Introduction
This chapter discusses the controversy surrounding temporary Mexican migrants and illegal migration from Mexico. Mexican migration and immigration first became a leading immigration concern in the 1930s, resulting in a decade long anti-Mexican movement. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, growers and farm owners lobbied the federal government to enable a more widespread temporary worker program that would allow the use of affordable migratory labor. This resulted in a series of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and Mexican governments permitting hundreds of thousands of temporary laborers, known as Braceros, to migrate into the United States for seasonal work.
The Mexican migrant laborer programs continued from the 1920s to the 1960s in various forms. However, demand for laborers was far higher than the supply of legal migrants through the Bracero Programs, which ultimately led to a vast increase in unauthorized migration. Business owners enabled this situation by hiring undocumented migrants (who worked for wages lower than legal workers) rather than only hiring legal temporary migrants or native workers. This angered nativists, white labor activists, and supporters of legal migrant work programs. The document for this chapter is a speech given in 1952 by Juanita Garcia, a legal migrant worker bemoaning the lack of regulation that led to competition between legal migrants and unauthorized migrants. Concern about illegal migration led to “Operation Wetback,” a military-style effort to purge the nation of illegal migrants. Though widely promoted as a success, the program failed in many regards; specifically, it did not significantly reduce illegal migration because Congress and the states were reluctant to punish business owners who hired undocumented migrants. As federal immigration agents focused on border control instead of on those who hired illegal workers, the flow of undocumented migrants not only continued, but increased.
Topics covered in this chapter include:
Garcia, Juanita. “Migratory Labor. Hearings before Subcommittee on Labor and Labor-Management Relations.” 82nd Congress, 2nd Session. 1952. Digital History . University of Houston. 2016.
Opportunity and Exploitation The Bracero Program (1917–1964)
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. In 2017, the United States accounted for nearly 25 percent of the world’s wealth, but this was a significant reduction from the mid-twentieth century, when the United States accounted for a full 40 percent of the global GDP. Many of the biggest immigration controversies in U.S. history were and are a factor of the economic disparity between the United States and the rest of the world’s nations. For instance, when Chinese immigrants were coming to the United States in large numbers to work on the railroads and in mining camps, potential earnings in the United States were so much higher (in terms of absolute purchasing power) that Chinese laborers earning even desperately low wages in America could still use that money to make a major difference for the lives of their families back home. The same situation drove and continues to drive legal and illegal migration from Mexico.
The Migrant Labor Lobby
The Bracero Program (named for the Spanish word for manual labor) began with a bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico in 1917 that brought over thousands of Mexican laborers on short-term migrant agreements to work in the U.S. agriculture and railroad industries. Similar agreements were adopted on a semi-annual basis from 1917 to 1921, fueling the growth of the western agricultural industry. The disparity between the United States and Mexican economies during this period meant that a migrant worker from Mexico could accept extremely low wages working in the United States and still have enough income, comparatively, to improve his or her situation markedly when returning home. Some, however, after arriving, sought better wages further North, and thus escaped the farm labor contracts to live illegally in many of America’s cities, and this was the very beginning of the illegal Mexican migration controversy that became the primary focus of immigration reform from the late twentieth century through the present.184
Mexican labor filled an important niche during the period after the United States banned Chinese labor (in 1882) and especially after the 1921 law that also drastically restricted European migration. In towns and communities where migrant Mexican laborers were common, the temporary worker programs were often controversial. Nativists were concerned for American jobs, whereas eugenicists and white supremacists saw Mexicans as a threat to the nation’s cultural melting pot. The first round of bilateral Bracero Programs ended in 1921, as American immigration policy shifted further towards isolationism. Farm organizations in the southwest petitioned the government to bring the programs back, leaving legislators caught between the two sides of the debate. In addition, the Mexican government was not satisfied with how the 1917–1921 programs had been managed as many of the participating workers suffered from strong discrimination in the United States and accrued little in benefit due to unpaid contracts and exploitation by U.S. merchants, who often charged Mexican migrants more for food, clothing, and other necessities.
