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History As It Happens
The Folly of Mass Deportation
00:44:46
President-elect Donald Trump, who has said illegal immigrants "poison the blood of our country," vows his administration will implement the largest deportation program in U.S. history. Mass deportations are part of the American story; Mexicans were...
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- [00:00]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens. January 10, 2025. The folly of mass deportations.
- [00:06]
Donald Trump
I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done.
- [00:16]
Julia Young
President elect Donald Trump's pick for border czar is sharing new details about proposed mass deportations.
- [00:22]
Lindsey Graham
Would you describe the last four years as mass illegal immigration coming to our borders?
- [00:28]
Donald Trump
The incoming administration is preparing a list of countries where it deport migrants.
- [00:33]
Julia Young
The biggest deportation operation in American history.
- [00:36]
Donald Trump
The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.
- [00:42]
Martin DeCaro
President elect Trump is vowing to kick out undocumented immigrants by the millions because he says they're poisoning the blood of the country. The largest immigration boom in our history only recently abated. Mass deportations are part of the American story. Large numbers of Mexicans were sent back across the border during the Great Depression and again in 1954. Did it work? Will Trump's plan work? That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:11]
Julia Young
The belief that immigrants are harmful or dangerous to the native born population, and that belief tends to center around, I would suggest, kind of three main areas. One is economic or financial. The idea that immigrants are a drain or a cost to society, they drain welfare, they're poor, they need resources, or, and this fits under the same economic bucket, they take our jobs. So economic competition.
- [01:47]
Martin DeCaro
When Dwight Eisenhower was reelected in 1956, he was 66 and looking grandfatherly. He had barely survived a major heart attack the year prior, but won in a landslide over Democrat Adlai Stevenson in New York's time.
- [02:02]
Donald Trump
Times Square crowds gather on election night as returns mount. An Eisenhower landslide finds Ike winning state after state at Democratic headquarters in Chicago. Adlai Stevenson, twice defeated by Mr. Eisenhower, urges all Americans to close ranks behind the President.
- [02:19]
Martin DeCaro
His two terms in office are remembered for several major developments. The Korean armistice, nuclear arms race, coups in Iran and Guatemala. The McCarthy hearings, Brown versus Board of Education. The Soviet invasion of Hungary, Suez crisis, and more. In C SPAN's most recent survey on presidential leadership, Ike ranks fifth overall, in part because of strong marks in the category of moral authority. So what about Operation Wetback?
- [02:48]
Donald Trump
It is a manifest right of our government to limit the number of immigrants our nation can absorb.
- [02:54]
Martin DeCaro
In 1954, the administration launched the largest deportation program in the US to date, targeting Mexicans. But not everyone swept up in the raids was in the country illegally, meaning US Citizens were deported. Operation Wetback a racist term, mind you, has not escaped Donald Trump. Here he is in 2016 during a Republican primary debate praising the Eisenhower operation.
- [03:18]
Donald Trump
Moved a million and a half 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.
- [03:34]
Martin DeCaro
Now the number of people deported is in dispute. Historians estimate anywhere from 300,000 to more than a million. Whatever the number, Operation Wetback exacted brutal treatment on the deported. According to history.com, anti Mexican sentiment was pervasive. Racist portrayals of immigrants as dirty, disease bearing and irresponsible were the norm. Tens of thousands were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often unfamiliar parts of Mexico where they struggled to rebuild their lives. This was the second mass deportation operation in a quarter century, following the repatriation raids of the early 1930s, the nadir of the Great Depression. And we'll talk about these two historical cases with our guest in this episode, Catholic University historian Julia Young. So today the incoming administration wants to set deportation records. Trump has already succeeded in shifting the paradigm. Immigration is not a reality of our global age that benefits the United States, but rather a problem that has to be stopped through evermore enforcement. At a Senate hearing just a couple days ago, Senator Lindsey Graham held forth on the necessity of sending migrants back where they came from.
- [04:46]
Lindsey Graham
Does anybody disagree that the last four years has resulted in mass illegal immigration directed toward America? Because if this is not mass, what the hell would be now? How do you answer mass illegal immigration? You start enforcing the laws, Ms. Moran said, and you start sending people back who've had their day in court. You can't answer the question. And I respect you, you've been able to take the opportunity to make something of yourself. But we're passing on just constant disorder. If you can't say you should be deported after you've had a full hearing, everything been available to, and you lose, and it's hard to say you need to go. We don't have an immigration system. General, how many people have been deployed to the border by governors to assist in border security from the National Guard?
