Yves here. I have to confess to not previously having heard of the Eisenhower “wetback” deportation scheme, which I find an interested bit of media-promoted amnesia. Since the 1960s press did give some attention to Cesar Chavez’s boycotts to get better labor conditions and pay for farmworkers, who were often seasonal migrants (the post mentions the Bracero program to regularize migrant farm workers with a sub-minimum wage but also called for decent working conditions, and hence regularized their status; it ended in 1964 and Chavez increasingly opposed illegal immigration). Irrespective of the history, illegal immigrants have become a hot button, with opponents (either to them at all or their current numbers) extending beyond the hard core right wing. So Gordian-knot-cutting scheme has voter appeal despite its practical failings.
By Katrina Burgess, Professor of Political Economy, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Originally published at The Conversation
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.
Trump was referring to Operation Wetback, a military-style campaign launched by the Eisenhower administration in the summer of 1954 to end undocumented immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. “Wetback” was a widely used ethnic slur for Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river dividing Mexico and the U.S.
Trump says that he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, including National Guard troops, to remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the U.S.
As a migration scholar, I find Trump’s proposal to be both disturbing and misleading. Besides playing to unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhower’s policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.
Operation Wetback
In May 1954, U.S. Attorney General Harold Brownell appointed Joseph Swing, a retired general, to lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, in a “special program to apprehend and deport aliens illegally in this country from areas along the southern border.” Until 2003, the INS was responsible for immigration and border control, now handled by multiple federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Swing ramped up a decade-long practice of using special task forces composed of INS agents who could be rapidly deployed where needed in order to locate and deport undocumented workers. The operation began in California and then spread to Arizona and Texas. INS agents set up roadblocks and raided fields, factories, neighborhoods and saloons where immigrants were working or socializing. The INS also built a vast wire-fenced security camp, according to the Los Angeles Times, in order to detain apprehended immigrants in Los Angeles before sending them to the border.
Captured immigrants were put on hot, overcrowded buses or rickety boats and sent to designated border crossings in Arizona and Texas, where they were forced to cross back into Mexico. Some found themselves stranded in the Mexican desert just over the border. In one incident, 88 migrants died of sunstroke before the Red Cross arrived with water and medical attention. Others were delivered to Mexican authorities, who loaded them onto trains headed deeper into Mexico.
By mid-August, INS agents had deported more than 100,000 immigrants across the U.S. Southwest. Fearing apprehension, thousands more reportedly fled back to Mexico on their own. Most of these immigrants were young Mexican men, but the INS also targeted families, removing nearly 9,000 family members, including children, from the Rio Grande Valley in August. There is also evidence of U.S. citizens getting caught up in the INS sweeps.
Operation Wetback wound down its operations a few months later, and Swing declared in January 1955 that “the day of the wetback is over.” The INS disbanded its special mobile task forces, and the deportation of undocumented immigrants plummeted over the next decade.
Not Just About Deportation
Operation Wetback made the headlines and disrupted countless lives, but it was more show than substance when it came to deportation.
The government’s claim to have deported more than 1 million Mexicans during the summer of 1954 does not stand up to scrutiny. The 1.1 million figure was for the entire fiscal year, which ended in June 1954, and a sizable share of these apprehensions were repeat arrests, sometimes in a single day. Moreover, over 97% of these deportations occurred without a formal order of removal. Instead, migrants agreed, or were coerced, to leave the country after being apprehended.
Despite Trump-like rhetoric decrying a “wetback invasion” across the U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Wetback’s main objective was not to remove Mexican immigrants but rather to frighten U.S. farmers, especially in Texas, into hiring them legally.
This tactic largely worked. A crucial but often overlooked detail about Operation Wetback is that it happened at the same time as the Bracero Program, a massive guest-worker program between the U.S. and Mexico. Between 1942 and 1964, U.S. employers issued over 4.6 million short-term contracts to more than 400,000 Mexican farm workers. Nearly three-quarters of these contracts were issued between 1955 and 1964 – after the INS carried out Operation Wetback.
Operation Wetback is unlikely to have led to a dramatic decline in undocumented immigration had Mexican workers not had a legal option for entering the United States. As one immigrant caught up in Operation Wetback commented, “I will come back – legally, if possible. If not, I’ll just walk across again.”
The INS explicitly recognized the connection between the Bracero Program and the decline in undocumented immigration in a 1958 report, stating 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.”