Numerous historians have reported that there was a prevailing belief that some ethnic quality of Mexicans made them especially suited for migrant labor, willing to forego economic stability in favor of short-term profit. It was common for Mexicans to be described as “homing pigeons” who would always, dutifully return to Mexico at the end of their contracts, and so would not become a long-term drain on the American economy, nor pollute the nation’s racial mixture. There was a campaign, among farm associations eager to continue the flow of Mexican migrants, to depict Mexicans as having racial qualities that made them suitable for labor, including a general docility of temperament and a lack of interest in political activism.185
The U.S. farm owners who lobbied for migrant worker programs were not immune to racial prejudice, but argued that they had little choice. A representative of the California Farm Bureau said of the situation in 1926:
“We, gentlemen, are just as anxious as you are not to build the civilization of California or any other western district upon a Mexican foundation. We take him because there is nothing else available. We have gone east, west, north, and south and he is the only man-power available to us.” 186
Farm lobbyists managed to keep Mexican migrant programs going throughout the 1920s, though the programs were halted entirely during the Great Depression, which inspired the nation’s first anti-Mexican movement that resulted in the forced expulsion of thousands of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-American citizens. This anti-Mexican surge gradually diminished towards the end of the 1930s, as America shifted its attention away from domestic issues and towards the national threat of World War II.
During World War II, when another labor shortage threatened the farm industry, especially in the southwest, farm and labor unions petitioned the government to return to migrant labor programs. The Mexican government was reluctant to return to a system that had been discriminatory and prejudicial to their people, but, when the U.S. government agreed to guarantee the contracts provided to laborers, the two nations reached an agreement, with the first 500 Braceros brought into California in September of 1942.
The Bracero Program of 1942 was authorized by Executive Order 8802, which contained provisions prohibiting discrimination and guaranteeing transportation, paid for by the government, between Mexico and the United States. To address nativist fears, the EO also prohibited farm owners from displacing native-born workers in preference of migrants. Further, the EO held that laborers must be paid a minimum of $0.30 per hour in U.S. currency, whether working full-time or part-time. At the time, the minimum wage in California was $0.45 per hour, meaning that hiring migrant workers was a major benefit to the farm owners who participated in the program.187 The wartime Bracero Program peaked in 1944, with around 62,000 admissions that year.
News from the U.S. Department of Labor, “Federal Stop-Order on Indio Farmer,” 1959, U.S. National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons
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From Braceros to Wetbacks
Though the wartime program ended officially in 1947, there were still channels in place to allow farmers to recruit Braceros each year. In the late 1940s, the Mexican labor market began to change. Whereas at one-time growers and farm owners seeking cheap laborers had to participate in the Bracero program, after years of migrant labor contracts, large number of illegal Mexican migrants were beginning to come to the United States and a large number of farm owners and growers began shifting from contract migrants to illegal migrants. Increasing profits is the only reason this occurred. By hiring unauthorized migrants, growers and farm owners saved even more on labor and did not have to pay their share of transportation costs and other costs associated with the official temporary worker programs.
In the 1940s, there were no penalties in place for farmers who were found to be employing illegal migrants and, in fact, the immigration authorities had a relatively simple process in place for dealing with the situation, called “drying out the wetbacks,” in which an illegal migrant was taken back to the Mexican border, given papers allowing them to legally work, and then returned, as a legal Bracero, to the farm where they were found. The term “wetback” was the most common racial epithet used for Mexicans at the time, and referred to illegal Mexican workers entering the country by swimming across the Rio Grande River. By the end of the 1940s, the number of illegal migrants had outpaced the number of contract laborers coming from Mexico. For instance, in 1949, around 20,000 migrants came to the United States on temporary worker permits, whereas there were some 87,000 illegal migrants who were later legalized through the “drying out the wetbacks” system.