- [05:41]
Julia Young
Sir, I don't have that information.
- [05:42]
Lindsey Graham
Okay. There's thousands. Is that a legal use of the National Guard?
- [05:47]
Julia Young
It is not the illegal use of the National Guard.
- [05:49]
Lindsey Graham
It's legal, right? That is correct. Yeah, I agree with you there. What's the largest cause of death in America for young people? Does anybody know? Mr. Arthur? Drug poisoning, overdose deaths coming from a drug called fentanyl that is correct, sir. Okay. Where does that drug come from?
- [06:09]
Julia Young
That drug? Reports indicate that it's made from precursors that come from the People's Republic of China, assembled in Mexico, and largely smuggled.
- [06:17]
Martin DeCaro
Into the United States over the Southwest.
- [06:19]
Lindsey Graham
General Manor, do you consider illegal immigration a national security problem?
- [06:24]
Julia Young
I believe that it is something that ICE and CBT needs to address.
- [06:28]
Lindsey Graham
Now I ask you, is it a national security problem?
- [06:31]
Julia Young
I think it's a concern, yes.
- [06:33]
Lindsey Graham
Okay. I do, too. And there are the highest number of people on the terrorist watch list in our country today. At the end of the day, the number of people being killed in America by drug poisoning is coming from labs and cartels in Mexico. General Manor, does the President have the authority to attack a drug lab in Mexico that's making fentanyl to kill American citizens?
- [07:01]
Julia Young
I am not a legal expert, Senator.
- [07:03]
Lindsey Graham
And I do not know.
- [07:04]
Julia Young
So.
- [07:04]
Lindsey Graham
So here's what I would say. I think we need to be tough, compassionate, but end this crap.
- [07:09]
Martin DeCaro
The US Immigration system is broken. This, everyone agrees it's been broken for decades. But the issue is critical now because the United States just experienced its largest immigration boom. Annual net migration averaged 2 1/2 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This reported in the New York Times. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed 8 million people, the most rapid increase since 1850, according Times analysis. This does include legal and illegal immigration, and there were many factors for this. But the Times concludes Biden administration policy was the most important of all. It led to a backlash. And now the next administration will try to reduce the number of foreign born people in the United States. But will it work? Can our history help us understand what might happen if the government removes a large part of our labor force? Julia Young, welcome back to the show.
- [08:09]
Julia Young
Thank you. Great to be here again.
- [08:11]
Martin DeCaro
It's been a few months. Last time you were on the show, we discussed the border crisis, the origins of it. Today we're going to talk about the history of mass deportations. The United States has tried a couple of these over the past century, and of course, deportation has been a major part of day to day immigration policy, if you will, for the past 30 years or so. But why don't we start with the present moment? President Elect Trump will soon be taking office and he has a plan to deport undocumented immigrants anywhere from 0 to 11 million or more of them. In the past, deportation plans had a number of motivations. Racial animus, economics, fear of crime, what have you. What's motivating this today?
- [08:54]
Julia Young
Mass deportations are the latest in a number of simplistic solutions that have been promised for a really complicated problem. Before we had the Trump administration promising a wall. I'm not a political analyst, but I would just say these kinds of simplistic solutions to complex immigration problems go way back in US History and go way back in human history. Right. Because just as it's human to migrate, it's also human to feel concern or anxiety about groups of newcomers or others who arrive in a territory controlled by the native born.
- [09:42]
Martin DeCaro
So you're saying it's an intangible feeling, a loss of security, fear of crime. There is no immigrant crime wave. But also there are material interests here as well. When the immigrants were shipped via bus from Texas, say to liberal cities in the Northeast, New York City. This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York city. We're getting 10,000 migrants a month now.
- [10:10]
Julia Young
We're getting people from all over the.
- [10:12]
Martin DeCaro
Globe have made their minds up that.
- [10:13]
Julia Young
They'Re going to come through the southern part of the border and come into New York City.
- [10:18]
Martin DeCaro
So there was a backlash there as well.
- [10:20]
Julia Young
Yeah.
- [10:21]
Martin DeCaro
Because of a strain on resources. I mentioned material reasons.
