Braceros
While campaigning in Iowa last September, former President Donald Trump made a promise to voters if he were elected again: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he said. Trump, who made a similar pledge during his first presidential campaign, has recently repeated this promise at rallies across the country.
And, upping the game, US Speaking of the House, Mike Johnson vowed the “round up” 11 million undocmented aliens for deportation.
Both Johnson and Trump point to the 1954 “Operation Wetback” when what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service attempted to deport 1 million aliens, mostly farmworkers, as their model. The model is flawed, but the whole issue of “illegal” immigrant workers stems from attempts to regularlize foreign workers, going back to the World War II “Bracero” programs… another of those “issues of today” that call for a deeper dive into history.
At the stat of the Second World War, Nazi Germany had bent over backwards to avoid breaking relations with neutral Mexico, hoping to maintain access their mineral and other resources (and provide a “safe space” for espionage against the United States), despite Mexico’s official anti-Fascist policies. However, following U-boat attacks on Mexican flagged ships exporting oil to Allies, on the 28th of May1942… for the first, and only time in its history… Mexico declared war on a foreign country. Or rather several foreign countries, notably Italy and Japan as well.
This presented an open ally to the United States, which was desperately trying to find the manpower for its rapidly increasing military, while at the same time keep its own economy functioning. Mexico was hardly in any position to offer significant military assistance, but it did have one thing the US and allies needed… workers to replace those being rapidly conscripted into the military.
So, under a “memorandum of understanding” between the now allies, Mexico entered into an agreement with the United States that the latter could hire Mexican workers “for the duration” with some stipulations… they had to be paid a mimimal wage (set at 30 cents per hour), provided with sanitation, housing and food, not subject to the US draft, and 10% of their earning were to be withheld until their return home. While mostly meant to replace farm workers in the United States, Mexicans were recruited for other jobs, especially keeping the railroads running.
What constitutes acceptable “sanitation, housing, and food” was, of course, open to interpretation and unfortunately how that was interpreted, let alone enforced, was spotty at best. Worse, although less so for the railroad workers, was that much (perhaps most) of the funds set aside to be paid upon return to Mexico simply disappeared. My sense is that the railroads, being corporate entities with sophisticated accounting practices, were able to track financial expenses, and built in to their costs the future payments. Whereas (and something we forget) is that “big ag” didn’t really exist in the 1940s, and farms were still mostly family owned operations, with varying levels of financial controls. Add too, that many of the farmers were simply unfamiliar with foreigners… perhaps not fully comprehending things like Mexican surnames. That is, José Sanchez García and José García Sanchez might both be employed on the same farm, and as far as whomever was keeping the books, they were the same guy. And, without oversight, of course, some simply took advantage of the situation, paying as little as they could get away with, or their small town banks just dumped everything into some general account and “forgot” about it. Not that there wasn’t corruption on the Mexican side as well.
And, with the end of the war, while the railroad and factory workers were being replaced with “natives”, farm workers — given the massive change in the US economy, with a massive shift to industrial production — farmers needed to replace workers unlikely to ever return to low paid “stoop work”.
IN 1948, given recognition that the booming post-war US economy attracted other Mexicans still willing, if only temporarily, to take on those dirty jobs, with or without official permission… to the detriment of its own farmers and complaints about the conditions under which workers not officially in the program were subjected to, Mexico wanted the program ended, but settled for a compromise in which the US would sanction employers hiring outside the official program, and making the US government, not the individual employer, responsible for the workers. . In 1949 and again in 1951, “adjustments” made, notably holding farmers harmless for allegedly hiring non-citizen workers unknowingly.
Texas having especially become dependent on Mexican labor to keep its agricultural sector functioning was reluctant to enforce even these minimal standards. And, ironically enough, “Operation Wetback” was meant to force Texas farmers to “get with the program” by threatening them with otherwise entirely losing their work force. If that was the plan, it went spectacularly wrong. 100,000 migrant workers and family members (not the million so beloved by politicians bent on repeating the exercise. The million figure includes everyone either denied entry from Mexico, or returned to Mexico in 1954).