Illegal migration was a major controversy in the early 1950s as Congress debated overhauls to the nation’s immigration system. The President’s Commission on Migratory Labor released a study in 1951 recommending that the only way to stem the tide was to levy fines on employers found using illegal migrants.188 These studies were influential and the anti-illegal immigration lobby was powerful and thus, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act also contained provisions based, in part, on these findings, making harboring illegal aliens a felony punishable by a fine of $2000 and a possible five-year prison term. However, the southern, southwestern, and western farm associations were also powerful, and their lobbying and political donations resulted in a loophole, known as the “Texas proviso,” saying that “employing” an illegal immigrant is not the same as “harboring,” and thus exempted the growers and farm owners from any penalty for their continued use of unauthorized labor.189
Seen here are the first Mexican Braceros (manual laborers) to arrive in California in 1917, via Wikimedia Commons
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After several years of resistance to Mexican migration in Congress, the Korean War created a new alleged labor shortage that farm groups used to petition the federal government for a new Bracero Program. Supporters of the program hoped that legalizing the flow of immigrants would reduce the impetus for unauthorized migration, whereas others argued that the expansion of the legal program might also help mitigate exploitation of illegal migrants. The lobby was successful and the U.S. government formalized the Bracero Program with a 1951 amendment to the Agricultural Act of 1949. This officially made the Bracero Program part of the federal government’s agricultural assistance system.7
At the time, migratory workers coming to the United States legally also protested the growth of the illegal migrant population competing with them for jobs. Although the Border Patrol would later target the illegal migrants themselves, it was understood by those familiar with the way the system worked at the time, that the primary agents of this inequity were the growers, ranchers, and farm owners. In 1952, migrant farm worker Juanita Garcia testified for the Subcommittee on Labor and Labor- Management Relations in the 2nd session of the 82nd Congress:
Testimony to the Subcommittee on Labor and Labor-Management Relations by Juanita Garcia 1952 Source Document
I work in the field and in the packing sheds. I lost my job in a packing shed about two weeks ago. I was fired because I belonged to the National Farm Labor Union. Every summer our family goes north to work. We pick figs and cotton. My father, my brothers and sisters also work on farms. For poor people like us who are field laborers, making a living has always been hard. Why? Because the ranchers and companies have always taken over.
When I was a small kid my dad had a small farm but he lost it. All of us used to help him. But dad got older and worn out with worries every day. Lots of us kids could not go to school much. Our parents could not afford the expenses. This happened to all kids like us. Difficulties appear here and there every day. Taxes, food, clothing, and everything go up. We all have to eat. Sometimes we sleep under a leaky roof. We have to cover up and keep warm the best way we can in the cold weather.
In the Imperial Valley we have a hard time. It so happens that the local people who are American citizens cannot get work. Many days we don’t work. Some days we work 1 hour. The wetbacks and nationals from Mexico have the whole Imperial Valley. They have invaded not only the Imperial Valley but all the United States. The nationals and wetbacks take any wages the ranchers offer to pay them. The wages get worse every year. Last year most local people got little work. Sometimes they make only $5 a week. That is not enough to live on, so many people cannot send their children to school.
Many people have lost their homes since 1942 when the nationals and wetbacks started coming. Local people work better but wetbacks and nationals are hired anyway.
Last year they fired some people from the shed because they had nationals to take their jobs. There was a strike. We got all the strikers out at 4:30 in the morning. The cops were on the streets escorting the nationals and wetbacks to the fields. The cops had guns. The ranchers had guns, too. They took the wetbacks in their brand-new cars through our picket line. They took the nationals from the camps to break our strike. They had 5,000 scabs that were nationals. We told the Mexican consul about this. We told the Labor Department. They were supposed to take the nationals out of the strike. They never did take them away.