- [10:23]
Julia Young
If we can, we could maybe talk a little bit about, about nativism and what Nativism is the belief that immigrants are harmful or dangerous to the native born population. And that belief tends to center around, I would suggest, kind of three main areas. One is economic or financial. The idea that immigrants are a drain or a cost to society. They drain welfare, they're poor, they need resources. Or, and this fits under the same economic bucket, they take our jobs. So economic competition. The second one would be security. So immigrants are a threat to the security of the nation or the security of the native born because they commit more crimes because they're terrorists. We saw a lot of that after 2001. And then the third area would be culture. This idea that immigrants are too culturally different from the native born. They're so different that they can't possibly assimilate to the culture of the native born. And that's when you see for every new generation of immigrants in the history of the United States and probably elsewhere as well, this idea that, you know, these new immigrants that are coming in, they're not like the old immigrants, the ones that assimilated, they're too different to assimilate. So you see a lot of that. Again, it's common to humans all over the world and in the present as well as in the past, really, all throughout Human history. And what I think is interesting about the busing of immigrants to blue states or new places, even if those are places where people might have had signs on their yard saying immigrants are welcome here, when those areas experienced the strains that can accompany the arrival of a large number of newcomers, you begin to see that sort of nativist response. Not to justify it, but it's a natural human response. So it's not that surprising. We're definitely in a moment in the US where there's a much higher level of nativist concern. And I don't say nativist in necessarily a negative way. I mean, it can be really negative, and it can be motivated by racism. It can be motivated by some really ugly ideas. But it also does have these sort of more neutral, like, economic security and culture elements.
- [12:44]
Martin DeCaro
And it is a fact that the current system is so broken that it's harmful to the immigrants themselves. I mean, it doesn't serve anyone. Regardless of which side of this issue you're on, deport or not to deport, everyone can agree that the way things are happening now is dangerous for the immigrants themselves. Eric Foner, the great historian, wrote an article on the Nation. You know, we could talk about race, economics, security, fear of crime, what have you. But he said it's also part of a larger theme, a long debate about who can claim to be real Americans and whether the nation should be welcoming or exclusionary. He wrote this again in the Nation magazine. He says Trump's deportation plan should be viewed in the context of other efforts to curate the population, including Indian removal, Chinese exclusion, and the 1924 law that severely reduced immigration from southern and Eastern Europe. Most of that article that he wrote deals with colonization plans embraced by people, including Abraham Lincoln, to send emancipated slaves back. Back. They weren't from Africa. They were born in the United States for generations, but send them somewhere, Africa, Central America, what have you. Do you see it that way, too, that this is really part of a longer debate?
- [13:55]
Julia Young
Yeah, except that I would extend it back and outward outside of the United States and back in time. The expulsion of populations is in the Bible. And Foner himself talks about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. And there were also expulsions of Christians by the caliphate, by the Islamic caliphate in Spain in that medieval period. There's this kind of human impulse to worry over foreigners or strangers within the population and to turn to the idea of removing or deporting or exiling or expelling that population that is deemed to be undesirable, dangerous. What have you? So, yes to what Foner says, yes. These ideas go way back, but they're not uniquely American.
- [14:42]
Martin DeCaro
That's true. You mentioned to me before we connected here that Mexico, the Mexican government during the Porfirio Diaz era, deported large numbers of Yaqui indigenous people from their homelands in Sonora to regions including Yucatan. Not to digress about that chapter in history, but yeah, I mean, this is.
- [15:01]
Julia Young
Latin American countries in the 19th and 20th centuries had great concerns about the racial component of their own populations. And so Mexico, Argentina, other countries in Latin America were trying to actually import European, especially northern European populations in order to whiten their population. And at the same time, we're repressing, sometimes deporting, sometimes committing genocide against, in the case of Argentina, indigenous populations.
- [15:35]
Martin DeCaro
Amy Pope, who is the Director General of the UN International Organization for Migration, writing in Foreign affairs, says a new immigration system is necessary. We all agree on that. She says it must start from the premise that migration is a permanent feature of human civilization. In fact, border management and standardized passports are relatively new phenomena. And she says there's a way to manage the movement of people in a manner that is orderly, dignified and advantageous to all parties. What is the goal then of mass deportations? We've done them before. I also mentioned that deportation's been a major part of day to day policy. On average, the Obama administration deported almost 400,000 people per year. The Trump administration deported 300,000 people per year. So we all know why Obama was called the deporter in chief. It's only a temporary solution, and it's not the only thing the Trump people are talking about. To be fair, they have a lot of different ideas on how to deal with this problem of, generally speaking, too many people who don't belong here being in the country.
