Nearly 2 million Mexican Americans, more than half US citizens, were deported without due process during the Great Depression, reminiscent o
Claire Wang at The Guardian:
Those who failed to produce papers were arrested. More than 400 people were detained and forced on a train back to Mexico, a place many had never been.
It’s a scene many fear will come to pass in president-elect Donald Trump’s second term, especially after he doubled down on a campaign promise to “launch the largest deportation operation” in US history, and confirmed he would use the military to execute hardline immigration policies. But this particular episode happened in 1931, as part of an earlier era of mass deportations that scholars say is reminiscent of what is unfolding today. The La Placita sweep became the first public immigration raid in Los Angeles, and one of the largest in a wave of “repatriation drives” that rolled across the country during the Great Depression. Mexican farm workers, indiscriminately deemed “illegal aliens”, became scapegoats for job shortages and shrinking public benefits. President Herbert Hoover’s provocative slogan, “American jobs for real Americans”, kicked off a spate of local legislation banning employment of anyone of Mexican descent. Police descended on workplaces, parks, hospitals and social clubs, arresting and dumping people across the border in trains and buses.
Nearly 2 million Mexican Americans, more than half US citizens, were deported without due process. Families were torn apart, and many children never again saw their deported parents. Hoover’s Mexican repatriation program is, among mass deportation efforts in the past, most similar to Trump’s stated plans, said Kevin R Johnson, a professor of public interest law and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. [...] Since his first presidential run, Trump has invoked President Dwight D Eisenhower’s mass deportation program as a blueprint for his own agenda. During the second world war, the US and Mexican government enacted the Bracero program that allowed Mexican farm hands to temporarily work in the US. But many growers continued to hire undocumented immigrants because it was cheaper. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration cracked down on undocumented labor by launching “Operation Wetback”, a yearlong series of raids named after a racial epithet for people who illegally crossed the Rio Grande. [...] The politics of deportation have always contained an important “racial dimension”, said Mae Ngai, a historian whose book Impossible Subjects explores how illegal migration became the central issue in US immigration policy.
Trump has deployed racist tropes against various ethnic groups, including Mexicans as drug-dealing “rapists” and Haitians as pet eaters, while lamenting a lack of transplants from “nice”, white-majority countries like Denmark and Switzerland. Last month, sources close to the president told NBC News that he could prioritize deporting undocumented Chinese nationals. “He’s been very clear about going after people of color, people from ‘shithole countries,’” she said, referring to a 2018 remark from Trump about crisis-stricken nations like El Salvador and Haiti. Trump could plausibly deport a million people using military-style raids of the Eisenhower-era, Ngai said, but it is unlikely that he can expel 11 million undocumented immigrants. (According to an estimate by the American Immigration Council, deporting 1 million people a year would cost more than $960bn over a decade.) Still, Ngai said, his rhetoric alone could foment fear and panic in immigrant communities. But Eisenhower’s immigration approach also differed from Trump’s in notable ways, Ngai said. Though the administration did launch flashy raids, it also allowed farm owners to rehire some deportees through the Bracero program, essentially creating a pathway for authorized entry into the US. So far, Ngai said, Trump has hammered down on deportations without providing an option for legal immigration or naturalization. “He doesn’t know the whole story of ‘Operation Wetback’,” she said. Deportations also appear to have harmed the local economy.
Donald Trump’s mass deportation proposal hasn’t been the first time the US conducted mass deportations of Mexican-Americans, as it happened during the Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidencies. The deportations were ruinous to economies and were a human rights disaster, and Trump’s plan repeats that but turbocharges it.