It looks like the big companies in agriculture are running the United States. All of us local people went on strike. The whole valley was hungry because nobody worked at all. The melons rotted in the fields. We went out and arrested the wetbacks who were living in caves and on the ditches and we took them to the border patrol. But the national scabs kept working. Isn’t the Government supposed to help us poor people? Can’t it act fast in cases like this?191
President Harry Truman signed the Bracero bill into law on July 13, 1951, but expressed serious concerns about the program, primarily in that the program as formulated by Congress ignored much of what the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor had uncovered about the state of the program to that point. Under pressure from southwestern legislators and lobbyists, however, Truman agreed to pass the law through rather than vetoing the bill and sending it back to Congress for revision.192
Getting Tough on Immigration (Kind of)
As the Bracero Program proceeded, illegal migration increased as well. Between 1942 and 1964 (the entire duration of the Bracero Program), there were some 4.6 million legal Braceros admitted, and at least 4.9 million illegal Mexican migrants apprehended by border patrols and immigration officers. In August of 1953, then Attorney General Herbert Brownell toured the southwest to investigate the migrant situation, describing what he found as among the nation’s “gravest law-enforcement problems.” Brownell then worked to create solutions for the illegal migrant problem that included a military-style campaign to locate and forcibly remove undocumented migrants from the southwest. This was the program that the federal government ultimately accepted, initiated in 1954 under the name “Operation Wetback.”
During the 2016 Presidential Campaign, conservative Donald Trump revived the mindset of 1950s conservative legislators who, faced with an illegal immigration controversy, adopted the 1954 military-style deportation program then known as Operation Wetback. Trump claimed, in interviews, that he would eject the nation’s 11 million undocumented workers, then review cases and allow some of them back on a provisional basis. Beyond the glaring impracticality of the solution, there was a homespun logic that appealed to those with little understanding of what such an effort would entail. Trump based his argument, in part, on what he saw as the success of Operation Wetback in the 1950s. In a debate in November, Trump said:
“Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. I like Ike, right? The expression. I like Ike. Moved a million 1/2 illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again, beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.” 193
Donald Trump’s knowledge of Operation Wetback likely comes from those who defended the expensive and largely ineffective program in the 1950s and, in so doing, greatly exaggerated the effectiveness of the operation itself. For one thing, the 1.3 million people that the Border Patrol, and the leaders of Operation Wetback claimed were apprehended during the operation, is, at best, an exaggeration and, at worst, a political fabrication meant to cover for the broad failure of their program. Anger over illegal immigration prompted the “get tough” on illegal immigrant approach embodied by Operation Wetback, and it was, at the time, a test of the hard-nosed, police approach to patrolling the borders.
There were, to be certain, thousands of immigrants deported during the first few months of Operation Wetback and, as Trump asserted, one of the strategies was to remove migrants to far away locations to make it impractical for them to return. For the thousands rounded up onto trucks and boats and forcibly taken into the Mexican desert, there were many deaths and widespread documented instances of physical abuse. In her book Impossible Subjects , historian Mae Ngai writes about some of the controversial events associated with the program, including one instance in which immigration authorities dumped hundreds of thousands of Braceros (who were legally working in the country) in the desert where 88 died of sun stroke before the Red Cross intervened. Aggressive deportations ended altogether in 1956 after seven workers drowned in an incident aboard the ship Mercurio during the process of relocating 500 apprehended Mexicans across the river. The deaths brought a formal protest from Mexico, and the program was quietly put to bed.194
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, author of the book Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol , found in her research that the entire Border Patrol at the time, consisting of just 1,079 officers, wasn’t even remotely capable of deporting 1.3 million migrants, but, instead, inflated their numbers by apprehending the same people again and again, sometimes multiple times in one day. Interviews with individuals present during the program reveal that border agents were often just counting individuals they saw crossing back into Mexico on their own, who may have been illegals or Braceros, who were then added to the list of “voluntary departures.” Far more effective, Hernandez argues in her book, was the strategy employed by Border Patrol agents before, during, and after Operation Wetback, in which the agents spent most of their time making deals with farm owners and growers, convincing them to voluntarily switch from illegal migrants to legal Braceros.195
Attorney General Brownell, like Donald Trump in 2017, was not a specialist in immigration, nor had he any specific experience with the Border Patrol. Operation Wetback was a political theatre, more symbolic than anything else, but appealed to the simplistic logic of those who saw illegal immigration as a crime and the enforcement of border security as a black-and-white issue without any margins or grey areas. The limited actual success of Operation Wetback was not due to strength, the rule of law, or a more aggressive strategy, but to slow, gradual negotiation, back-room deals, and, most importantly, international cooperation. In a 2006 study published in the Western Historical Quarterly , historian Kelly Hernandez demonstrates that the Mexican government and the U.S. government worked together to control the borders at the time and that this was far more effective than a unilateral strategy from either nation could have been. Mexico, also needing laborers for its agricultural and manufacturing industries, thus worked closely with the United States to promote Braceros and limit illegal migration.196
The true nature of the Operation Wetback program was not evident in the way that the operation was marketed and sold to the American people. It is, therefore, not surprising that those without a detailed knowledge of history, like Donald Trump and many other anti-Mexican immigration advocates, would have absorbed the propaganda presented by government PR officials without understanding how the program worked.