It is no coincidence that the lull in migrants illegally crossing the U.S-Mexico border after Operation Wetback did not last once the Bracero Program ended in 1964. Mexicans still had strong incentives to migrate, but now they had to do so without visas or work contracts, contributing to a steady increase in border arrests after 1965 that surpassed 1 million in 1976 and reached nearly 2 million in 2000.
Real Lessons
If he were to win the presidency again, Trump would have the legal authority to deport undocumented immigrants, but the logistical, political and legal obstacles to doing so quickly and massively are even greater today than they were in the 1950s.
First, most undocumented immigrants now live in cities, where immigrant sweeps are more difficult to carry out. The INS learned this lesson when Operation Wetback shifted from the largely rural Southwest to urban areas in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in September 1954. Despite transferring hundreds of agents to these locations and using similar tactics, INS agents produced far fewer apprehensions as they struggled to find and detain immigrants.
Second, the U.S. undocumented population is much more dispersed and diverse than in the 1950s. Today, Mexicans are no longer in the majority, and nearly half of undocumented immigrants live outside the six major hubs for immigrants – California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
Third, most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. did not sneak across the border. An estimated 42% entered the country legally but overstayed a visa illegally. Another 17% requested and received a short-term legal status that protects them from immediate deportation.
Finally, mass deportations are likely to spark a more broad-based resistance today than happened in the 1950s. Once staunchly opposed to undocumented immigration, most labor unions and Mexican-American organizations are now in the pro-immigrant camp. Likewise, the Mexican government, which helped with Operation Wetback, is unlikely to allow massive numbers of non-Mexicans to be deported to its territory without the proper documentation.
Trump has not supported a way to provide undocumented immigrants with a legal alternative, which means that migrants will keep finding ways to cross illegally.
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Regarding the penultimate paragraph, how is it that labor unions are “now in the pro-immigrant camp”?
Maybe this is an overly simplistic question, but… isn’t a flood of undocumented immigrants under the Biden admin effectively undermining the unions’ power to negotiate with capital?
Don’t read it as pro-immigration. A scared, undocumented worker is not going to feel empowered to resist and/or ask for better working conditions. If unions don’t support these workers then employers will continue to leverage these “more compliant” workers to weaken unions and union workers rights.
There is an old saying, “my enemy’s enemy is my best friend.” So long as workers see immigrants as an enemy, employers will see them as their best friends/workers.
So the unions are going to organize the undocumented into dues paying members when they are struggling merely to organize those with US citizenship? It’s really not about unions anyway since the low skill/no skill jobs that these workers perform are displacing the reserve army of US unemployed. But as I understand it there was a time–when unions were much more a part of our labor force–when they did oppose illegal immigration and conducted demonstrations at the border.
As for Trump, he is about as likely to carry through his threat as he was successful in building his wall. He says a lot of things. His style is to provoke and his opponents’ style is to take the bait.
“His style is to provoke and his opponent’s style is to take the bait.”
So true: I continue to be amazed at the visceral and masochistic eagerness with which @McResistance liberals respond to Trump’s trolling. It just hurts so good, and provides a stage for morality performance, which is important to them.
Money quote.
Why would a union waste time organizing undocumented labor that will be deported when they can organize actual Americans? If they’re really wasting their time on the former then the “labor movement” won’t even get off the ground…
I have tremendous respect for the NC commentariat, so I’ll take the time to answer this question and assume it’s asked in good faith out of ignorance. Not to substitute credentials for subject mastery, but I retired a year ago after 26 years as a staff researcher for a large union, the majority of whose members are immigrants and 1st or 2nd generation Americans.
Understanding this issue requires actual knowledge of three things:
1. What kind of work undocumented immigrants do and where in the economy they work
2. How service sector workers in particular organize and represent themselves through labor unions, especially as opposed to the building construction trades.
3. Solidarity.
1. While large numbers of undocumented workers work in the informal economy – gaining cash wages for work like domestic housecleaning or childcare – many others work in structures that exist in a twilight semi-formal economy or in the formal economy itself.
One notable example of the twilight economy – the residential construction and home improvement industries are loaded with immigrant workers both documented and undocumented. Hiring undocumented workers is made possible by the diffuse capital and administrative structures that dominate those industries – general contractors can present themselves with pristine labor law credentials to clients, but when the work actually gets done, the people who show up to do it work for sub-sub-contractors who, as is the case with household domestic labor, may pay workers in cash and with whom they have a tenuous legal relationship. Even when paid formally, these subcontracted workers are virtually all 1099ed and therefor have been extremely difficult to organize into legally recognized unions regardless of immigration status because forming a union has for decades required a legally recognized employer-employee relationship.
