 |
|
|
 Editorials | June 2007 
History of Migration Shows Pattern Of Mutual Opportunism
 Ashley Pettus - Harvard Magazine
| | In the vast migration that is changing the US, a Honduran boy rides a freight through Mexico. Each year thousands of undocumented Central Americans stow away for 1,500 miles on the tops and sides of trains. Some are parents desperate to escape poverty. Many are children in search of a parent who left them behind long ago. Only the brave and the lucky reach their goal. (LATimes) |
The recent political sparring over immigration reform has included scant mention of cross-border diplomacy. Despite the growing interdependence of the U.S. and Mexican economies over the past few decades, the governments of the two nations have shown little interest in cooperating on the thorny issue of human migration. A brief look at the history of the Mexican-U.S. labor relationship reveals a pattern of mutual economic opportunism, with only rare moments of political negotiation.
The first significant wave of Mexican workers coming into the United States began in the early years of the 20th century, following the curtailment of Japanese immigration in 1907 and the consequent drying up of cheap Asian labor. The need for Mexican labor increased sharply when the Unites States entered World War I. The Mexican government agreed to export Mexican workers as contract laborers to enable American workers to fight overseas. After the war, an intensifying nativist climate led to restrictive quotas on immigration from Europe and to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol, aimed at cutting back the flow of Mexicans. But economic demand for unskilled migrant workers continued throughout the Roaring Twenties, encouraging Mexican immigrants to cross the border - legally or not.
The Depression brought a temporary halt to the flow of Mexican labor. During the early 1930s, Mexican workers - including many legal residents - were rounded up and deported en masse by federal authorities in cooperation with state and local officials. Mexicans became the convenient scapegoats for widespread joblessness and budget shortages; as Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand and Nolan J. Malone point out in "Beyond Smoke and Mirrors" (2002), Mexicans were accused, paradoxically, of both "taking away jobs from Americans" and "living off public relief."
The demand for Mexican immigrants reemerged after Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. government sought an agreement with Mexico to import large numbers of Mexican farm laborers. Known as braceros, these workers would ensure the continued production of the U.S. food supply during the war years. "It was Mexicans and Rosie the Riveter who ran the American economy and enabled American citizens to go to war," explains Harvard vice provost for international affairs Jorge Domínguez, the Madero professor of Mexican and Latin American politics and economics.
Although intended as a wartime arrangement, the bracero program continued under pressure from U.S. growers, who feared a continued labor shortage in the booming postwar economy. Still, the numbers of legal braceros fell short of demand, and growers began regularly recruiting undocumented workers to tend their fields. By the end of the Korean War, illegal immigration had become a fixture of the U.S. agricultural economy - and public sentiment had again turned restrictionist. In 1954, the U.S. government responded with "Operation Wetback," apprehending close to 1 million illegal workers. Meanwhile, to appease the growers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service reprocessed many of these undocumented Mexicans and returned them to the fields as legal braceros.
In the early 1960s, with the advent of the civil-rights movement, public opinion began to view the bracero system as exploitative and detrimental to the socio-economic condition of Mexican Americans. The government ended the program in 1964. But growers were still hooked. "The problem of Mexican illegal immigration is born at the moment that the bracero program ends," Domínguez explains. "(Mexicans) keep coming, because the demand is still there."
Following the Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which removed the racially based quotas on immigration set up in the 1920s, Mexicans for the first time had to compete for visas with immigrants from other areas of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rapid population growth and declining economic conditions in Mexico coincided with a reduction in the legal cap on Mexican immigration beginning in 1968, causing the numbers of undocumented workers to soar. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us