Happy Saturday, everybody. In a couple of weeks, we're going to be doing an episode on the Delano grape strike, which took place shortly after the end of the Brissero program in the United States. We covered the Brissero program on the show back on August, and rather than trying to go back over all of that same context in the Delano Grape Strike episode, we thought we would go ahead and just put this classic back into people's feeds. This episode also talks about a mass deportation effort that overlapped the Briscero program, and that mass deportation effort was named after a racist slur. I wrote this episode back in If I were writing it today, I probably would have approached that differently. So we just wanted to note up front that there are multiple references to the program, including its full name, over the course of this episode. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tree C. D. Wilson, and I'm Holly fry So. Today, I think a lot of people think concerns about immigration are a recent phenomenon. I mean definitely in the United States, which is where we live and can talk about from experience. But I'm maybe in other nations too, but definitely in the US, right, people don't think of this is a thing that's been around for a long time. Yeah, I think there's an availing thought that uh, you know there colonists came and that was the big immigration thing, and then there was this big gap and now we're all arguing and worried about it again. Yeah, it's been like the last I don't know, thirty or forty years. So in a in a way, in a way, it definitely is a new concern for people because for about a hundred and fifty years to the nation was founded, there weren't really any immigration laws, right. If you could get here, you got to live here. That was basically how it worked until, um, you know, the nineteenth century. So back in the late seventeen hundreds, the country didn't really seem to care about about immigration. But to look at another way, it is not a new concern at all, because the United States started passing immigration laws and a lot of them were targeted at immigrants from specific countries in the eighteen sixties. So this is both a really new idea given the whole history of the United States as a nation, uh, and a really old one, given that it's been around for more than a hundred and fifty years. So that whole division between like legal and illegal immigration is simultaneously new and old. And today's story or today's story is part of that centuries long history. Because for parts of the twentieth century, the United States and Mexico had agreements in place that we're allowing and even encouraging Mexican nationals to enter the United States to do agricultural work and other labor, mostly in the American Southwest. And one specific program called the Brissero program was launched during World War Two to address a labor shortage um as American men were needed for the war effort. But an unintended side effect of this program that was about legally coming to the United States to work, was this huge increase in the number of people who were crossing the border from Mexico illegally. And these illegal entries reached a point that the government implemented another program which I'm gonna make it clear this is not an acceptable word to use today, but it is literally what the program was named. It was called Operation Wetback to deport Mexican nationals and huge groups. So the intertwined stories of these two government programs is what we are going to talk about today. And before nineteen ten, there was simply not a lot of regulation of the United State It's border with Mexico. People pretty much crossed back and forth as they pleased. And as agricultural industry started to really grow in the Southwest, these industries started to really rely on this readily available and seasonal workforce that was coming in from Mexico in the nineteen twenties. This also became true of other industries in the American West and Southwest as well, including railroads and mining. But today we're talking mostly about agriculture, so using Mexican nationals as a source of labor basically came with some benefits. Agricultural work in a lot of places is highly seasonal, and for the most part, migrant workers who were US citizens were traveling as families. They would spend the year moving from place to place as a family, for the most part, spending a lot more time looking for work than actually working. And when there was work, it was usually work that the whole family did, including the children, and an effort to try to make enough money to last them for the rest of the year, so that it's not an ideal situations been a lot of ways. Mexican workers, on the other hand, tended to be young men traveling in groups with other young men. A group of young men was overall a lot more efficient than a family with children, and on the more exploitive side of things, many were willing to accept lower wages than what was considered standard among Americans. Because of a limited proficiency with the English language, Mexican nationals were often unaware of laws or standards that could protect them in their work, and as a result, there were a lot of growers and farmers in the American West and Southwest who were willing to overlook the issue of whether a person had come into the United States legally or not in order to get cheap, easy to exploit labor. By the early nineteen twenties, though, an increasing number of people were starting to think of this basically open border in the way it affected the labor pool is a big problem. Large farms were driving down their own costs by employing large numbers of Mexican migrant workers at a really low rate of pay, and small farms considered themselves to be at a big financial disadvantage. As a result, labor organizations started tacitly excluding Mexican workers when they formed unions, and also started using their political clout to lobby the government for more enforcement along the border and to put a stop to immigration from Mexico. In nineteen twenty four, the United States formally established the Border Patrol as part of the Labor Appropriation Act. As the US government started taking steps to secure the Mexican border and curtail illegal immigration in the nineteen twenties, local communities and states began taking steps to regulate their own Mexican population as well, as we've discussed in our podcasts on Mendoes Versus Westminster and Macario Garcia. Much of the Southwest and West approached its Hispanic and Latino population in much the same way most of the rest of the nation did. Its lack population through segregation, which was reinforced either through laws or through social customs. In places with large Mexican and Mexican American populations, discrimination was widespread and socially accepted by much of the Anglo community during the Great Depression, which lasted roughly a decade beginning in nine nine, and the Dust Bowl, which was a devastating period of drought and dust storms that struck much of the Southwest and Great Plains. During the same time, life was pretty hard for pretty much everybody in the region, but it was