- [16:41]
Julia Young
It doesn't address the root causes of immigration, not just the root causes outside of the United States. It also doesn't address the demand for immigrant labor here in the United States. People who do need to leave their countries for economic reasons or for political reasons because their lives are in danger, et cetera, for any reason, also know that they have a better chance to survive and even to thrive in the United States because they can find jobs here, because our economy not only demands immigrant labor, but depends on immigrant labor. If you deport all of the 11, 12, 14? Number of undocumented immigrants here in the United States, and if you magically, for the first time, ever, figure out how to, quote, unquote, close the U.S. mexico border and close the U.S. canada border where there's also a lot of undocumented crossing and somehow stop people, stop the 50% of undocumented immigrants who arrive legally on a visa and usually arrive by air, but then overstay their visa. So if you figure out how to completely shut down all undocumented immigration and then you deport everybody who is here illegally, what happens to that demand for immigrant labor? What happens to the economy? All the solutions that involve border security, deporting, they're all sort of band aids on top of the fundamental problem or the fundamental issue, which is that people are going to continue to leave their countries and need to leave their countries and they're going to find employment here once they get here.
- [18:15]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I mean, immigration in my view, generally speaking, is not a problem. We need immigrants in this country. The problem is our broken system and all the chaos it entails. So we also should be realistic here. Deporting 10 million people is a physical impossibility. Even if Trump doubles the number he deported from his first term, talking maybe two, two and a half million people, that's still a lot. That will be difficult. So we still would have a large number of people in this country who are foreign born, not all of them undocumented. Annual net migration, the number of people coming to the country minus the number of leaving averaged 2 1/2 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Even Goldman Sachs did a study of it. About 60% of that figure is undocumented. So can you put these numbers, these most recent numbers, in historical perspective?
- [19:06]
Julia Young
What's interesting, and I think you're drawing some of these numbers from the David Leonard piece in the New York Times.
- [19:12]
Martin DeCaro
Yes, the New York Times did a comprehensive look at the Biden immigration policies.
- [19:17]
Julia Young
There has been a really big surge since Biden took office. And some of that was from the Biden administration relaxing policies at the border that had become unpopular under Trump and now might be more popular again after they resulted in a surge of immigration. But we were already in a larger decades long surge in immigration that has brought us to the point where we're now at 15.2%. As that article states, 15.2% of the population in the United States is foreign born.
- [19:53]
Martin DeCaro
Or that's a decades long surge in immigration that coincides with ever increasing efforts to deport more people, with the exception maybe over the last couple years under Biden, but no, ever since 9, 11 in the Department of Homeland Security, etc. But go ahead.
- [20:06]
Julia Young
Yeah, you know, and ever increasing money Poured into border security and border enforcement. Right. I mean, if you look at the budget for the border Patrol, it just goes up and up and up and up since the 1990s. Right. And then if you think about the new technologies and that money's been used, you know, for border patrol personnel, for new technologies, for drones, for surveillance technology, cameras, lights, everything at the border, yet that number has continued to go up. Not all of that. 15.2% of the foreign born is undocumented. A significant amount is also legal immigration. And that's really been on the rise since the immigration reforms of 1965, to put it, as you asked, into historical context. So we're at 15.2% now of the population is foreign born. In 1890, we were at our previous peak, which was 14, 14.8%, 15.2%. They're pretty similar numbers also, especially when you take into account the ways that the government was able to collect Census data in 1890. Right. It was difficult to count the number.
- [21:16]
Martin DeCaro
All these numbers are estimates, as we know.
- [21:17]
Julia Young
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So those numbers are pretty close. So you can think of it as, you know, in 1890 and then really like for the next couple decades after that. From 1890 into the 1920s, we were hovering at about almost 15% of the population being foreign born. That was a moment of intense anxiety around immigration in the United States, around demographics, around the ethnic makeup of the population here in the United States.
- [21:46]
Martin DeCaro
That's when my people were coming here. Catholic, swarmy, swarthy was the term. Italians, Mafiosos, Sicilians. They're not real Americans, but go ahead.
- [21:55]
Julia Young
Right, yeah. Oh, yeah, they were criminals. Right. That was the idea. There's this huge anxiety that sounds so similar to so much of the rhetoric today, and tons and tons of anxiety around Italian immigrants specifically Martin. So they only knew what great food.
- [22:11]
Martin DeCaro
We were bringing with, you know, now, you know, no one questions it now, but they, maybe they know the lasagnas.