The Exploitation Machine
Historical economists have found that growers and farming associations greatly exaggerated the need for migrant laborers. Rather than having little choice but to petition for migrants, these farm owners and agricultural companies seized on the opportunity for cheaper labor, increasing profits, even when other sources of citizen labor were available. Mexican-American labor activist Ernesto Galarza led a movement against the Bracero Program while it was in place, seeing it as exploitative. His 1956 report, Strangers in Our Fields documented some of the ways in which the regime of farm owners and labor leaders had taken advantage of the migrant workers participating in the program.
Among other things, Galarza’s research found that housing provided to Braceros was substandard, that the workers endured prejudicial treatment by white owners and laborers, and that the workers were required to work longer-than-average hours in inhospitable, potentially dangerous conditions. One specific issue noticed by Galarza was that the workers were typically forced to use “short-handled” hoes, which growers felt forced the workers to be more careful and reduced damage to crops. The workers disliked the short-handled hoes because they forced them to stoop over while working and so caused back and muscular problems. The use of short-handled hoes was eventually made illegal by a 1975 Supreme Court decision, though they remained in use illegally into the 1980s. In addition, Galarza found that growers deducted the cost of food, housing, and other expenses from the pay given to Braceros, which would have been illegal had the workers been U.S. citizens, but was not prohibited explicitly in the 1951 Bracero Program and so continued unencumbered by legal issues.197
The Mexican migration debate is often obscured by misinformation. The Republic of Mexico is not a developing nation because of the inherent inferiority of the Mexican governmental system, or because of corruption (though that does exist), or a lack of effort and intelligence on the part of the Mexican people, but rather, is the result of historic and political patterns that create and maintain a hierarchy of power between nations in the same way that those same forces create hierarchies of power between classes within a nation. Illegal migration was the product of an industry controlled by American business owners, supported by politicians, who exploited Mexican labor to increase their profits. By opting for illegal labor rather than participating in regulated programs, these companies did right for themselves and their investors, but also facilitated a pattern that developed into one of the nation’s greatest humanitarian crises in later decades. The unregulated freedom of companies and entrepreneurs to pursue profit at the expense of human rights and national interest is thus the key to understanding how the exploitation of poor people and poor nations support a product of the hierarchies of wealth characteristic of the world’s leading powers.
Conclusion
There were no public opinion polls measuring sentiment on Operation Wetback directly, but the congressional record indicates strong resistance from within United States and Mexico. Some U.S. and Mexican politicians argued that migrant laborers were essential to the economies of both nations, while others objected, based on humanitarian concerns against the military-style methods being used to eject Mexican migrants from the country. Although prejudice against Mexican people was still prevalent, attitudes about race were beginning to change, inspired, in part, by the dawn of a widespread progressive movement that swept across the country, fueling the youth, anti-war, and Civil Rights movements. Policies like Operation Wetback deepened the gulf between the conservative establishment and America’s youth, who, in the next generation, began playing a more dominant role in the evolution of America’s domestic and foreign policies.
Discussion Questions
What does the Operation Wetback program indicate about modern proposals to deport illegal migrants in the United States?
Should the United States return to temporary worker programs as a way to lessen demand for unauthorized migration? Explain your answer.
Does prejudice against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans play an important role in American culture? Why or why not?
What are some of the moral and/or ethical issues involved in the Mexican immigration debate in the 1950s? Are any of these issues relevant in the modern debate?
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Hernandez, Kelly Lytle. “The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943 to 1954.” The Western Historical Quarterly . Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 2006).
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