especially hard for people of Mexican descent. The Anglo community was increasingly hostile towards Mexican migrants, viewing them as unnecessary competition for incredibly scarce jobs. The industries that had been relying so heavily on Mexican labor for so long increasingly tried to exclude Mexicans from their workforce during the Great Depression. Prior to the Great Depression, the United States in Mexico had been working together to find ways to send Mexican nationals who were in the US illegally back to Mexico. During the Great Depression, those efforts increased. President Herbert Hoover ordered the Department of Labor to work out a deportation program. The Mexican government tried to identify its citizens who were in the United States and in many cases paid for their return to Mexico. Also, due to the Great Depression, Mexico was facing its own labor shortage, so part of the reason it paid to repatriot its citizens was to try to fill that labor shortage. Between nineteen and nine thirty five, about eighty five thousand Mexicans voluntarily returned to Mexico and another four hundred thousand word deported or repatriated, depending on how you want to look at it. Most of the ones who tried to return to the United States during the right Depression were turned away at the border, which at this point was a lot more secure than it had been earlier than the nineteen twenties. However, things shifted dramatically once again during World War Two. The draft applied to all men residing in the United States, whether they were citizens or not. Roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand Hispanic men saw some sort of active service in the war, and with so many men serving in the war, the job market changed dramatically in the United States. Many men who had held agricultural jobs went to serve in the war, and then other men and women moved out of agriculture and into higher paying manufacturing jobs that were either opened up as part of the war effort or because the people who had been doing those jobs joined the armed forces that were also disrupted trade with Europe, which cut off the United States sources of many goods and meant that basically America had to make them for ourselves. The overall effect of all this on the labor pool for agricultural work was, as you might suspect, enormous, and it led the US to work out a program specifically to recruit Mexican workers. And we're going to talk more about that after we pause and think one of the sponsors that keeps our show going to return to the Bricero program. This huge shift in the workforce during World War Two had immediate and detrimental effects on agriculture. Soon after the war began, the Southwest's cotton and vegetable growers were petitioning Congress to hire temporary workers to help them build a labor shortfall that basically meant they couldn't harvest what they needed to harvest. The key here was that this workforce would be temporary. In the words of a report from President Harry S. Truman's Commission on Migratory Labor later on in nine quote, the demand for migratory labor is thus essentially twofold to be ready to go to work when needed, to be gone when not needed. So the United States, leaning on Frank Lynda Roosevelt's good neighbor policy, started trying to work out a bilateral agreement with Mexico that would allow Mexican nationals to enter the United States to work and then return home when they were done. At first, Mexico was reluctant to do this for a number of reasons. Mexican citizens who had previously immigrated to do exactly these types of work had faced discrimination and exploitive treatment in the United States. Many had been forced out of their jobs and stranded during the Great Depression. So basically, Mexico remembered all of that and just didn't have a lot of confidence that its citizens would be treated fairly if they went back to the United States to work. So Mexico insisted that any agreement spell out protections for its citizens, one that would protect Mexican laborers while in the United States and would protect Mexico's own industries from suffering due to a lack of workers. Mexico did, however, see some potential benefits to allowing its citizens to work in the United States. It was hoped that anyone who entered the program would return home with money that would be injected into the Mexican economy. Running parallel with that was the idea that Mexico's workers would learn new techniques relating to agriculture and then bring those new techniques back to Mexico. The result of this negotiation between Mexico and the United States was the Brissero program, which was launched in nineteen forty two by executive order and then formalized by a bilateral agreement on April nine. It would later be amended by Public Law seventy eight and nineteen fifty one. The basic terms of the Brossero program would be that this would be non military work. It was not acceptable to recruit Mexican nationals to work in agriculture and then put them into the military service. Mexican nationals would be protected from discrimination. Employers would pay transportation and living expenses, as well as a fair wage. Workers would get medical and sanitary services at no cost to them. People enrolling in the Broscero program would sign a Spanish language contract and be paid a fair wage that would not be less than what was standard for Anglo workers in the area, and workers under the age of fourteen were not allowed. There were also protections if there was a shortage of work, guaranteeing a subsistence level pay. If someone contracted with a Mexican national but turned out not to have work for them to do, a percentage of the broscero's pay was also to be saved and returned to them once they returned to Mexico. The criteria for the workers themselves were that they had to be young, healthy men who had agricultural experience but did not own land of their own. They also needed to have a letter from local authorities saying that their labor wasn't needed where they actually lived, and that was to try to diminish the impact on Mexicans. Mexico's own labor force. Applicants would go to collection points in Mexico, be fingerprinted, be sprayed down with DDT, and then be taken to the United States. In spite of concerns that Mexican nationals would take jobs away from Americans. At first, this seemed like a mutually beneficial agreement. The United States would get the farm labor it needed and Mexico would get new, modernized farming techniques, an injection of cash into its economy and jobs for citizens who needed them. However, things took a turn for the worst pretty much immediately. Most of the work to be done was known as stoop labor. This was cultivation work that was done using a short handled hoe stooped over rose into the in the fields. This was grueling and like it could have been done with a long handled hoe instead of a short handled hoe that required you to literally stoop over, But for some reason people thought a long handled who was damaging to the crops. Today, the short handled hoe is regarded as an occupational hazard and in many states it is banned as unsafe. There were also way more interested