction back in 1968. Greene wasn’t in charge here–he was only deputy commissioner after all–but it was he who made the phone call to order the agency to immediately revoke Lennon’s visa. Lennon would fight this in the courts and win in 1976.

Greene died of Parkinson’s in 1995. He was 80 years old.

James Greene is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

I grant this is kind of a lame post, but you do the best you can and sometimes, you just can’t find out as much about these folks as you’d like. Oh well. At least you all can talk about the Beatles. If you would like this series to visit other high ranking INS officials, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lemuel Braddock Schofield is in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania and Earl Harrison is in Media, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.