https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/12/title-42-was-never-going-to-fix-illegal-immigration/
Title 42 Was Never Going To Fix Illegal Immigration
BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON a senior editor at The Federalist
Whatever your view of immigration, there can be no doubt that the Biden administration’s border policies have been an miserable failure.
This is especially true of Title 42, the pandemic-era public health order that for the last three years, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, allowed border officials to expel illegal immigrants quickly back to Mexico.
Title 42 came to an end last Thursday, May 11th when the Covid public health emergency officially ended, and its ending has coincided with what can only be described as absolute chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border this past week.
Border Patrol agents are now arresting more than 10,000 illegal immigrants every day. If you have no context for that figure, consider that in March 2019, at the onset of the last border crisis, Border Patrol was arresting 4,000 illegal immigrants a day.
At the time, President Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said, “I know that 1,000 [apprehensions] overwhelms the system and I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like.”
What 10,000 a day looks like is a humanitarian catastrophe. Put bluntly, Border Patrol has nowhere to put these people.
If it keeps up for much longer, we’ll see a string of what amount to massive migrant camps appear across south Texas — think of the encampment of 15,000 Haitians under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021, multiplied many times over all up and down the border.
What 10,000 a day means is that our southwest border is collapsing. The Texas cities of Laredo, El Paso, and Brownsville have issued emergency declarations, as has New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who still refuses to order state law enforcement and military units to arrest and deport illegal immigrants caught crossing the Rio Grande, has deployed a new National Guard unit, the Texas Tactical Border Force, to try to “deter” illegal crossings.
It’s unclear what this will entail, but video circulating on Twitter this week taken by Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies showed Texas DPS troopers blocking a group of migrants along the north bank of the Rio Grande.
That’s a step in the right direction, but as a long-term strategy, rolling out razor wire along stretches of the Rio Grande isn’t going to cut it.
Neither is the Biden administration’s plan to send hundreds more U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) personnel to the border as part of a just-finalized new policy to process migrants within days of their arrival and deport them if they fail an initial screening. The USCIS agents will be joined in this effort by some 1,500 military troops — not to enforce the border but to do data entry, mostly.
But the new Biden policy amounts to little more than a slap-dash propaganda campaign to make it look like the administration is doing something about the crisis.
It might result in fewer illegal immigrants ultimately being granted asylum, but it does nothing to reduce the use of catch-and-release as America’s de facto border policy, because it allows anyone who is denied a credible fear claim to appeal to an immigration judge — a process that takes years to complete thanks to the growing backlog of asylum cases in the system.
And since Biden’s new rule does nothing to speed up the adjudication process, it just means this backlog will grow faster than it was before, providing an even greater incentive for illegal immigrants to cross the border and file bogus asylum claims, knowing they will be released with work authorizations as their cases wind their way through the system.
On some level, even Biden knows this, which is perhaps why he said this week that the border was going to be “chaotic for a while.”
Well folks, how about a little history to explain how we got into this mess and steps we have taken to fix it in the past.
On August 4, 1942, the United States and Mexico signed the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, creating what is known as the “Bracero Program.” The program, which lasted until 1964, was the largest guest-worker program in U.S. history.
Throughout its existence, the Bracero Program benefited both farmers and laborers but also gave rise to numerous labor disputes, abuses of workers and other problems that have long characterized the history of farm labor in the Southwestern United States.
The program was born from necessity, as the federal government worried that American entry into World War II would sap the Southwest of much of its farm labor.
Manual laborers (braceros in Spanish) from Mexico became an important part of the region’s economy, and the program outlasted the war.
The program guaranteed workers a number of basic protections, including a minimum wage, insurance and safe, free housing; however, farm owners frequently failed to live up to these requirements.
Housing and food routinely proved to be well below standards, and wages were not only low but also frequently paid late or not at all.
Years after the program ended, many braceros were still fighting to receive the money that had been deducted from their salaries and allegedly put into savings accounts. Due to these broken promises, strikes were a common occurrence throughout this period.
Over 4.6 million contracts were issued over the 22 years of the Bracero Program.
Though Congress let the program expire in 1964, it set the stage for decades of labor disputes and a dynamic of migrant labor that still exists today.
The 60s and 70s saw the rise of the United Farm Workers, a union composed largely of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, which continued fighting many of the same inequalities that faced the braceros. To this day, migrant labor from Mexico continues to be a vital part of the Southwestern economy as well as a source of political and racial tension.
Having created a monster with the Bracero Program, the federal government created a new program to “fix” their previous mess.
This program was known as “Operation Wetback”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wetback
Wetback
—used as an insulting and contemptuous term for a Mexican who enters the U.S. illegally
Origin: from the practice of wading or swimming the Rio Grande where it forms the U.S.-Mexico border
https://www.history.com/news/operation-wetback-eisenhower-1954-deportation
BY: ERIN BLAKEMORE
…..As many as 1.3 million people may have been swept up in the Eisenhower-era campaign with a racist name, which was designed to root out undocumented Mexicans from American society.
