The Making of a Great America Where the Church and the Founding Fathers Fell Short

Operation “Wetback”

“Under my administration, anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country and back to the country from which they came. And they’ll be brought great distances. We’re not dropping them right across. They learned that. President Eisenhower. They’d drop them across, right across, and they’d come back. And across. Then when they flew them to a long distance, all of a sudden that was the end. We will take them great distances. But we will take them to the country where they came from, O.K.?” (Trump, 2016)
Donald Trump (Campaign Speech)

The quote above was from a campaign speech given by President Trump here in Arizona, where I live. I think because the speech was given here, I had a heightened interest in what he said. One thing, in particular, stood out in this quote. It was a reference to President Eisenhower. I wanted to know what the Eisenhower reference was about.

     The reference was to “Operation Wetback,” which was conducted in 1955. Operation Wetback was “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.” (Blakemore, 2018)
Operation Wetback used “military-style tactics” to deport both illegal immigrants and American citizens. (Blakemore, 2018) Millions of Mexicans had entered the country legally through the previous cooperative efforts between the US and Mexico. The Mexican government, however, was facing a labor shortage and helped the U.S. to illegally deport Mexican nationals who had earned their citizenship, along with those who had illegally immigrated to the U.S. (Blakemore, 2018)

     As I read more about Operation Wetback, I saw that it used negative “racial stereotypes” in the same way the Trump administration does today and for the same reason—" to justify their sometimes brutal treatment of immigrants.” (Blakemore, 2018)

    In Operation Wetback, “harsh portrayals of Mexican immigrants as dirty, disease-bearing and irresponsible were the norm.” (Blakemore, 2018)

     When the operation commenced, tens of thousands of people were shoved onto buses, boats, and planes and often “dumped” into unfamiliar parts of Mexico, “thrown into a city where they didn’t know anyone.” (Blakemore, 2018)

       In the state of Texas, “25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.” (Blakemore, 2018)

      As deplorable as Operation Wetback sounds, it was not the first time the U.S. had conducted mass deportation of Mexican immigrants. This practice goes back to the Great Depression. “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... the program was referred to as “repatriation” to give it the sense of being voluntary. In reality, though, it was anything but.” (Blakemore, 2018)

     The horrible irony of Operation Wetback and other similar practices is that in 1942, the U.S. invited Mexicans to work in its fields. It was called “Operation Bracero.” (Blakemore, 2018)

     The contrast of how Mexicans were treated in Operations Bracero and Wetback is just a repeat of this country’s pattern of exploiting immigrant labor for profit while at the same time seeking to deny them the basic rights that you would expect in “the land of free and the home of the brave.”

     Here’s an outline from History.com of the history of Operation Bracero and timeline that led up to Operation Wetback:

• “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.

• However, not all employers wanted to follow the guidelines or pay the thirty-cent-an-hour guaranteed wage (about $4.51 in modern dollars). Nor did the Mexican government want Mexicans to work in Texas, which continued its discrimination against Mexican people, and the state was excluded from the program between 1942 and 1947. That’s where ‘wetbacks’ came in. The racial epithet was used to describe Mexicans who illegally entered Texas by crossing the Rio Grande River. The government turned a blind eye to Texans’ employment of these undocumented immigrants, even after hiring undocumented workers was declared illegal.

• An estimated 4.6 million Mexicans entered the country legally through the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964, and states like California soon became dependent on bracero workers. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers crossed the border without permission and found jobs on the farms of employers willing to flout the law.

• In 1953, the government decided it had had enough. By refusing to participate in the Bracero Program, South Texas farmers essentially received their labor for less money than farmers who complied. And Border Patrol head Harlon B. Carter—a convicted murderer who killed a Latino as a teenager in 1931 and who later headed the National Rifle Association (NRA)—was frustrated by the sheer numbers of Mexican immigrants, both legal and undocumented, in the United States. He convinced President Eisenhower to ramp up immigration enforcement efforts.

• In 1953, Carter tried to get the National Guard involved in a forerunner of Operation Wetback, but since the U.S. military is not supposed to be used to enforce domestic laws, he couldn’t gain authorization to do so. Instead, in 1954, the government introduced Operation Wetback, which used Border Patrol resources instead.

• Operation Wetback may not have had troops, but it used military tactics and propaganda to achieve its goals. It was headed in part by General Joseph Swing, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and was planned like a war strike.

• Immigration officials threatened South Texas employers, some of whom had resorted to hiring armed guards to fend off Border Patrol officers, with stepped-up raids and offered them watered-down versions of the Bracero Program that let them get papers for their workers without committing to all of the program’s strenuous requirements. As a result, the number of immigrants in the Bracero Program grew as undocumented workers were deported.

• Within a few months, Operation Wetback’s funding ran out, and the program ended. The Bracero Program continued until 1964 when Congress terminated it against farmers’ complaints in an attempt to preserve jobs for American citizens. By then, the program had created an ongoing thirst for cheap farm labor and cheap food—and a corresponding thirst for Mexican nationals to seek out their fortunes in the United States. Ironically, the program bred even more illegal immigration.” (Blakemore, 2018)

The historical account of Operation Bracero is fascinating to me. Despite all the historical racist rhetoric about Mexicans, the truth was that U.S. farmers benefitted from illegal immigrant labor and encouraged it, despite the legal vehicle set up in Operation Bracero, to provide immigrant labor.