- [22:17]
Julia Young
Actually, America, the American population was not. The native born American population was not used to garlic, and they were very anxious about that. But no, I mean, there's this tremendous anxiety around what, like I said, this sort of economic. They're draining society. They're poor, they're criminals. Especially with Italians. You see that, but you really see it about all kinds of immigrants that were coming in during this period. They were a new group of immigrants where before you had had mostly western Europeans with a large surge of Irish immigrants and German immigrants that themselves provoked anxiety back in the mid 8 1800s. Later, at the end of the 1900s, you had Southern and Eastern Europeans, you had the Italians, you had Jews, you had Poles, you had Greeks, you had Russians. And all this anxiety about these people are too different. The Italians, they've got the Mafia, right? What is that going to do to US society? It's going to threaten the rule of law. You've got these people that are part of an international criminal organization, right? That sounds really similar to some of the rhetoric around gangs. Mississippi 13, the new Venezuelan tender, I think is the name of it. And then that idea of, like, they're just too different. They're so different from us culturally. They will never be able to assimilate and they'll never become be able to become like us. And their language is different and their religion is different Catholic.
- [23:39]
Martin DeCaro
So the main reason I wanted to have you on here, my great interviewing skills. Twenty minutes into the interview, we're finally getting to it, was to examine two past episodes of mass deportations. What were the consequences? Did they quote, unquote, work? And what might we expect this time around? We're going to start with the 1930s. We're in the Great Depression. The deportation campaigns were referred to as repatriation drives. Were these fomented organized, planned by the federal government, or were these simply undertaken locally?
- [24:11]
Julia Young
They're called repatriation drives for a reason. This was not a federal deportation campaign. There was deportation by immigration services at this time, but not wide scale. This was actually campaigns that were organized by state governments and local governments. They primarily targeted Mexican migrants, or almost all of them were Mexican migrants. And they happened in the states where Mexican migrants had started coming in the 1920s. So actually, to back up just a minute, because of all our anxiety about the new southern and eastern European immigrants of the 1880-1920 period, in the 1920s, we enacted new federal legislation. The immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 that we refer to, that are referred to as the quota laws, they limited the number of immigrants who could come into the country based on the countries and regions where they were born. So essentially they closed the door to that Italian immigration. Right. So your relatives probably came in before 1921, or at least before 1924 that they did.
- [25:12]
Martin DeCaro
Yes.
- [25:13]
Julia Young
So they closed the door to immigration from southern and eastern Europe. But we still had the same labor demand. And in fact, we had increasing labor demands down in our southwest states, where we developed some nice new irrigation technologies that allowed us to turn those dry states into productive agricultural zones. And so we turned to Mexico, those 1921 and 24 laws. There was no cap on the number of immigrants who could come from Mexico, partly because of demand and lobbying by agricultural interests who said, don't put a cap on Mexico because we need Mexican laborers. And partly because we believe that Mexican immigrants were only temporary immigrants. And a lot of that was true. Many Mexican immigrants would come, work in the fields for a season and go back to Mexico with their earnings. Throughout the 1920s, we see an increase in Mexican immigrants arriving to places that actually used to be Mexico, so California, Texas and the Southwest, but also to new places like the industrial Midwest, like Chicago and Michigan, where the. The number of immigrants from Europe had actually diminished. But we still had a great demand for laborers in the steel mills and the meatpacking plants, et cetera. Then we get to 1929, and we all know what happens in 1929. The Great Depression. And anytime the economy collapses in the United States, and I'm sure really elsewhere, you get a surge of economic anxiety around immigration. Right now there's really a concern, why should immigrants take the jobs that Americans need? And so then you see after 1929, a surge in concern, antipathy, nativism towards Mexican immigrants. But again, this is very local because Mexican immigrants are not all over the country. There are almost no Mexican immigrants in the east coast at that time, for example. There are almost no Mexican immigrants in the U.S. south. So the repatriation campaigns happened in California. The biggest number, I think, is in California, in Texas, but then also in place like Michigan and Illinois.
- [27:12]
Martin DeCaro
Many of them were American citizens. There was an investigation done in 2004 by a California state senator actually named Joseph Dunn, who looked at the deportations under President Hoover. He found that 60% of the people were born in the United States or many of them born in the United States or American citizens. 60% to first generation immigrants. Born to first generation immigrants, yeah. So how did this happen? It was local governments. They simply take people and just transfer them. Right. Ship them back to Mexico and just dump them there. Right.
- [27:43]
Julia Young
There's a little bit of fuzziness to it because sometimes it was a voluntary, like almost what you'd call a self deportation, like quasi voluntary. You know what? Here's a train ticket. There is no work for you here. There's no money for you here. You should go back to Mexico. So they decide to go back to Mexico. I don't know is that voluntary or not? It's sort of coercive. The numbers are also sort of difficult to tally. And you see different estimates in the scholarship. I remember reading, you know, years Ago, a book that estimated 200,000, and now we're talking about, you know, over a million.