In the service sector – food service and hospitality in particular – work is done in physical locations and requires somewhat more regular schedules because you have to produce meals and clean hotel rooms on time to meet customers’ needs. So the employment structures, especially in larger operations, are more likely to be formal.
it’s more difficult to find undocumented workers in the true formal economy than twenty or thirty years ago, but there are still large numbers of people working in these jobs either without documentation or with unresolved legal immigration status issues.
2. With certain exceptions, workers don’t form unions generically within an industry. The government extends the (absurdly weak) formal protections of the laws governing the formation and maintenance of a union to groups of workers who can demonstrate a “community of interest” amongst themselves. In nearly all industries, by far the most critical element defining a community of interest is that you work together for the same employer, most often in one place.
So when workers want to band together to gain power in their workplace, they can’t just go out and pick the “actual Americans” among their neighbors who they happen to share political views and friendships with. They have to join together with their coworkers. That’s the short answer to why unions would organize undocumented immigrants – in the industries that I’m most familiar with, undocumented workers are a non-zero chunk of the workers who do the work in the places where the work is done. Ignoring them means no movement.
Forming a union is easily the hardest civic task in this country. Employers rely on a multi-billion psychological warfare industry to terrify workers out of organizing. It requires courage, determination and stamina to get recognized and extract money and on-the-job respect from an employer. Immigration status adds an additional layer of fear to workers’ responses to the idea of forming a union.
Hence the labor movement’s shifting position on immigration over the last two decades. Most of the unions that have led that shift are committed to organizing non-union workers in low-wage service industries with changing workforce demographics, not just immigrants, of course, but large numbers of African-Americans and native born people one generation removed from points across the globe. These unions have taken legislative positions on immigration reform and aggressively represented the interests of immigrant workers documented and undocumented alike because that’s who many of the members – and potential future members – of those unions are.
Of course, forming a union doesn’t magically change anyone’s immigration status, but it can offer protections that help remove some stigma and fear. For example, hotel union contracts in a number of cities require employers to guarantee workers their jobs for up to a year or more when they have to leave to work through immigration status problems.
To return to the question of “actual Americans,” in service sector industries, workers’ power is still deeply contingent. In some narrow slices of heavily-regulated industries where the employer places a high premium on trained work like commercial construction or seaports, unions hold significant formal sway over hiring. That’s not the case in service industries. Although in some places it’s changing slowly – especially where labor-community coalitions have fought battles over local hiring – generally employers hire whoever they want and those workers either join an existing unionized workplace or decide to form a union in their non-union workplace. The idea of just organizing a bunch of “actual Americans” is meaningless – workers who actually work together have to organize.
3. Solidarity is a matter of principle. It’s the right thing to do. And it should be expected in particular from unions whose members include huge numbers of first or second generation citizens whose lives growing up may have been shaped by elders who scratched their way into this country without documents and who may have relatives on the other side of the document divide.
My family came to the U.S. two and three generations ago from Ireland. Irish Americans faced serious discrimination but also had the benefit of fair enough skin to make assimilation easier than for a lot of other people, including millions of people who forcibly “immigrated” during the slave trade or who were here long before Europeans. Given how much immigration laws have changed in the past 200 years and how different they were when my relatives arrived, I don’t believe I have any special right to be here. I lived in Las Vegas for two and a half years. I’ve been in the Sonoran desert in the summer. Anyone who wants to be here so badly they’ll walk through that hell can join me in my neighborhood and my union anytime.
This is excellent. Thank you!
I second Acacia’s praise. This is excellent! Thanks!
Aren’t most of the unionized in the public sector, like teachers unions? Fill up those seats!
Because the labor unions are a wholly-owned Team D subsidiary/sockpuppet. This has been the case for decades.
In 1996, union leaders warned Bill Clinton that they would not be able to stop widespread defection of union voters to Team R if Pat Buchanan were to get the Team R nomination.
At one time, I thought that union leaders were supposed to represent their constituents and not Team D. Damn, but I was dumb.
Didn’t Obama deport more than other presidents in the past few decades?
And does Trump’s proposals include penalties for those who benefit from it? Like those who employ them, including those who use contractors?
My guess is that it does not have penalties for employers who knowingly recruit and hire undocumented immigrants. There have never been penalties in the past, so why start now?
