Immigration Debates: Interstate-travel

California is a garden of Eden

A paradise to live in or see

But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot

If you ain't got the do re mi

– Woody Guthrie “Do-Re-Mi”, Library of Congress Recordings, 1964

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During the Great Depression, anti-immigrant policies were widespread. Our downtown LA story, Ni de Aquí, ni de Allá, tells the story of how hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans were coerced into leaving California in the 1930s.

But what about the story of California’s American refugees? In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of families drove west, hoping to escape the grinding poverty of climate disaster in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas. Their stories were the source material not only for the folk songs of Woody Guthrie, but also John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange’s iconic portrait, Migrant Mother.

These “Okies” were overwhelmingly poor, white Americans. But they were not Californians – and California didn’t want them. Through the 1930s, the state passed a series of “anti-Okie” laws, one of which made it  a crime—punishable with prison time—to transport an out-of-state pauper across state lines. In 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department, to glowing review in the LA Times, sent officers to the California-Arizona border to enforce a “bum barricade”, forcibly turning back poor Americans seeking entry to the Golden State.

This was hugely controversial, asking questions about states’ rights with far-reaching implications. Could California really choose which American citizens to admit? The answer, delivered by the US Supreme Court in 1941, was no. In Edwards vs California, the Court delivered a stinging verdict, with the majority writing that “to allow such an exception to be engrafted on the rights of national citizenship would be to contravene every conception of national unity. It would also introduce a caste system utterly incompatible with the spirit of our system of government.”

The experience of the Okies in 1930s California—and the Court cases that restored their right to travel—are  part of the reason why the freedom of American citizens to move across the US is something most of us have always taken for granted. Yet in a post-Roe America, the right to interstate travel faces new threats, as states like Idaho move to impose 'abortion trafficking' bans

Today, if you drive the five hours from San Francisco to Bakersfield, where many Dust Bowl migrants settled, it's very evident that their descendents today are a dot of MAGA red in a deep blue sea. The US has always been a composite nation: bound together by political rights as much as by any single culture, and the story of the Okies underlines why Interstate travel is fundamental to this view of America. Yet in 2025 that view looks increasingly tenuous, as California and the Dustbowl states drift in opposite political directions.