Mexican nationals than there were jobs, and soon officials processing applications were accepting bribes to move people ahead of the line. Recruitment efforts became prone to corruption. People who didn't meet these qualifications for one reason or another also started using the constant traffic back and forth across the border to make the crossing themselves illegally, and as was the case before, there were still plenty of growers who were willing to hire these people for almost no money. Unscrupulous growers also figured out that a lot of the Mexican nationals who were actually part of the Broscero program didn't have a lot of proficiency in English and weren't aware of the pay and protections they were legally entitled to under the terms of this program. This definitely was not universal. In various parts of the United States, broscero's organized themselves and went on strike to protest low wages and poor treatment that we're specifically outlawed in the Briscero programs terms. Many growers flouted the rules of the program and hired people who had crossed illegally to get around having to worry about all of this. Mexico eventually refused to send workers to the entire state of Texas because of flagrant hiring of unauthorized workers as well as other abuses. So soon illegal border crossings were rampant and the employment of people who had entered illegally was widespread. Wages started to drop for basically everyone because there were so many low wage workers who had become part of the economy in the Southwest that minimum standard housing and medical care that was supposed to be part of this program also didn't materialize, and a lot of people who actually were part of it wound up tightly packed together in barracks on canvas cots, where respiratory diseases and other illnesses spread like wildfire. Over the twenty two year life of this program, four point five million Mexican nationals legally came to the United States to work, some of them returning to the US repeatedly under new contracts, but far more entered illegally outside the bounds of the program. There was actually a six thousand percent increase in illegal immigration between nineteen forty four and nineteen fifty four. Support for the program, which had never been universal, started to wane after World War Two was over and Americans who had survived the war started to return home and to try to reclaim their old jobs. The official wartime program ended on December thirty one of nineteen forty seven, although the program continued to be extended for peacetime purposes for quite a while after that, and eventually Mexico, fed up with what it saw as the United States refusal to enforce the terms of their bilateral agreement, stopped participating by just declining to send any more workers through official channels. According to the Texas State Historical Association's handbook, of Texas. The US retaliated against Mexico's non participation in nineteen fifty one by allowing thousands of people to enter the US illegally, arresting them and then, rather than deporting them, turning them over to the Texas Employment Commission to be put to work. By the nineteen sixties, the Broscero program was officially on the way out. Labor organizations had become a lot more influential in policy and had started advocating very vocally for jobs in the United States to be filled by Americans and not by Mexicans. At the same time, increasing mechanization in the agriculture industry meant that a lot of the physical labor that had required this huge labor pool was disappearing. The need for physical labor became a lot smaller. The Brassero program needed to be reauthorized periodically, and there were increasingly contentious debates whenever it came up for renewal. Its re authorizations in nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty three in particular, were extremely hotly debated. It There was a lot of pressure to end the program after a bus accident killed thirty two migrant workers in nineteen sixty three. The Burcero program eventually expired the following year in nineteen sixty four. With the abolition of the program. One of the things that proponents had often said about it turned out apparently to be true. A lot of people who were in favor of the program insisted that American workers did not want to do this work, which is why it needed to be open to Mexican nationals. After the abolition of the program, there were about five hundred and nineteen thousand unemployed people in California, which should have been plenty to cover the seventy thousand people who were needed to do stoop labor in the agricultural industry. But the nature, the nature of the work and the wages that were that were offered meant that a lot of these jobs went unfilled and tons of fruits and vegetables rotted in the fields. So there was a lot of argument that this should have been like a gradual phase out rather than just an abrupt abolition. As we said at the top of the show. Running parallel to all of this was a mass deportation program focused on Mexican nationals called the horrible name Operation Went Back and We're going to talk about that after we pause once again and take a break in here from one of our fantastic sponsors, to get back to Operation Went Back as an example of how the United States thinking on immigration shifted. In the nineteen thirties and forties, President Franklin D. Roosevelt combined two other government agencies to form the Immigration and Naturalization Service in three This agency was originally part of the Department of Labor. In ninety that changed, the I n S and the Border Patrol that fell under it moved from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. With that the I n S and the Border Patrol were no longer about work. They were about lawing for sman And as we said, Operation Went Back was a mass deportation effort that came along after the I and S moved to the Department of Justice. It's often portrayed as a swift, decisive effort to deport people who had entered the US illegally, but it was really part of a decades long effort that ran, as we said, parallel to most of the Burscero program. In the nineteen forties, for example, special Mexican deportation parties were established to try to apprehend and deport Mexican migrant workers in there was an attempt to reinforce targeted portions of the border with chain link fencing. In the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, some border patrol agents ran an unsanctioned quote little barber shop, basically clippers that they carried with them to cut the hair of repeat immigration offenders, sometimes in intentionally humiliating ways. In terms of the more above board efforts to control immigration, a lot of them really were across national The United States why it to keep illegal immigration from driving down wages and causing housing and social issues within its own borders, and Mexico wanted to have enough workers to meet its own labor needs and also protected citizens from exploitation and discrimination while they were in the United States. In nineteen fifty one, a report on Mexican migrant workers in the US pinned all sorts