Mass Deportations - A Dark History Returns

There have been two "Mass Deportations" of Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent that have happened before in the United States. You don’t know about it because this history isn’t taught.

Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images

It was almost a century ago.

The collapse of the engine of capitalism and unregulated markets brought about the most spectacular collapse of the modern economic system. Millions of dollars of wealth vanished. Industries contracted. Food lines swelled and houses were foreclosed on.

The politicians, of course, needed a scapegoat.

A lot of our history taught in public schools covered the crashed economy because it left an indelible scar on the psyche of a country relishing its emerging perch as an abundant nation on par with its European contemporaries. But an enormous part of American history, one far less covered in our public schools today, impacted the psyche of a broad swath of Americans in another way. We’ve never heard about it much because these were no ordinary Americans - they were Mexican Americans and along the way, it was decided that this Latino history didn’t merit the attention of the Okies or the Dust bowlers.

To be sure, life in America, and for that matter the entire world was difficult all the way around. Homes were lost. Farms folded up. Migrations from the West and Midwest required newly poverty-stricken white folks to leave for California where meager, but existent, opportunities in the Central Valley of California offered some hope for a family that knew how to grow and pick and work the land.

Of course, that meant that somebody else would have to get an even worse break to make room for these new farm workers. Then, as now, being white helped.

During the Great Depression, anti-immigrant sentiment whipped up as fast as the stock market crashed down. Poor whites needed jobs and what little there were could be found by removing Mexican laborers in the agricultural fields of California. The problem, of course, was that not all of the workers were Mexican, many were U.S. citizens and many of the thousands of Mexican citizens had children that were U.S. citizens.

In a remarkable post written for KQED this past August reflecting on this dark history of America resurrected and as the topic of “Mass Deportations” again reared its head on the Presidential campaign along with chants and signs on the floor of the Republican National Convention, reporter Tyche Hendricks wrote, “The years-long episode, referred to as the Mexican Repatriation by those who enacted it, began in 1930, as the Great Depression took hold. As employment dwindled, hostility toward immigrants grew. President Herbert Hoover had announced a plan to ensure “American jobs for real Americans,” implying that anyone of Mexican descent was not a “real” American.

Historians say more than a million people — and possibly as many as 1.8 million — throughout the country were forced to go to Mexico. But not all of them were Mexican. Indeed, scholars estimate that more than half of those pushed out of the country were American citizens, often the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

It’s that last sentence that left me speechless. “…Scholars estimate that more than half of those pushed out of the country were American citizens, often the U.S. born children of immigrants.”

That would mean nearly a million or more U.S. citizens were deported to a country that was not theirs. These were U.S. citizens endowed with all of the rights guaranteed to citizens of this country right?

Right.

According to a Constitutional Law expert quoted in the KQED article “UC Davis Law School Dean Kevin Johnson said government officials flagrantly disregarded people’s constitutional rights.

“It was a lawless deportation,” he said. “There were no removal procedures. There’s no process, there’s no nothing. And [under law] you can’t deport a citizen. You can’t force a citizen to leave the country.”

Johnson points out that “repatriation” is a misnomer for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had never lived in Mexico, including his former colleague, the late California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso.

“I view the repatriation as an ethnic cleansing that took place in the greater Southwest, including Los Angeles, in the Great Depression,” he said. “And it’s had significant impacts…. For generations, Mexican identities were kept, some might say, ‘in the closet.’ It was kept quiet.”

(Permit me a quick sidebar to note that as I was writing this I first learned that one of my great political mentors California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso was “repatriated” during this mass deportation. Cruz Reynoso was a friend, a mentor, a reformer, and a man of incredible integrity and principle. In our time together discussing racial justice, his career, California, Latino history, and finding strength in fighting for right against wrong - he never once mentioned this to me. In an OpEd he penned for the Washington Post when Donald Trump attacked Judge Curiel for not being able to be objective because he was Mexican, Cruz Reynoso wrote: “More than 80 years ago, as a 1-year-old boy in the 1930s, I was “repatriated” with my family to Mexico from whence my parents had immigrated. A majority of those “repatriated” had never been to Mexico and were, like my brothers and me, American citizens. The “repatriation” during the Great Depression resulted from a wave of prejudice against Mexicans. Later, as a grammar school student, I was sent to a segregated public school for a number of years, a “Mexican school.” Such segregation, extensive at that time, has since been declared unconstitutional. Creating a social compact of respect takes decades. In turn, it makes for a more vigorous democracy.”)

A short excerpt from History states “Mass deportations of Mexican immigrants from the U.S. date to the Great Depression, when the federal government began a wave of deportations rather than include Mexican-born workers in New Deal welfare programs. According to historian Francisco Balderrama, the U.S. deported over 1 million Mexican nationals, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, during the 1930s. Balderrama told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that the program was referred to as “repatriation” to give it the sense of being voluntary. In reality, though, it was anything but.”

Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration

Even where we do minimally reflect on the Great Depression era Mass Deportation, U.S. history refers to it as “Mexican Repatriation” suggesting the migration of U.S. citizens was entirely voluntary when, in fact, it was a concerted effort to move these low-skilled workers out of jobs for needy white Americans and also save more New Deal dollars for those same white Americans at the same time.

But wait…this may not have been the biggest ‘mass deportation’ in US history. Reading further in the article from History on “Operation Wetback” outlining our country’s continued mass deportation operations that swept up US citizens, the racist campaign of the Eisenhower administration may have been even bigger.