- [28:16]
Martin DeCaro
About 1.3 million is the high end estimate of how many people were kicked out of the country.
- [28:21]
Julia Young
Very hard to count at the time. And the numbers of people who crossed the US Mexico border, because it's not policed nearly as effectively, obviously then as it was today. So a lot of people cross without being counted. It was a simple matter to cross the U.S. mexico border into the mid-20s and beyond.
- [28:36]
Martin DeCaro
Deporting U.S. citizens is unconstitutional. You know, there were no advocacy groups sticking up for these people. I'm wondering.
- [28:42]
Julia Young
And a lot of these US citizens are children of Mexican immigrants. So there are some really tragic stories about, you know, Mexican American children born here in the US Speak English as their primary language, they go to school, they. Everything is in English, you know, and they're deported with their families and they have to go live in this country where they've never been and they don't feel a connection to, and they feel like they're American and they have trouble fitting in. Back to Mexico.
- [29:08]
Martin DeCaro
One more question about the 1930s, then we'll move on to Eisenhower era Operation Wetback. It was called, my gosh, a racist term that we would never use today. One more question about the 1930s. But first, I was just watching Donald Trump's interview on Meet the Press that he did a couple of weeks ago. He was actually asked about this problem. Are you gonna do family separ? And he said no. And the interviewer said, well, then what are you going to do about parents who have children born here who are citizens of the United States?
- [29:37]
Donald Trump
Your borders are talking about separation.
- [29:39]
Julia Young
Well, I mean, there are two aspects to this. Your border czar, Tom Homan, said they can be deported together. Is that the plan?
- [29:45]
Donald Trump
That way you keep the. Well, I don't want to be breaking up families. So the only way you don't break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them.
- [29:53]
Julia Young
All back, even kids who are here legally.
- [29:56]
Donald Trump
Well, well, what you gonna do if they wanna stay with the father? Look, we have to have rules and regulations. You can always find something out, like, you know, this doesn't work, that doesn't work.
- [30:04]
Martin DeCaro
Again, they're American citizens. I'm not sure how he's gonna do that, but we'll get back to Trump at the end.
- [30:09]
Julia Young
That's a perfect solution. Complicated problem.
- [30:12]
Martin DeCaro
So what was the end result here of the 1930s raids? What were the consequences?
- [30:17]
Julia Young
I mean, did it solve the problem of undocumented immigration from Mexico? Are you asking? Yes. It solved the problem. And there were no more problems after the nineteen nineteen thirties. It resulted in disruptive and sometimes tragic experience for the families who lived through it. Some went back to Mexico and probably never returned to the United States. Others came back to the United States as soon as they could. The fundamental causes of that migration between the U.S. u.S. And Mexico never went away. They never went away permanently. In the depression years, yes, there were fewer jobs for everybody and fewer agricultural jobs. And so those Mexican migrants were deported. And for the most part, I think immigration declines from Mexico to the United states during the 1930s. But as soon as the US economy begins to pick up again, right, as we ramp up and get into World War II, then we once again have a demand for that immigrant labor. Immigration from Mexico picks up again and some of those same people who are deported in the 1930s will come back again to work in the United States.
- [31:24]
Martin DeCaro
Reading an article@history.com Modern economists who studied the effects of the 1930s repatriation drives on cities argue the raids did not boost local economies. You mentioned, Julia, that there were some federal prosecutions here, but most of this was done locally. However, the Hoover administration did approve of them. The President himself had a slogan, American jobs for real Americans. And his Secretary of Labor helped pass local laws and arrange agreements that prevented Mexican Americans from holding jobs. All right, let's skip ahead then to the 1950s. Give us a little of the context here why the Eisenhower administration decided it had to deport, mass, deport Mexicans from American society.
- [32:12]
Julia Young
So the context is really interesting. 1940s, our economy has ramped back up. We are now involved in World War II and massive increases in wartime production. And US working age male population is being drafted and going off to fight in Europe and in the Pacific. So there is a need for laborers to replace these native born laborers who are gone and also to meet the needs of the growing, again growing economy. And so for the first and only time in their history, the US and Mexico create a. A bilateral migration agreement. It's known as the Bracero program. Bracero from the word brazos, for arms, people who work with their muscles, people who do manual labor. The Bracero program, which is a guest worker agreement or guest worker program to bring Mexican laborers to work in the industries where they were needed, primarily in the agricultural sector. And the Bracero program will run from 1942 to 1964. The Bracero program never provided enough visas to meet either the demands of Mexican migrants who wanted to go or US employers who wanted to employ Mexican migrants. And it took a lot of. As with any immigration process or legal immigration process, there was a lot of paperwork. There was a lot of bureaucracy involved. And so a lot of Mexican workers decided to bypass the bracero program and cross the border illegally into the United States. And a lot of US Employers decided to bypass the bracero program and hire those undocumented workers in the United States. So along with the bracero program in the 1942-64 period, there was a parallel rise in undocumented immigration from Mexico. And this is actually maybe the first, the moment when undocumented immigration from Mexico really starts.