of social and economic ills on illegal immigration and characterized the situation as an invasion. Soon, the US was diverting more and more of the border patrol and i n s to the Mexican border, more than doubling the number of agents that were stationed there. In between nineteen forty three and nineteen fifty three, there were a lot more people apprehended in illegal border crossings. The number rose from eleven thousand, seven hundred and fifteen in nineteen forty three to eight hundred and eighty five thousand, five hundred eighty seven in nineteen fifty three, with Mexicans making up more and more of those apprehended. At the same time, though, the United States didn't actually increase the immigration and Naturalization services budgets, so even though there were more agents on the Mexican border, there were fewer agents overall, with the forces numbers dropping a third between nineteen two and nineteen fifty one. When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office as president in nineteen fifty three, it's estimated that three million Mexican nationals in the US had entered the country illegally, but previous efforts to deport them had increasingly stalled out because so many farms and ranches were dependent on this illicit labor pool. In the words of Walt Edwards, who served in the Border Patrol from nineteen fifty one to nineteen sixty four, quote, when we caught illegal aliens on farms and ranches. The farmer or rancher would often call and complain, and depending on how politically connected they were, there would be political intervention. Yeah that political intervention was basically getting their workers out of jail and turning away from the fact that they were not supposed to be in the United States. In nineteen fifty four, Eisenhower appointed General Joseph Swing, also known as Jumping Joe, as the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Swing started transferring immigration officials who had spent a long time in the Southwest to other parts of the country with the hope of breaking all those social and political ties to all the local farmers, ranchers, and political big wigs that was leading the Service to not actually enforce immigration. Then, on June nine, four, Swing announced the commencement of Operation Wetback. One arm of the operation was meant to physically apprehend and remove people who had illegally immigrated into the United States. The other was meant to publicize this effort to make sure people who weren't in the country legally knew about it and see the deportation force as a threat. A lot of this publicity deliberately exaggerated the size and aggressiveness of the deportation force in the hope of scaring people into leaving the country voluntarily. On June seventy four, immigration officials started the actual sweeps to apprehend and deport people who had illegally immigrated. About seven hundred and fifty immigration agents moved north through California and Arizona. They started in those two states because the entrenched resistance to deportation was lower there, so they're hoping to kind of get a good foothold before moving on to places where it was more contentious. They had a goal of apprehending a thousand people who had entered the country illegally every day. By the end of July, fifty thousand people had been arrested in California and Arizona, and an estimated four d eighty eight thousand had fled the United States on their own. And as Tracy had said, it started in California and Arizona, but from there it moved into Utah, Nevada, Texas, and Idaho, and immigration officials put the people that were apprehended in these sweeps onto trains and buses bound for Mexico, far enough south that they simply couldn't turn around and re enter the United States. Two ships were also you for this purpose, The Emancipation and the Mercurio, carried people from Port Isabel in Texas about five hundred miles to Vera Cruz in Mexico. At the time, the i n S claimed that it deported one point three million people during Operation Went Back, but those numbers have not really held up to historical scrutiny. It was definitely lower than that, and it might have been as low as three hundred thousand. These efforts actually disrupted some of the agriculture industry in the states that were targeted by deporting their workforces. Like we said, a lot of the agriculture industry in the Southwest and West had become highly dependent on this illegal labor. The government tried to reassure people that they could get new labor through the Buscero program, which was still in effect at this point. In addition to the immediate impact that it had on the agriculture industry, there were other problems with Project White Back as well. Aside from its name, which I'm going to say again is a racial slur. We would not normally say on this show. Everyone of Mexican descent was suspect, whether they had entered the country illegally or not, and a lot of the lawful residents, some of them American citizens, were deported in error. Families were broken up when some members were caught up in a sweep and others weren't. Children were left with anyone, without anyone to look after them when their parents were arrested and deported. Mexican American communities were disrupted when their populations were basically decimated, and then that would basically leave whoever was left without the basic life amenities that they needed, and the problems did not end north of the border. People who were dropped off in Mexico were often left in completely unfamiliar territory where they had no friends or family, without any food, without water, and with no money. Eighty eight people from just one roundup died of heat stroke after being left in remote territory without food or water. Conditions on the Emancipation and the Mercurio were also appalling, incredibly overcrowded and dismal. On one voyage, a riot broke out and the use of ships was eventually stopped after seven people drowned during one voyage Apart from all of that, that ten percent of their pay that was supposed to be withheld for legitimate participants of the Burscero program and then returned to them when they returned to Mexico. A lot of people never saw it. A settlement was in the works in two thousand and eight to restore this pay to the former workers and their descendants, but as of there were still marches and protests going on to have this money restored because it had never actually happened. So that is the basics of like this long kind of convoluted, intertwined effort to both recruit and deport Mexican nationals in the United States. Uh. I know for sure that there are folks in the world whose mindset is, well, they're illegally in here, it serves them, right. I personally think that if you are traveling hundreds of miles away from your family to do physically grueling, stoop labor for little money, like, imagine what your life is like to lead you to that decision, right, Like, what other option might you have? Have? Empathy? That's what I'm saying. