This is Yves. I must confess that I had never heard of Eisenhower’s “wet back” expulsion plan, which I find an interesting bit of media-promoted amnesia. Since the 1960s, the press has paid some attention to Cesar Chavez’s boycotts aimed at obtaining better working conditions and wages for farm workers, who were often seasonal migrants (the post mentions the Bracero program aimed at regularizing workers migrant farmers with wages below the minimum, but also calls for a decent wage). working conditions, and therefore regularized their status; it ended in 1964 and Chavez increasingly opposed illegal immigration). Whatever the story, illegal immigrants have become a hot-button issue, with opponents (either of them or their current numbers) extending beyond the hard core of the right. Thus, the Gordian knot-splitting project appeals to voters despite its practical failures.
By Katrina Burgess, Professor of Political Economy, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Originally published on The conversation
While campaigning in Iowa last September, former President Donald Trump made a promise to voters if re-elected: “Following Eisenhower’s model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he said. Trump, who made a similar commitment during his first presidential campaign, recently reiterated 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 illegal immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. “Wetback” was an ethnic slur widely used against Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river that divides Mexico and the United States.
Trump says he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much larger scale by creating temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, including National Guard troopsto delete the estimate 11 million undocumented immigrants I now live in the United States
Like a migration researcher, I find Trump’s proposal both worrying and misleading. In addition to playing on unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhower’s policies while ignoring the significantly changed landscape of American immigration today.
Operation Wetback
In May 1954, United States Attorney General Harold Brownell appointed Joseph Swing, a retired general, to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, as part of a “special program to illegally apprehend and expel aliens in this country.” areas along the southern border.” Until 2003, the INS was responsible for immigration and border enforcement, now managed by several federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Swing accelerated a a practice that has lasted for ten years to use special forces composed of INS agents who could be quickly deployed when needed to locate and deport undocumented workers. The operation began in California and then expanded to Arizona and Texas. INS agents set up roadblocks and raided fields, factories, neighborhoods, and bars where immigrants worked or socialized. The INS also built a vast fenced security campaccording to the Los Angeles Times, in order to detain immigrants apprehended in Los Angeles before sending them to the border.
Captured immigrants were placed on overcrowded buses or rickety boats and sent to designated border crossings in Arizona and Texas, where they were forced to return to Mexico. Some found themselves stranded in the Mexican desert, just across the border. During an 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 bound for Mexico.
By mid-August, INS agents had expelled more than 100,000 immigrants throughout the southwestern United States. Fearful of being apprehended, thousands of others reportedly fled to Mexico by them selves. Most of these immigrants were young Mexicans, 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 from American citizens getting caught up in INS sweeps.
Operation Wetback ended its operations a few months later and Swing declared in January 1955 that “wetback day is over.” INS disbanded its mobile special forcesand the expulsion of undocumented immigrants collapsed over the next decade.
Not just a question of deportation
Operation Wetback made headlines and disrupted countless lives, but it was more appearance than substance when it came to deportation.
THE the government’s claim having expelled more than a million Mexicans in the summer of 1954 does not stand up to scrutiny. THE figure 1.1 million extended over the entire fiscal year, which ended in June 1954, and a significant part of these apprehensions concerned repeated arrests, sometimes in a single day. Furthermore, more than 97% of these evictions took place without a formal expulsion order. Instead, migrants agreed, or were forced, to leave the country after being apprehended.
Despite the Trump-style rhetoric denouncing a “invasion of wet backs» Across the US-Mexico border, the main goal of Operation Wetback was not to deport Mexican immigrants but rather to scare American farmers, particularly in Texas, into hiring them legally.
This tactic largely worked. A crucial, but often overlooked, detail about Operation Wetback is that it occurred at the same time as Operation Wetback. Bracero Program, a large guest worker program between the United States and Mexico. Between 1942 and 1964, American employers issued more 4.6 million fixed-term contracts to more than 400,000 Mexican agricultural workers. Nearly three quarters of these contracts were issued between 1955 and 1964 – after the INS conducted Operation Wetback.
It is unlikely that Operation Wetback would have resulted in a dramatic decline in illegal immigration if Mexican workers had not had a legal opportunity to enter the United States. Like an immigrant caught in Operation Wetback commented, “I will return – legally, if possible. Otherwise, I will cross again.
The INS has explicitly recognized the link between the Bracero program and the decline in undocumented immigration in a 1958 reportstating that “if…a restriction were placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can expect a large increase in the number of illegal aliens entering the United States.”
It is no coincidence that the lull in the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally after Operation Wetback did not last after the end of the Bracero program in 1964. Mexicans still had strong incentives to emigrate, but they now had to do so without a visa or employment contract. , contributing to a constant increase border arrests after 1965, this figure exceeded one million in 1976 and reached almost 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 hurdles to doing so quickly and en masse are even greater today than they were. were in the 1950s.
First, most undocumented immigrants now live in cities, where immigration raids are more difficult to carry out. The INS learned this lesson when Operation Wetback moved from the largely rural Southwest to the urban areas of the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in September 1954. Despite transferring hundreds of agents to these locations and the use of similar tactics, INS agents produced much less apprehension as they struggled to find and detain immigrants.
Second, the U.S. undocumented population is much more dispersed and diverse than in the 1950s. TodayMexicans are no longer the majority and nearly half of undocumented immigrants live outside the six major immigration hubs – California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
Third, most undocumented immigrants in the United States did not sneak across the border. A estimated 42% entered the country legally but illegally overstayed their visa. An additional 17% requested and received a short-term legal status which protects them from immediate expulsion.
Finally, mass deportations are likely to arouse broader resistance today than in the 1950s. Formerly fiercely opposed to illegal immigration, most unions and Mexican-American organizations are now in the pro-immigrant camp. Likewise, the Mexican government, which contributed to Operation Wetback, is it is unlikely that he will allow a massive number of non-Mexicans will be deported to its territory without the proper documents.
Trump has not supported giving undocumented immigrants a legal alternative, meaning migrants will continue to find ways to cross the border illegally.