- [34:09]
Martin DeCaro
So there was a backlash then as.
- [34:12]
Julia Young
This illegal immigration or as this illegal border crossing and the population of undocumented immigrants rises. There was increasing concern in the United States about what were then called wetbacks. And that comes from the idea that people cross the border illegally by crossing the river, and therefore they're wet. And so they're wetbacks. In Spanish, they're called. Or in Mexico, they're called mojados, people who are wet. The US Government and actually the Mexican government get increasingly concerned about, you know, this rising phenomenon of illegal immigration. And so the US Government institutes a campaign to begin workplace raids to find and then to deport very visibly and publicly Mexicans who have crossed the border illegally and who are in the United States as undocumented workers.
- [35:07]
Martin DeCaro
Was the military involved?
- [35:09]
Julia Young
The military was not involved. This was primarily an effort by the U.S. border Patrol.
- [35:15]
Martin DeCaro
But they use military techniques, it's been said. I ask because Donald Trump today has talked about using the US Military to assist in what would be a massive logistical operation of rounding up people, putting them in camps. Operation wetback was pretty cruel, right? I mean, people are basically stuffed onto boats and buses and planes.
- [35:35]
Julia Young
And there was a plane that crashed with deportees on it who were. Were all killed. I think Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it. Can you play songs on the podcast? That might be a good.
- [35:46]
Martin DeCaro
I know there might be some trademark or copyright issues.
- [35:48]
Julia Young
There might. You might. The deportees crammed into boats, crammed into buses, deported across the border, and also subject to these startling and militarized raids. U.S. politicians who wish to be seen doing something or solving the problem of illegal immigration often tend to gravitate towards these kinds of militarized actions. Public raids that are photographed, mass attempts to put migrants on planes, boats, buses, to ship them out of the country. It has two purposes. One is to write, to sort of gin up publicity, to show we're doing Something we're exerting our strength, we're enforcing the border. And number two is to scare potential future illegal immigrants. Right. To share.
- [36:37]
Martin DeCaro
Or people who are here now, they might self deport to avoid getting ensnared and thrown into a holding cell or whatever.
- [36:44]
Julia Young
Yeah, yeah. And if people see this, they won't cross the border illegally.
- [36:49]
Martin DeCaro
So it's been reported that 1.3 million people were deported during Operation Wetback. However, a historian, Kelly Little, I believe is the right way to pronounce.
- [37:00]
Julia Young
Yeah, Kelly Little Hernandez.
- [37:02]
Martin DeCaro
Kelly Little Hernandez, citing a history.com article here. The actual number of deportees was drastically lower than what was reported. Closer to 300,000, the article says due to immigrants who are caught, deported and captured again after reimmigrating. It's impossible to estimate the total number of people deported under the program. But it was significant and it did send a message. Of course, the consequences, were they any different than the ones from the 1930s?
- [37:29]
Julia Young
No, no. I mean, they did nothing to address the root causes of that immigration. The bracero program ended in 1964 and nothing replaced it. As we've already discussed, there was no reform to our immigration laws that created a path to legal migration for low wage workers. And as a result, undocumented immigration from Mexico skyrocketed and continued to just grow and grow and grow through the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and into the 2000. And it didn't plateau until 2008 in the economic crash of 2008.
- [38:06]
Martin DeCaro
Today, the demographic mix of people crossing the southern border is more diverse, say, than maybe it was in the 1950s. And to link past and present here, draw a contrast, cause this is an important point. In the 1930s, people repatriated. You just brought them back to Mexico, dumped them back over the border, 1950s, bused back, put on planes back to Mexico. Today it's a question of finding the right country. Right. Talk to me a little bit about how the system, system works when it comes to people from the southern parts of Central America or South America or people from Africa who are coming through the southern border. Right. It's not as simple as just bringing them back across the southern border and dumping them in Mexico.
