Disturbing reports are emerging of U.S. immigration round-ups following the spirit and letter of Trump’s proclamations—six men taken in handcuffs February 8 from a church-run, Virginia homeless shelter, a mother who had committed nothing worse than an immigration offense yet separated from her American children and deported from Arizona February 9.
Other reports give overwhelming evidence that new anti-Mexican-immigrant policies (“the wall,” mass deportations) are unnecessary, ineffective, ruinously expensive and destructive to both the economy and communities.
For example, the MIT Technology Review’s most conservative estimate placed the real cost of the wall at $US27 billion, more than twice Trump’s highest estimate.
As for deportation, the New York Times reports that “the federal government spends more each year on immigration enforcement … than on all other federal law enforcement agencies combined … The number of people they detain each year … is greater than the number of inmates being held by the Federal Bureau of Prisons for all other federal crimes.”
In this current climate around truth, is there any point in looking at the history of Mexico-U.S. immigration? The consensus is that Trump will do what he wants even if it doesn’t make sense. Would he pause if he discovered there are 11 million Mexicans in America illegally not because they are sneaky lawbreakers, but because well-intentioned U.S. leaders installed a faulty system in place of one that was working?
An august line-up of dignitaries, including U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, gather under the Statue of Liberty to sign the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, marking the death knell of the earlier Bracero program.
The functional system was the Bracero (“manual labor”) program, which focused on farming and ended in 1964. It was superseded by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 with its visa quota policy—disastrous for Mexico-U.S. immigration and still in effect today.
A Guadalajara woman, now 67, remembers the Bracero program from her childhood in the early 1960s, when recruiters visited her neighborhood and she said goodbye to people heading off to legal, agricultural jobs north of the border.
Another Guadalajara resident recounts the story of his father, who, when he was 18, was enticed by recruiters with loudspeakers in his Michoacan hometown. Ricardo M. was bussed off to the grape-growing regions of California, returning after the season finished each year. At home in Michoacan, he married and had nine children. Meanwhile, the Bracero program ended and he began returning to California illegally.
During the Bracero period, illegal immigration from Mexico was “incomprehensible because the United States was legally admitting about 50,000 Mexicans a year,” Kurt Eichenwald writes in Newsweek. Another source says as many as 437,000 Mexicans received temporary work visas one year. Indeed, I often saw bracero workers in the 1950s and 60s in the northern “cherry belt” of Michigan.
“The laborers were happy to head back home when their seasonal jobs were done,” Eichenwald emphasizes.
The Bracero program, tailored for agriculture and for a less prosperous neighbor with whom the United States shared a huge border, lasted 22 years. Finally, it gave way to an overhaul of the U.S. immigration system in 1965. The antique system that the new law replaced had become embarrassing, both because it left out Mexico—indeed, it left out all of Latin America, Africa and Asia—and thus was seen as racist. It had favored immigrants from Canada and north and west Europe, and nixed Italians and Jews, who were described as troublemakers.
The new law was enthusiastically passed by large majorities in the House and Senate, seemingly due to embarrassment over the old system. It assigned visa quotas to all nations and, importantly for Mexico, streamlined entry for family members of newly accepted immigrants.
The results of the law were mirrored in Ricardo M’s life. With the Bracero system ended, he managed to go back and forth across the border illegally, supporting his family at home all the while. Countless other Mexicans did the same, working in jobs that were low paying by U.S. standards but gave them a good standard of living in their binational world.
In the years after the demise of the Bracero program, rapid population growth and poverty in Mexico, along with a decline in the permissible number of legal immigrants to the United States, caused illegal immigration from Mexico to balloon. A 1986 law granted amnesty to roughly 2 million Mexicans living in the United States and because border militarization increased, the trend was to discourage undocumented Mexicans from returning home seasonally as in the past. They feared they would never be able to return.
Ricardo M. got aboard an amnesty program and become a legal resident. Then, due to the family provisions of the 1965 law, he legally brought his wife and six of his children to live in California. One son still works today in a vineyard, as a higher capacity cellar assistant. Another works as a systems engineer in a utility company. Back in Mexico, yet another son is a doctor. Because Ricardo was offered a chance and took it, his family has done well.
This picture can be extended to many parts of the United States where Mexicans form the backbone of communities. Their looming absence would result in ghost towns and rotting crops, a phenomena seen more often since anti-immigrant talk geared up and culminated in Trump’s policies. A report in The Guardian newspaper, for example, tells of tomato crops left in Alabama fields because workers had been spooked by harsh new immigration laws and no Americans showed up to replace them, since the jobs pay so little by U.S. standards.
Another irony since Trump took office, according to the New York Times, is the reaction of farm owners in California, most of whom voted for Trump and still sport “Make America Great Again” signs. While Trump’s anti-Mexican-immigrant proposals are considered his cornerstone, somehow these farmers now express shock, saying they are “deeply alarmed” and if illegal Mexicans are deported “it would be a total disaster.”
“If you only have legal labor, certain parts of this industry and this region will not exist,” another added nervously.
They rely on illegal workers, owners admit. And, indeed, illegals comprise 70 percent of the workforce that makes California the top U.S. food-producing state. Even before Trump, border policing and the post-2008 depression had reduced the entry of younger illegals to almost zero and the recent H-2A agricultural visa program, somewhat similar to the Bracero program, had not been able to turn the spigot of Mexican workers back on.
Yet these farm owners say they had felt that the Trump campaign’s signature anti-immigrant line was nothing more than empty talk.
As the United States lurches from a workable guest worker system (the Bracero program) to one that increased the number of illegal Mexican field hands, and now to policies that are ripping up the agriculture industry and making sacrificial goats out of Mexicans, the consensus is that Trump’s policies are going forward even though they don’t make sense and their ephemeral “benefits” only satisfy primitive racist drives. Can the sight of unpicked crops, bankrupt farms, broken families and communities and whatever resistance can be mustered detain this train wreck in slow motion?