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. M Stuff You miss in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Happy Saturday, everybody. In a couple of weeks, we're going to be doing an episode on the Delano grape strike, which took place shortly after the end of the Brissero program in the United States. We covered the Brissero program on the show back on August, and rather than trying to go back over all of that same context in the Delano Grape Strike episode, we thought we would go ahead and just put this classic back into people's feeds. This episode also talks about a mass deportation effort that overlapped the Briscero program, and that mass deportation effort was named after a racist slur. I wrote this episode back in If I were writing it today, I probably would have approached that differently. So we just wanted to note up front that there are multiple references to the program, including its full name, over the course of this episode. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tree C. D. Wilson, and I'm Holly fry So. Today, I think a lot of people think concerns about immigration are a recent phenomenon. I mean definitely in the United States, which is where we live and can talk about from experience. But I'm maybe in other nations too, but definitely in the US, right, people don't think of this is a thing that's been around for a long time. Yeah, I think there's an availing thought that uh, you know there colonists came and that was the big immigration thing, and then there was this big gap and now we're all arguing and worried about it again. Yeah, it's been like the last I don't know, thirty or forty years. So in a in a way, in a way, it definitely is a new concern for people because for about a hundred and fifty years to the nation was founded, there weren't really any immigration laws, right. If you could get here, you got to live here. That was basically how it worked until, um, you know, the nineteenth century. So back in the late seventeen hundreds, the country didn't really seem to care about about immigration. But to look at another way, it is not a new concern at all, because the United States started passing immigration laws and a lot of them were targeted at immigrants from specific countries in the eighteen sixties. So this is both a really new idea given the whole history of the United States as a nation, uh, and a really old one, given that it's been around for more than a hundred and fifty years. So that whole division between like legal and illegal immigration is simultaneously new and old. And today's story or today's story is part of that centuries long history. Because for parts of the twentieth century, the United States and Mexico had agreements in place that we're allowing and even encouraging Mexican nationals to enter the United States to do agricultural work and other labor, mostly in the American Southwest. And one specific program called the Brissero program was launched during World War Two to address a labor shortage um as American men were needed for the war effort. But an unintended side effect of this program that was about legally coming to the United States to work, was this huge increase in the number of people who were crossing the border from Mexico illegally. And these illegal entries reached a point that the government implemented another program which I'm gonna make it clear this is not an acceptable word to use today, but it is literally what the program was named. It was called Operation Wetback to deport Mexican nationals and huge groups. So the intertwined stories of these two government programs is what we are going to talk about today. And before nineteen ten, there was simply not a lot of regulation of the United State It's border with Mexico. People pretty much crossed back and forth as they pleased. And as agricultural industry started to really grow in the Southwest, these industries started to really rely on this readily available and seasonal workforce that was coming in from Mexico in the nineteen twenties. This also became true of other industries in the American West and Southwest as well, including railroads and mining. But today we're talking mostly about agriculture, so using Mexican nationals as a source of labor basically came with some benefits. Agricultural work in a lot of places is highly seasonal, and for the most part, migrant workers who were US citizens were traveling as families. They would spend the year moving from place to place as a family, for the most part, spending a lot more time looking for work than actually working. And when there was work, it was usually work that the whole family did, including the children, and an effort to try to make enough money to last them for the rest of the year, so that it's not an ideal situations been a lot of ways. Mexican workers, on the other hand, tended to be young men traveling in groups with other young men. A group of young men was overall a lot more efficient than a family with children, and on the more exploitive side of things, many were willing to accept lower wages than what was considered standard among Americans. Because of a limited proficiency with the English language, Mexican nationals were often unaware of laws or standards that could protect them in their work, and as a result, there were a lot of growers and farmers in the American West and Southwest who were willing to overlook the issue of whether a person had come into the United States legally or not in order to get cheap, easy to exploit labor. By the early nineteen twenties, though, an increasing number of people were starting to think of this basically open border in the way it affected the labor pool is a big problem. Large farms were driving down their own costs by employing large numbers of Mexican migrant workers at a really low rate of pay, and small farms considered themselves to be at a big financial disadvantage. As a result, labor organizations started tacitly excluding Mexican workers when they formed unions, and also started using their political clout to lobby the government for more enforcement along the border and to put a stop to immigration from Mexico. In nineteen twenty four, the United States formally established the Border Patrol as part of the Labor Appropriation Act. As the US government started taking steps to secure the Mexican border and curtail illegal immigration in the nineteen twenties, local communities and states began taking steps to regulate their own Mexican population as well, as we've discussed in our podcasts on Mendoes Versus Westminster and Macario Garcia. Much of the Southwest and West approached its Hispanic and Latino population in much the same way most of the rest of the nation did. Its lack population through segregation, which was reinforced either through laws or through social customs. In places with large Mexican and Mexican American populations, discrimination was widespread and socially accepted by much of the Anglo community during the Great Depression, which lasted roughly a decade beginning in nine nine, and the Dust Bowl, which was a devastating period of drought and dust storms that struck much of the Southwest and Great Plains. During the same time, life was pretty hard for pretty much everybody in the region, but it was especially hard for people