Author Footnotes with Ronald L. Mize

Immigration enforcement during the Obama administration has now reached a number (1.2 million deportations) that harkens back to two forced deportation campaigns initiated during the Great Depression, and then again in 1954. On May 9, 2012, a coalition of twelve Latino and immigrant-serving organizations released a public letter admonishing the Obama administration’s deportation state of the nation. In the letter, they compare the deportation regime of the Obama administration to the events of 1954 when the Bracero Program (the first and largest temporary worker program of its kind) was operating at full capacity. They identify how Washington was pressured to respond to the perceived border crisis of Mexicans entering the U.S. without authorization. Rather than alter the terms of the Bracero Program (something Washington had done in 1948, in an administrative retroactive process of granting temporary visas once Mexican farmworkers were already in the U.S. or derisively referred to as “drying out the wetbacks”), then INS commissioner Joseph Swing harkened back to the Great Depression and initiated another forced repatriation program—this time as a military operation.

In Consuming Mexican Labor, we discuss how the two prior forced deportation campaigns were preceded by active and vigorous recruitment of Mexican labor to the United States to meet labor demands in the agricultural, railroad, and mining industries. The first set of deportations occurred during the Depression known as the Great Repatriation. The Hoover administration, along with a substantial percentage of the American public, suggested that the so-called horde of unwanted Mexican immigrant laborers were taking jobs from “real” Americans. The United States then embarked upon its largest repatriation campaign ever to be experienced by an immigrant group, with little to no legal precedent and relative impunity. Mexicans, regardless of their legal status, were rounded up in major destination points such as Los Angeles, El Paso, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, and all points in between. The repatriation campaigns eventually led to the forced and voluntary removal of 1 to 2 million Mexicans, making it perfectly clear to all that their status and rights in the U.S. would be tenuous during bust times, essential during boom times, and eminently politicized at all times.

In 1954, the U.S. government mounted a second mass repatriation campaign of undocumented Mexican workers, dubbed “Operation Wetback,” which resulted in an estimated return of 1.3 million immigrants to Mexico. The means of repatriation varied—some migrants were forced to return; some left voluntarily—but the effect was the same: it sent a strong message not only to the Mexican people about their rights to live and work in the U.S., but also to U.S. employers, suggesting they would not be held responsible for the mass migration that they had earlier initiated by actively recruiting and employing undocumented labor. The long history of the U.S. is one of actively attracting immigrant labor in boom times, only to repel them during hard times. Obama’s recent decisions to allow discretion for low-priority immigrants undergoing deportation proceedings and DREAMers (young adults brought to the U.S. at an early age) certainly represents a capitulation to important voting blocs but overall the Obama administration has continued the immigration/deportation cycle by vehemently enforcing the civil infraction of working without proper documentation (to the tune of 400,000 deportations per year). And who benefits from this enforcement model? The employers whose jobs attracted immigrants in the first place, and the consumers whose needs drove and became dependent on cheap Mexican immigrant labor.

Ronald L. Mize, Ph.D. is the co-author of Consuming Mexican Labor: From the Bracero Program to NAFTA (2010, University of Toronto Press, with Alicia Swords) and Latino Immigrants in the United States (2012, Polity Press, with Grace Peña Delgado). He is currently assistant professor of Latino Studies at Cornell University and will begin teaching sociology at Humboldt State University this coming fall.

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