Of course penalizing employers would probably be the single best way to stop excessive undocumented immigration. Not a big fan of the hypocrites who decry illegal immigration and yet sing the praises of the corporations who hire and benefit from them.
Or the rich people who use them as maids and nannies.
There was just a discussion here about the health consequences from the current non policy so perhaps a return to regulated immigration with contracts and inspections would at least make sense.
Trump talks a lot about people -elite and non-elite – that he and his followers think need to be hurt, and the ways he intends to hurt them. The cruelty is the point. Trump has his own history of hiring undocumented workers, and temporary documented non-US workers. He has talked about using e-verify and requiring other employers to do so, but he’s been for it and against it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2021/11/17/the-trump-organization-sought-to-hire-87-foreign-workers-at-mar-a-lago-this-year/
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/trump-undocumented-workers-ok-sometimes.html
About 5 minutes in on this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1MHh4uAd1c
There have been penalties for employers who knowingly recruit and hire undocumented immigrants since 1986.
Since 1996 there has been a federal program that allows employers to verify documentation for workers.
The tools are there but neither party wants to use them because… donors ( the Oligarchs).
Thank you. And I should have said penalties have never been enforced in the past, as your quotes noted. Put some C-suite types in the slammer for a decade or so and that might help the rest of them get their minds right on the issue. But instead they are able to donate their way out of any problems.
They didn’t have cameras and tracking devices every where in the 1950s, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. It would only be temporary.
If there were US or European leaders who really thought illegal immigration was a problem, they wouldn’t do everything in their power to hinder economic development of many countries. If they were concerned about the disruptive effects of mass displacement on the other citizens in various countries, the US wouldn’t be dropping bombs (and aiding the dropping) all over the world.
And now we’re saturated with 24/7 spying devices that we carry in our pockets.
A determined government could track nigh every denizen of the state and fairly reliably predict who was a citizen/migrant. Given the crackdown on rights now occurring across the western world, there’s no reason to be naive about the scope and capability of modern technology.
Obama deported more people than all other presidents before him combined.
As well as starting Babies In Cages. However, when Trump does it (characteristically highlighting the cruelty, unlike the D’s who highlight the legalism) please make sure you get that obligatory choke-up in your voice, to make sure everyone knows you Care.
And needless to say, such “compassion” makes a point of ignoring the coups, sanctions, repression and mundane everyday exploitation that drives so many people here.
Yes, I am against illegal immigration and I wouldn’t mind greatly increased deportations, but many of the people who come here are fleeing the economic and social hellscape that our country created in their countries for the benefit of the corporations and the affluent. Corporations and affluent people who frequently break the law to exploit these desperate people.
I really dislike these waves of illegal immigrants. I want them gone. But I hate the corporations, despise the affluent, and loathe the government who encourage and take advantage of these often desperate migrants at the expense of Americans.
In addition to actually enforcing the laws especially the corporations, stop mucking with the many countries that the migrants come from, and actually invest and give aid, not exploit, these often poor countries. This would require consistent policies for all this.
Going after illegal employers is certainly key; but both parties are okay with the labor exploitation that illegal immigration permits.
Today, we don’t need such a large allocation of personnel to accomplish this on the ground; why not simply actually verify SSN per employee? Confirm that the number is legit, and that it doesn’t belong in actuality to someone other than the worker in question. It’s hard to believe this won’t snuff out plenty of employers and their contractor firms.
Look for TB cases, (and other communicable diseases) to increase commensurately with the Trump (or Biden) deportation sweeps. Beleaguered Public Health workers who have been holding things together with chewing gum and rubber bands will be overwhelmed by the impossibility to contact trace as people hide from the sweeps. Immigrants will be crammed into crowded, poorly ventilated conditions, (holding pens), where it will spread and cases will rise. I don’t know the proportion of multi-drug resistant TB cases in the US but it’s substantial I think.
Hot mess on the stupidest time line!