There have been two significant ‘mass deportation’ programs designed to sweep up massive numbers of undocumented Mexican immigrants - both saw enormous numbers of U.S. adult citizens caught up in the sweeps. But in both the “Mexican Repatriation” of the 1930s and “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s, U.S. children often consciously had their rights ignored to meet the mass deportation objectives.

According to History: “These Mexican immigrants had been caught in the snare of Operation Wetback, the biggest mass deportation of undocumented workers in United States history. As many as 1.3 million people may have been swept up in the Eisenhower-era campaign with a racist name, which was designed to root out undocumented Mexicans from American society.

The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants—but also many American citizens—from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico.

With the help of the Mexican government, which sought the return of Mexican nationals to alleviate a labor shortage, Border Patrol agents and local officials used military techniques in a coordinated, tactical operation to remove the immigrants. Along the way, they used widespread racial stereotypes to justify their sometimes brutal treatment of immigrants. Inside the United States, anti-Mexican sentiment was pervasive, and harsh portrayals of Mexican immigrants as dirty, disease-bearing, and irresponsible were the norm.”

Operation Wetback was implemented in June 1954 and occurred during what was known as The Bracero Program which ran from 1942-1964. At the beginning of World War II the US and Mexican governments developed an agreement to allow Mexican workers to enter and work in agriculture on a short-term basis in exchange for tighter border security and the return of undocumented workers to Mexico.

Despite a widespread belief among native-born Americans that Mexicans came to the United States to steal jobs from American workers, many were invited to the country to work in its fields. In 1942, the U.S. Mexican Farm Labor Program, also known as Operation Bracero after the Spanish term for “manual laborer,” began. The program funneled Mexicans into the United States on a legal, temporary basis in exchange for guaranteed wages and humane treatment—an attempt by the Mexican government to stave off the discrimination faced by earlier immigrants.

The Bracero program worked and it didn’t. The main problem was that immigrants were effectively treated like cattle and subject to the whims of both countries’ labor needs, war efforts, and industrialization efforts. Political ambitions and domestic priorities between the two countries compounded the problems and inconsistent and then the inevitable inhumane treatment of migrants.

Between 1942 and 1954 the Bracero program met the needs of the US war effort and the early start of growing agribusiness concerns that required cheap labor. But this success also created undue pressure on major Mexican farming interests whose crops were rotting in the fields as they were unable to find labor to pick their crops because they were all working in the United States. Mexico and the U.S. needed to find a way to appease both interests and “Operation Wetback” was the solution, including a dramatically scaled-up border patrol with considerably more infrastructure to deport Mexican migrants (and many US citizens swept up in the raids) deep into Mexico so that deportees couldn’t easily return.

Operation Wetback did not, however, stop U.S. farming interests from recruiting illegal labor along the border and in Mexico. Paying illegal labor was also cheaper than complying with the Bracero program requirements. Illegal immigration continued as did the massive deportation of legal and illegal Mexicans and U.S. citizens swept up in raids. Deportees were transported inhumanely on cargo ships and caged trucks to far-off parts of Mexico where most had never been. Hunger and dehydration were common. Operation Wetback was discontinued a few months after it began - a complete humanitarian fiasco.

To be sure we are not in the depths of The Great Depression. In fact, the U.S. economy is the envy of the world. Moreover, there aren’t any white people migrating to push Latino farmworkers out of the fields to do their work. Not hardly. We all know that there aren’t any white people that are going to do these jobs…or most of the jobs being done by these laborers.

But in terms of illegal crossings, the border has been out of control for three and half of the past four years and anti-immigrant sentiment is running high. Much higher than at any time since the early 2000s to be exact.

Immigration has always served to benefit industries that need cheap labor. I actually don’t have an issue with that. I do have an issue with our country turning a blind eye to allowing undocumented labor flows to make industry happy and then turning on the immigrant when public opinion turns. We should all be horrified at the history of inhumane treatment of temporary seasonal workers that allow for our quality of life. The history of our immigration pacts with Mexico is far more about cheap labor that Americans won’t do and which major business interests need it most at any given time. The immigrant becomes a political punching bag with enormous human costs.

It’s a callous form of indentured servitude, or modern slavery, where the immigrant bears the dangerous cost of finding work that the US economy desperately needs.

Mexico isn’t prepared for mass deportations and the reality of returning millions could be disastrous for both countries. Organized crime will explode. Inflationary pressures from Labor shortages will magnify. Industries will contract. Supply chains will be impacted. Human beings will suffer.

But for all of these consequences we must come to understand history tells us clearly that U.S. citizenship will not guarantee protection for anyone from these mass deportations. The size and scope of the sweeps the Trump administration promises to execute can not be much more discerning than those of the past, which means U.S. citizens will invariably be swept up in these mass raids.

Yes, we have indeed all been afforded more Constitutional protections since the 1930s and 1950s respectively. But let’s also keep in mind who we must rely on to safeguard those Constitutional protections. At the moment Matt Gaetz has been nominated to be the Attorney General of the United States and to oversee the Department of Justice. Governor Kristi Noem has been nominated to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. Tom Homan, the proposed new border czar has said he would get around ‘family separation’ by deporting entire families together without mentioning what that meant for US citizen children. Hardly reassuring.

Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

It’s as if these dark periods of American history haven’t been told for a reason. Operation Wetback was shut down so quickly in part because of domestic political pressure in the United States. People publicly spoke out.