Operation Wetback and The Candidate

Last night, early on in the debate, a remarkable moment of clarity offered an opportunity to view Trump’s position on “Illegals” exactly as it is. Sadly, few people have picked up on it. Donna Brazile mentioned it in post-debate coverage on CNN. I would not have known about it but for my friend, Peter Hernandez, posting a Washington Post article, which the put it up on their website again today. Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone released a short blog post today as well. Other news stories, including one from AP have been poppoing up through the day.

On their face the candidate's comments were ugly enough. He mentioned a program started by President Dwight Eisenhower. “Everyone likes Ike, right?” Good guy.

In 1954, Eisenhower's Attorney General initiated a plan to ship “illegals”-- the candidate's derogatory term for human beings from across our southern border-- back to Mexico.  Last night the candidate told us how Eisenhower sent them back across the border, and when that didn’t work they sent them further south, and then when that didn’t work, they sent them even further south. Ha, ha. Showed them, didn’t we. That's how we'll make America great again.

The hyper thin-skinned, arrogant, outrageous billionaire playing to the rabble’s fear and anxiety, how nice.

Historians dispute the numbers. The INS claimed to have deported 1.3 million workers, but disputes arise because it is widely believed that those numbers may have been purposely exaggerated at the time to discourage other Mexicans seeking work in the US.

The program’s name was named “Operation Wetback”. If any other candidate or any of the debate moderators had known the history, and asked the candidate on national TV to tell us all the name of the program no one would be talking about anything else today and his candidacy would be mortally wounded.  

The US did send hundreds of thousands of Mexicans back alright, and as well, an unknown number of American citizens of Latino heritage who were swept up in the raids across several Border States. These roundups reached as far as Missouri, Oregon, and Washington State. When you’ve got to move hundreds of thousands of people quickly, and you set aside the Constitution and Due Process rights, shit happens. Some deportees were left in the desert with limited provisions. 88 died of heatstroke in one incident. More would have been lost if not for the intervention of the Red Cross. Initially INS used trains and trucks to transport workers back to Mexico. Later in the campaign when the goal became moving people deeper south, and cargo boats were employed, eight more drowned after jumping from a ship. Without the brutal mayhem, and the racist provenance, this is all pretty much as the candidate described it last night. Today he announced his plan to "have a deportation force" and "do it humanely". Nothing rings quite as close to the true north of humanely like "Deportation Force". 

As the program escalated it became clear that American growers did not want to see a reduction in their access to cheap, pliable,  labor and so they continued to encourage the migration. Then, human need being what it is, Mexican field workers continued to return in large numbers. The Eisenhower administration then decided that ships offered the best chance to return these workers far enough south so they wouldn’t come back. Conditions on the vessels on the crossing across the gulf of Mexico were likened to that of slave boats with hundreds of young men held in the cargo hold, with unsanitary conditions, lack of food and water and all the rest of it.

We would do well to remember the candidate has told us how his program will return 11 million in a “humane” way. So it’s perhaps ironic, or alternatively, a moment of blazing truth, that he would reference “Operation Wetback” which clearly had a racist motive, a brazenly racist title, and moved workers like cargo with no concern for life or liberty.

“Operation Wetback” grew in response to another program, called Braceros, which was actually a series of legal and diplomatic agreements between the US and Mexican governments. FDR signed the agreements in 1942 in response to a severe shortage of agricultural workers brought on by the war. Ironically, the agreements were actually part of an effort by the Mexican government to maintain some control of their own workers so that there were adequate numbers of them available for the Mexican agricultural industry. Rather than a full on opening of the gates, it was thought at the time that a managed flow was better for both countries. Hundreds of thousands of workers moved back and forth across the border according to the growing seasons. Beyond the planned scope of the program American growers, hungry for cheap labor, exploded the scope of migration planned in Braceros, encouraging and facilitating what became a massive movement of undocumented workers from Mexico to the US.

Early on voices were raised among the worker community. Complaints that the American farmers were providing poor diet, substandard wages, and sometimes no wages at all were rife. A series of strikes were held, most of which led to little improvement in the lives of the workers. According to the Texas State Historical Society, “Mexico excluded Texas from the labor-exchange program on the grounds of widespread violation of contracts, discrimination against migrant workers, and such violations of their civil rights as perfunctory arrests for petty causes. Oblivious to the Mexican charges, some grower organizations in Texas continued to hire undocumented Mexican workers and violate such mandates…” The 1956 George Stevens movie, Giant, which featured James Dean, gave America a small glimpse of what Texas might have looked like in that period.

As today, there was labor on one side of the border and the need for work on the other. While the workers were made out as villains, and smeared with the term "wetback", a slur I heard often as a kid in Illinois, American growers owned primary responsibility for creating and exploiting the system in their pursuit of cheap labor. Just a few years later, in 1962, Caesar Chavez, an American born farm laborer, started the American Farm Workers (AFW) Union as a direct response to the exploitation of both American and Braceros workers in the fields.

The candidate’s main campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again”.  Inherent in so much of the conservative nostalgia is a gauzy image of a simpler America. Never mentioned in these kinescope reels is any honest recollection of the ways that America dealt with issues of race and class.  It is our unwillingness as a nation to honestly address this past which presents the greatest danger for our political future. The preamble to the Constitution contains the following:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

So said the slave owners and freedom fighters who are responsible for the birth of our nation. While they skirted truths, and allowed slavery to be enshrined in our founding documents, there was still an acknowledgment of the goals, and the state of things: “a more perfect union”. Not a perfect union, a “more perfect union”. Something closer to the truth. If only…