Between roadblocks throughout the southwest, raids on social halls like bars and restaurants in rural communities, and pulling workers out of the fields, the deportees were loaded onto buses, driven into Mexico and dumped, sometimes wherever it was a bus driver decided he’d had enough for the day. 88 people died in one event, when the US failed to notify Mexican authorities, or the Cruz Roja, where they had stranded a few hundred people.
Despite the then head of the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service); Joseph Swing’s statement to the public that “The era of the wetback is over”, it became normalized for Mexican workers… with or without official permission, to cross over the border to work. Although there was a drop in Mexican immigration at the time, in 1958, the INS noted that ““should … a restriction be placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.”. In other words, if there are jobs paying more in the US than a person can find at home, they will come.
The supply of “legal” braceros and demand for employees was always out of balance, but the program limped on until 1964. There was an absurd effort in 1965 to recruit high school and college athletes to work the fields during the summer, which quickly fell apart when the small number of students who participated (only 3000 or the 18,000 recruits ever worked the fields) either went of strike over the poor housing and food issues, or found the work too difficult and quit.
But, then again, by 1965, even with the massive changes in the agriculture as a business, it still came down to people working in the fields for not much money… but more than they could earn in Mexico. Farm workers already established in the United States (mostly of Mexican descent, either those who had the border cross them in the 19th century, or the descendants of earlier migrations, especially during the Revolution) opposed hiring foreign workers at less than they earned.
Still, the booming southwest needed workers of all kinds, and with Mexico largely ignoring the rural communities throughout the 1950s and 60s in favor of urban development, those not migrating from rural Mexico to the cities were moving north looking for jobs that offered a better life than that in the still “backwards” small villages at home.
Farm workers… out of sight for most middle-class Americans, and out of mind were one thing… but the migrants, documented or not, were the kind of people the middle-class saw every day: construction workers, cleaners, delivery drivers, restaurant workers, and so on. Low paid, but very visible people.
And… resented.
No one was sorry to see the Bracero program fade away, although in the aftermath of US and Mexicn bank consolidations in the 1990s and 2000s, the issue of unpaid set-aside wages had still not been settled. Banks, and farms, in the United States had either gone out of business or had been swallowed up by larger banking corporations, and denied any responsiblity. The Mexican banking system had collapsed completely in 1992, and after reorganization, the banks were either sold to foreign corporations or forceably consolidated. At any rate, from both countries, the businesses that should have paid denied any resonsiblity for the missing funds. Eventually, a fund under Mexican government oversight was creted in the early 2000s, but could only pay out to those still having work records from their time in the US.
And now… given the “Bracero” program openly encouraged foreign workers to come to the United States, and that the government in the US turned a blind eye (for the most part) to those workers not officially in the program, but doing the same sort of work, it shouldn’t be surprising that what started as an emergency and temporary solution to an immediate problem (farm workers needing to become soldiers) would become a customary way of dealing with the need for these types of workers when the crisis had passed, but new opportunities had presented themselves. Nor, that as these new opportunities (work in fields other than… well… in the fields) presented itself, that migrants would not avail themselves of it.
Nor that migrants wanted to stay, and did. Nor… given political and cultural developments after the second world war that displaced millions, and required not just a change in occupation, but one in location… and the location offering the best opportunities just happened to lie a bit further north, that the migrant community (legal and otherwise) continued to grow. Especially after 1964 when the United States, which had depended on European immigration discovered its Eurocentric 1924 immigration regulations were no longer serving the country’s needs, and … although they didn’t want to openly say so… they were depending on low wage foreign labor to keep their economy growing.
Are there 11 million “illegals” in the United States? Back in 1954, when the population of the United States was about 160 million, about 9 million were immigrants. The US population is about double what it was then, with about 45 million immigrants. A higher percentage, perhaps (about 10 percent now), but how many have all the right papers, and how to discern that, and how to keep businesses running if 11 million people were to be deported and dumped elsewhere is something hard to imagine. And this site deals in history, not what-ifs.
By the way… given that of all places, Wikipedia had a detailed, scholarly entry on Braceros… warning that it needed rewritten as an encylopedia article, I am posting it almost in its entirity as it stands now before the editors dumb it down.
mexfiles.net 