of Mexican descent. The Anglo community was increasingly hostile towards Mexican migrants, viewing them as unnecessary competition for incredibly scarce jobs. The industries that had been relying so heavily on Mexican labor for so long increasingly tried to exclude Mexicans from their workforce during the Great Depression. Prior to the Great Depression, the United States in Mexico had been working together to find ways to send Mexican nationals who were in the US illegally back to Mexico. During the Great Depression, those efforts increased. President Herbert Hoover ordered the Department of Labor to work out a deportation program. The Mexican government tried to identify its citizens who were in the United States and in many cases paid for their return to Mexico. Also, due to the Great Depression, Mexico was facing its own labor shortage, so part of the reason it paid to repatriot its citizens was to try to fill that labor shortage. Between nineteen and nine thirty five, about eighty five thousand Mexicans voluntarily returned to Mexico and another four hundred thousand word deported or repatriated, depending on how you want to look at it. Most of the ones who tried to return to the United States during the right Depression were turned away at the border, which at this point was a lot more secure than it had been earlier than the nineteen twenties. However, things shifted dramatically once again during World War Two. The draft applied to all men residing in the United States, whether they were citizens or not. Roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand Hispanic men saw some sort of active service in the war, and with so many men serving in the war, the job market changed dramatically in the United States. Many men who had held agricultural jobs went to serve in the war, and then other men and women moved out of agriculture and into higher paying manufacturing jobs that were either opened up as part of the war effort or because the people who had been doing those jobs joined the armed forces that were also disrupted trade with Europe, which cut off the United States sources of many goods and meant that basically America had to make them for ourselves. The overall effect of all this on the labor pool for agricultural work was, as you might suspect, enormous, and it led the US to work out a program specifically to recruit Mexican workers. And we're going to talk more about that after we pause and think one of the sponsors that keeps our show going to return to the Bricero program. This huge shift in the workforce during World War Two had immediate and detrimental effects on agriculture. Soon after the war began, the Southwest's cotton and vegetable growers were petitioning Congress to hire temporary workers to help them build a labor shortfall that basically meant they couldn't harvest what they needed to harvest. The key here was that this workforce would be temporary. In the words of a report from President Harry S. Truman's Commission on Migratory Labor later on in nine quote, the demand for migratory labor is thus essentially twofold to be ready to go to work when needed, to be gone when not needed. So the United States, leaning on Frank Lynda Roosevelt's good neighbor policy, started trying to work out a bilateral agreement with Mexico that would allow Mexican nationals to enter the United States to work and then return home when they were done. At first, Mexico was reluctant to do this for a number of reasons. Mexican citizens who had previously immigrated to do exactly these types of work had faced discrimination and exploitive treatment in the United States. Many had been forced out of their jobs and stranded during the Great Depression. So basically, Mexico remembered all of that and just didn't have a lot of confidence that its citizens would be treated fairly if they went back to the United States to work. So Mexico insisted that any agreement spell out protections for its citizens, one that would protect Mexican laborers while in the United States and would protect Mexico's own industries from suffering due to a lack of workers. Mexico did, however, see some potential benefits to allowing its citizens to work in the United States. It was hoped that anyone who entered the program would return home with money that would be injected into the Mexican economy. Running parallel with that was the idea that Mexico's workers would learn new techniques relating to agriculture and then bring those new techniques back to Mexico. The result of this negotiation between Mexico and the United States was the Brissero program, which was launched in nineteen forty two by executive order and then formalized by a bilateral agreement on April nine. It would later be amended by Public Law seventy eight and nineteen fifty one. The basic terms of the Brossero program would be that this would be non military work. It was not acceptable to recruit Mexican nationals to work in agriculture and then put them into the military service. Mexican nationals would be protected from discrimination. Employers would pay transportation and living expenses, as well as a fair wage. Workers would get medical and sanitary services at no cost to them. People enrolling in the Broscero program would sign a Spanish language contract and be paid a fair wage that would not be less than what was standard for Anglo workers in the area, and workers under the age of fourteen were not allowed. There were also protections if there was a shortage of work, guaranteeing a subsistence level pay. If someone contracted with a Mexican national but turned out not to have work for them to do, a percentage of the broscero's pay was also to be saved and returned to them once they returned to Mexico. The criteria for the workers themselves were that they had to be young, healthy men who had agricultural experience but did not own land of their own. They also needed to have a letter from local authorities saying that their labor wasn't needed where they actually lived, and that was to try to diminish the impact on Mexicans. Mexico's own labor force. Applicants would go to collection points in Mexico, be fingerprinted, be sprayed down with DDT, and then be taken to the United States. In spite of concerns that Mexican nationals would take jobs away from Americans. At first, this seemed like a mutually beneficial agreement. The United States would get the farm labor it needed and Mexico would get new, modernized farming techniques, an injection of cash into its economy and jobs for citizens who needed them. However, things took a turn for the worst pretty much immediately. Most of the work to be done was known as stoop labor. This was cultivation work that was done using a short handled hoe stooped over rose into the in the fields. This was grueling and like it could have been done with a long handled hoe instead of a short handled hoe that required you to literally stoop over, But for some reason people thought a long handled who was damaging to the crops. Today, the short handled hoe is regarded as an occupational hazard and in many states it is banned as unsafe. There were also way more interested Mexican nationals than