Yesterday’s article about recent TB outbreaks in the US. Read between the lines and know that it’s already out of control:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/tuberculosis-emergency-in-california-after-death-in-homeless-shelter-outbreak-follows-chicago-migrant-shelter-cluster-and-earlier-im-doc-anecdata.html
My crystal ball tells me the first publicized spread of highly pathogenic bird flu will be attributed by the MSM to “illegals”…
Even though written well before the start of Eisenhower’s program, Woody Guthrie saw what was happening. Many excellent renditions of Deportee, this one sung by Johnny Cash and Johnny Rodriguez:
https://youtu.be/d87jEZ1Agpo?si=KYfGOEgh385jLSD2
by Woody Guthrie & Martin Hoffman
The crops are all in, and the peaches are rotten
The oranges are packed in the creosote dumps
They’re flying us back to the Mexico border
To pay all our money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mi amigos, Jesus and Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be Deportee
Now my father’s own father, he waded that river
They took all the money her made in his life
Six-hundred miles to the Mexico border
They chased us like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus and Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
No all they will call you will be Deportee
The sky-plane caught fire, over Los Gatos Canyon
A big ball of fire, it shook all the ground
Who are these friends, who are falling like dry leaves
The radio said they were just deportees
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus and Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
No all they will call you will be Deportee
But we died in your hills, we died in your valleys
We died in your orchards, we died on your plains
We died on your deserts, we died in your treetops
Both sides of the river we died just the same
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus and Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
No all they will call you will be Deportee
© 1948
The article misses several crucial points:
NAFTA forced millions of campesinos, mainly indigenous, off the Ejidos (Autonomous indigenous agricultural communities established by Emiliano Zapata following the revolution, and dismantled under NAFTA), and opened Mexico to massive imports of subsidized US factory farmed food staples. These displaced workers were intended to work in Maquiladoras along the Rio Grande, & in southern Mexico, but the jobs largely never materialized. Under Bill Clinton, the southern border became heavily militarized, making it much more difficult for seasonal migrant labor to cross the border. This resulted in seasonal migrants coming for work & staying.
The other factor, seen especially in the mid-Atlantic was the massive corporate deregulation under Clinton. Massive numbers of new housing was built to accommodate the newly minted corporate & high tech workers, requiring millions of construction workers. In addition growing demand for domestic & agricultural workers, this situation required millions more. These jobs were mainly filled by migrants from south of the border.
Another complicating factor in addition to those mentioned in the article is the reality that many migrants have intermarried with US citizens, or have children born in the US.
Thanks for making these points.
On nearly every major political issue there are the fake partisan positions, and then there are the underlying realities that actually drive bipartisan policies. The fake partisan positions are for stirring the emotions of varying political constituencies and the related partisan tasks of fund-raising and voter mobilization. They have little effect on the underlying realities, some of which you have helpfully noted here. Just another illustration that partisan electoral politics is WWF-style kayfabe.
JS and pjay: good points- thank you. Immigrants have been used as a scapegoat, internal “other” to mobilize political support etc since day one of the US project. Emotional manipulation, distractions to maintain the illusion of democratic choice. We are supposed to focus on the powerless and not look behind the curtain.
Another pet-peeve issue that I have is the close connection between US trade policies and especially foreign policy and migration. The US has imposed illegal siege warfare on Venezuela, Cuba etc. (western hemisphere) supported regime changes, meddled in internal affairs of numerous countries, CIA running guns and drugs to destabilize governments, neoliberal debt-traps and trickery. etc. etc. has caused the largest refugee crises since WWII.
In the eastern hemi we have the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria,… and the genocide of Palestine has caused another refugee crisis. And then we have Ukraine…
For a granular look at the Midwest Dairy industry and Mexican workers read, “Milked” by Ruth Conniff, (winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel award.)
(Not to be confused with the film of the same name which pertains to New Zealand).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61239504-milked
Trump promises lots of things, whatever idiocies he thinks will get him the biggest applause lines. Then he amps it up and sees what kind of reaction he gets.
That doesn’t mean that Trump is going to actually do any of it, even if he could. The Great Wall Of Imbecility and “Lock Her Up” come prominently to mind. Not to mention “Drain The Swamp!”
The DT has been a loud-mouthed, serially-mendacious conman and bullshitter his whole life. That’s why he is so popular among the gullible and naive, he’s a great politician: he panders to the crowd. JB as well, but DT is a better bullshitter. The US has reached peak kakistocracy.
Remember folks, perhaps there are some that don’t even know this, we have three branches of government. The Executive Branch by design has limited powers. Any President can only do so much.
True, bob, and a hope that I cling to. But it turns out that many people prefer an imperial presidency as long as the emperor-president is someone whose policies they like. And it seems to me that presidential campaigning mostly revolves around promising things a president can’t actually do in accord with the constitution.
>>>The US has reached peak kakistocracy.
Not quite. There are countries that are much worse including Ukraine. Something to look forwards to.
An American Zelenskyy *shudder*