- [38:49]
Julia Young
It's obviously much more expensive to ship immigrants back to faraway countries than it is to just dump them across the border in Mexico. They can't dump them across the border in Mexico unless Mexico agrees. They can't dump immigrants from other countries, countries across the border in Mexico unless Mexico agrees to that. And so if Mexico doesn't agree to that, then the cost of deporting all these immigrants from countries really all over the world, from Africa, from Southeast Asia. Right. From China, is going to be even more astronomical. It seems to me to be a logistic impossibility to do mass deportation of all these immigrants from so many countries other than Mexico. In a sense, it's sort of the easiest low hanging fruit, is to deport people who are Mexican because you just have to get them across the border.
- [39:36]
Martin DeCaro
Mexico has tightened its immigration policies recently, right?
- [39:40]
Julia Young
Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the recent decline declines since the past spring or summer are because of Mexico cracking down on immigrants from other countries coming in across its southern border. And there's a, there's something that's widely stated in Mexico. I'm not sure if it's as well known here, this idea that Mexico has become, become the wall. So Trump didn't manage to, you know, complete a wall across the border. But what's happened since the first Trump administration is that the US Government, both Trump and Biden, have worked with Mexico to get Mexico to enforce immigration laws and to keep people from immigrating to the United States even after they've reached Mexico. So Mexico has now become, you know, that wall that was never built along the US Mexico border, that may never be built around the US Mexico border. And Mexico is increasingly struggling as a country of immigration.
- [40:35]
Donald Trump
We're going to build a wall, folks. We're going to build the wall. We're going to build the wall. Don't worry. We're going to build the wall. That wall will go up so fast, your head will spin and you'll say, you know he meant it.
- [40:51]
Martin DeCaro
The reason why they're dropping the Mexico wall idea is because they'll need to build a larger wall on the Canada border once Canada becomes the 51st state of the United States.
- [41:03]
Donald Trump
Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like. And it would also be much better for national security. Don't forget, we basically protect Canada.
- [41:17]
Julia Young
I guess we'll see.
- [41:18]
Martin DeCaro
Working on that joke all day.
- [41:21]
Julia Young
We'll see what happens after January 20th.
- [41:23]
Martin DeCaro
So what are you expecting then in Trump's second term when it comes to mass deportations?
- [41:29]
Julia Young
I'm a historian, so I'm not supposed to make predictions.
- [41:32]
Martin DeCaro
Only fools try to predict the future.
- [41:35]
Julia Young
Okay, well, I'll be a fool for a minute. Based on history, what I would expect, the kind of visible, militarized, if not actually enacted by the military. Right. But made to look military responses by Border Patrol, by ice, to make very visible raids of immigrant communities and deport perhaps the sort of easiest people to deport. So maybe focus on Mexican and Central American immigrants over immigrants from, say, China that are, you know, or Venezuela, where it's very hard to send people back to Venezuela. Venezuela may not accept them. So I would expect some sort of high profile, high visibility immigration raids, deportation raids.
- [42:22]
Martin DeCaro
Maybe they'll start with people who have criminal records.
- [42:25]
Julia Young
This legislation, the Lake and Riley act, is aimed at fast tracking the deportation of immigrants who are accused of a crime, not even necessarily convicted of a crime. So I think we'll continue to see this kind of nativist framing of immigrants as criminals as a drain on resources, a cultural threat to, from our administration. And I think we'll see these high visibility efforts to deport, to conduct raids. I don't really think that this administration is serious about solving the underlying fundamental problems or underlying fundamental forces that drive immigration in the way that Amy Hope suggests in her piece. I don't think we'll see creative new legislation that reflects the realities of global migration.
- [43:18]
Martin DeCaro
I think one thing that Trump has already accomplished, however, is to really change the whole framing of the immigration issue. It is something that needs to be stopped. It is a problem. It is bad for our country. And, you know, when the pendulum might swing back to a more sane center is when people see the negative consequences of deportations, when there is a labor shortage, shortages of products, what have you. Right. Because it's so integral to our economic success in this country.
- [43:46]
Julia Young
Yeah. I mean, if people can put it together that these same immigrants that we're worried about, we are also economically dependent on and that they also bring so much to the country and that they have the potential to acculturate in the same ways that earlier generations have, then maybe we see a switch in policies and a switch in the way that we talk about immigration. But I don't expect that to happen during this incoming administration.
- [44:16]
Martin DeCaro
Speaking of the incoming administration, President Elect Trump has something for Panama. He says the Panama Canal needs to be in US Possession again, even if that requires the use of military force. You know, the Panama Treaty goes back to 19 1978. So why is this coming up now? That's next as we report history as it happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday, and it's free. Go to Substack and search for history as it happens.