there were jobs, and soon officials processing applications were accepting bribes to move people ahead of the line. Recruitment efforts became prone to corruption. People who didn't meet these qualifications for one reason or another also started using the constant traffic back and forth across the border to make the crossing themselves illegally, and as was the case before, there were still plenty of growers who were willing to hire these people for almost no money. Unscrupulous growers also figured out that a lot of the Mexican nationals who were actually part of the Broscero program didn't have a lot of proficiency in English and weren't aware of the pay and protections they were legally entitled to under the terms of this program. This definitely was not universal. In various parts of the United States, broscero's organized themselves and went on strike to protest low wages and poor treatment that we're specifically outlawed in the Briscero programs terms. Many growers flouted the rules of the program and hired people who had crossed illegally to get around having to worry about all of this. Mexico eventually refused to send workers to the entire state of Texas because of flagrant hiring of unauthorized workers as well as other abuses. So soon illegal border crossings were rampant and the employment of people who had entered illegally was widespread. Wages started to drop for basically everyone because there were so many low wage workers who had become part of the economy in the Southwest that minimum standard housing and medical care that was supposed to be part of this program also didn't materialize, and a lot of people who actually were part of it wound up tightly packed together in barracks on canvas cots, where respiratory diseases and other illnesses spread like wildfire. Over the twenty two year life of this program, four point five million Mexican nationals legally came to the United States to work, some of them returning to the US repeatedly under new contracts, but far more entered illegally outside the bounds of the program. There was actually a six thousand percent increase in illegal immigration between nineteen forty four and nineteen fifty four. Support for the program, which had never been universal, started to wane after World War Two was over and Americans who had survived the war started to return home and to try to reclaim their old jobs. The official wartime program ended on December thirty one of nineteen forty seven, although the program continued to be extended for peacetime purposes for quite a while after that, and eventually Mexico, fed up with what it saw as the United States refusal to enforce the terms of their bilateral agreement, stopped participating by just declining to send any more workers through official channels. According to the Texas State Historical Association's handbook, of Texas. The US retaliated against Mexico's non participation in nineteen fifty one by allowing thousands of people to enter the US illegally, arresting them and then, rather than deporting them, turning them over to the Texas Employment Commission to be put to work. By the nineteen sixties, the Broscero program was officially on the way out. Labor organizations had become a lot more influential in policy and had started advocating very vocally for jobs in the United States to be filled by Americans and not by Mexicans. At the same time, increasing mechanization in the agriculture industry meant that a lot of the physical labor that had required this huge labor pool was disappearing. The need for physical labor became a lot smaller. The Brassero program needed to be reauthorized periodically, and there were increasingly contentious debates whenever it came up for renewal. Its re authorizations in nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty three in particular, were extremely hotly debated. It There was a lot of pressure to end the program after a bus accident killed thirty two migrant workers in nineteen sixty three. The Burcero program eventually expired the following year in nineteen sixty four. With the abolition of the program. One of the things that proponents had often said about it turned out apparently to be true. A lot of people who were in favor of the program insisted that American workers did not want to do this work, which is why it needed to be open to Mexican nationals. After the abolition of the program, there were about five hundred and nineteen thousand unemployed people in California, which should have been plenty to cover the seventy thousand people who were needed to do stoop labor in the agricultural industry. But the nature, the nature of the work and the wages that were that were offered meant that a lot of these jobs went unfilled and tons of fruits and vegetables rotted in the fields. So there was a lot of argument that this should have been like a gradual phase out rather than just an abrupt abolition. As we said at the top of the show. Running parallel to all of this was a mass deportation program focused on Mexican nationals called the horrible name Operation Went Back and We're going to talk about that after we pause once again and take a break in here from one of our fantastic sponsors, to get back to Operation Went Back as an example of how the United States thinking on immigration shifted. In the nineteen thirties and forties, President Franklin D. Roosevelt combined two other government agencies to form the Immigration and Naturalization Service in three This agency was originally part of the Department of Labor. In ninety that changed, the I n S and the Border Patrol that fell under it moved from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. With that the I n S and the Border Patrol were no longer about work. They were about lawing for sman And as we said, Operation Went Back was a mass deportation effort that came along after the I and S moved to the Department of Justice. It's often portrayed as a swift, decisive effort to deport people who had entered the US illegally, but it was really part of a decades long effort that ran, as we said, parallel to most of the Burscero program. In the nineteen forties, for example, special Mexican deportation parties were established to try to apprehend and deport Mexican migrant workers in there was an attempt to reinforce targeted portions of the border with chain link fencing. In the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, some border patrol agents ran an unsanctioned quote little barber shop, basically clippers that they carried with them to cut the hair of repeat immigration offenders, sometimes in intentionally humiliating ways. In terms of the more above board efforts to control immigration, a lot of them really were across national The United States why it to keep illegal immigration from driving down wages and causing housing and social issues within its own borders, and Mexico wanted to have enough workers to meet its own labor needs and also protected citizens from exploitation and discrimination while they were in the United States. In nineteen fifty one, a report on Mexican migrant workers in the US pinned all sorts of social and economic ills on illegal immigration and characterized the situation as an invasion. Soon, the US was diverting more and more of the border patrol and i n s to the Mexican border, more than doubling the number of agents that were stationed there. In between nineteen forty three and nineteen fifty three, there were a lot more people apprehended in illegal border crossings. The number rose from eleven thousand, seven hundred and fifteen in nineteen forty three to eight hundred and eighty five thousand, five hundred eighty seven in nineteen fifty three, with Mexicans making up more and more of those apprehended. At the same time, though, the United States didn't actually increase the immigration and Naturalization services budgets, so even though there were more agents on the Mexican border, there were fewer agents overall, with the forces numbers dropping a third between nineteen two and nineteen fifty one. When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office as president in nineteen fifty three, it's estimated that three million Mexican nationals in the US had entered the country illegally, but previous efforts to deport them had increasingly stalled out because so many farms and ranches were dependent on this illicit labor pool. In the words of Walt Edwards, who served in the Border Patrol from nineteen fifty one to nineteen sixty four, quote, when we caught illegal aliens on farms and ranches. The farmer or rancher would often call and complain, and depending on how politically connected they were, there would be political intervention. Yeah that political intervention was basically getting their workers out of jail and turning away from the fact that they were not supposed to be in the United States. In nineteen fifty four, Eisenhower appointed General Joseph Swing, also known as Jumping Joe, as the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Swing started transferring immigration officials who had spent a long time in the Southwest to other parts of the country with the hope of breaking all those social and political ties to all the local farmers, ranchers, and political big wigs that was leading the Service to not actually enforce immigration. Then, on June nine, four, Swing announced the commencement of Operation Wetback. One arm of the operation was meant to physically apprehend and remove people who had illegally immigrated into the United States. The other was meant to publicize this effort to make sure people who weren't in the country legally knew about it and see the deportation force as a threat. A lot of this publicity deliberately exaggerated the size and aggressiveness of the deportation force in the hope of scaring people into leaving the country voluntarily. On June seventy four, immigration officials started the actual sweeps to apprehend and deport people who had illegally immigrated. About seven hundred and fifty immigration agents moved north through California and Arizona. They started in those two states because the entrenched resistance to deportation was lower there, so they're hoping to kind of get a good foothold before moving on to places where it was more contentious. They had a goal of apprehending a thousand people who had entered the country illegally every day. By the end of July, fifty thousand people had been arrested in California and Arizona, and an estimated four d eighty eight thousand had fled the United States on their own. And as Tracy had said, it started in California and Arizona, but from there it moved into Utah, Nevada, Texas, and Idaho, and immigration officials put the people that were apprehended in these sweeps onto trains and buses bound for Mexico, far enough south that they simply couldn't turn around and re enter the United States. Two ships were also you for this purpose, The Emancipation and the Mercurio, carried people from Port Isabel in Texas about five hundred miles to Vera Cruz in Mexico. At the time, the i n S claimed that it deported one point three million people during Operation Went Back, but those numbers have not really held up to historical scrutiny. It was definitely lower than that, and it might have been as low as three hundred thousand. These efforts actually disrupted some of the agriculture industry in the states that were targeted by deporting their workforces. Like we said, a lot of the agriculture industry in the Southwest and West had become highly dependent on this illegal labor. The government tried to reassure people that they could get new labor through the Buscero program, which was still in effect at this point. In addition to the immediate impact that it had on the agriculture industry, there were other problems with Project White Back as well. Aside from its name, which I'm going to say again is a racial slur. We would not normally say on this show. Everyone of Mexican descent was suspect, whether they had entered the country illegally or not, and a lot of the lawful residents, some of them American citizens, were deported in error. Families were broken up when some members were caught up in a sweep and others weren't. Children were left with anyone, without anyone to look after them when their parents were arrested and deported. Mexican American communities were disrupted when their populations were basically decimated, and then that would basically leave whoever was left without the basic life amenities that they needed, and the problems did not end north of the border. People who were dropped off in Mexico were often left in completely unfamiliar territory where they had no friends or family, without any food, without water, and with no money. Eighty eight people from just one roundup died of heat stroke after being left in remote territory without food or water. Conditions on the Emancipation and the Mercurio were also appalling, incredibly overcrowded and dismal. On one voyage, a riot broke out and the use of ships was eventually stopped after seven people drowned during one voyage Apart from all of that, that ten percent of their pay that was supposed to be withheld for legitimate participants of the Burscero program and then returned to them when they returned to Mexico. A lot of people never saw it. A settlement was in the works in two thousand and eight to restore this pay to the former workers and their descendants, but as of there were still marches and protests going on to have this money restored because it had never actually happened. So that is the basics of like this long kind of convoluted, intertwined effort to both recruit and deport Mexican nationals in the United States. Uh. I know for sure that there are folks in the world whose mindset is, well, they're illegally in here, it serves them, right. I personally think that if you are traveling hundreds of miles away from your family to do physically grueling, stoop labor for little money, like, imagine what your life is like to lead you to that decision, right, Like, what other option might you have? Have? Empathy? That's what I'm saying. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. M Stuff You miss in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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