The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants—some of them American citizens—from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico.
With the help of the Mexican government, which sought the return of Mexican nationals to alleviate a labor shortage, Border Patrol agents and local officials used military techniques and engaged in a coordinated, tactical operation to remove the immigrants.
Along the way, they used widespread racial stereotypes to justify their sometimes brutal treatment of immigrants.
Inside the United States, anti-Mexican sentiment was pervasive, and harsh portrayals of Mexican immigrants as dirty, disease-bearing and irresponsible were the norm.
During Operation Wetback, tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives.
In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.
It’s not clear how many American citizens were swept up in Operation Wetback, but the United States later claimed that 1.3 million people total were deported.
However, some historians dispute that claim. Though hundreds of thousands of people were ensnared, says historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the number of deportees was drastically lower than the United States reported—likely closer to 300,000. Due to immigrants who were caught, deported, and captured again after re-emigrating, it’s impossible to estimate the total number of people deported under the program.
Mass deportations of Mexican immigrants from the U.S. date to the Great Depression, when the federal government began a wave of deportations rather than include Mexican-born workers in New Deal welfare programs.
According to historian Francisco Balderrama, the U.S. deported over 1 million Mexican nationals, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, during the 1930s.
Balderrama stated that the program was referred to as “repatriation” to give it the sense of being voluntary. In reality, though, it was anything but.
Despite a widespread belief among native-born Americans that Mexicans came to the United States to steal jobs from American workers, many were invited to the country to work in its fields.
In 1942, as I stated earlier, the U.S. Mexican Farm Labor Program, also known as Operation Bracero after the Spanish term for “manual laborer,” began.
The program funneled Mexicans into the United States on a legal, temporary basis in exchange for guaranteed wages and humane treatment—an attempt by the Mexican government to stave off the discrimination faced by earlier immigrants.
However, not all employers wanted to follow the guidelines or pay the thirty-cent-an-hour guaranteed wage (about $4.51 in modern dollars). Nor did the Mexican government want Mexicans to work in Texas, which continued its discrimination against Mexican people, and the state was excluded from the program between 1942 and 1947.
That’s where “wetbacks” came in. The racial epithet was used to describe Mexicans who illegally entered Texas by crossing the Rio Grande River. The government turned a blind eye to Texans’ employment of these undocumented immigrants, even after hiring undocumented workers was declared illegal.
An estimated 4.6 million Mexicans entered the country legally through the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964, and states like California soon became dependent on bracero workers. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers crossed the border without permission and found jobs on the farms of employers willing to flout the law.
In 1953, the government decided it had had enough. By refusing to participate in the Bracero Program, South Texas farmers essentially received their labor for less money than farmers who complied.
And Border Patrol head Harlon B. Carter—a convicted murderer who killed a Latino as a teenager in 1931 and who later headed the National Rifle Association (NRA)—was frustrated by the sheer numbers of Mexican immigrants, both legal and undocumented, in the United States. He convinced President Eisenhower to ramp up immigration enforcement efforts.
In 1953, Carter tried to get the National Guard involved in a forerunner of Operation Wetback,, but since the U.S. military is not supposed to be used to enforce domestic laws, he couldn’t gain authorization to do so. Instead, in 1954, the government introduced Operation Wetback, which used Border Patrol resources instead.
Operation Wetback may not have had troops, but it used military tactics and propaganda to achieve its goals. It was headed in part by General Joseph Swing, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and was planned like a war strike.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Carter promised sweeps of factories, farms and other workplaces, ending with the detention of undocumented workers in holding facilities to await deportation. It would be “the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history,” Carter told the paper.
News of the raids terrified Latinos in the United States, many of whom remembered the wave of forced deportations in the 1930s.
Historians have documented the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that the United States participated in during Operation Wetback—deals that were not publicized at the time.
Immigration officials threatened South Texas employers, some of whom had resorted to hiring armed guards to fend off Border Patrol officers, with stepped-up raids and offered them watered-down versions of the Bracero Program that let them get papers for their workers without committing to all of the program’s strenuous requirements.
As a result, the number of immigrants in the Bracero Program grew as undocumented workers were deported.
Operation Wetback was lawless; it was arbitrary; it was based on a lot of xenophobia, and it resulted in sizable large-scale violations of people’s rights, including the forced deportation of U.S. citizens.
Within a few months, Operation Wetback’s funding ran out and the program ended. The Bracero Program continued until 1964, when Congress terminated it against farmers’ complaints in an attempt to preserve jobs for American citizens.
By then, the program had created an ongoing thirst for cheap farm labor and cheap food—and a corresponding thirst for Mexican nationals to seek out their fortunes in the United States. Ironically, the program bred even more illegal immigration.
So, there you have it folks.
I know it is hard to believe, but the mess we are in today is a direct result of two federal programs in our past.
The Bracero Program to recruit Mexican workers, and the Wetback Program to send them back.
This begs the question. Based on our government’s past track record in dealing with immigration on our southern border, do you really think that they can come up with a solution to fix the chaos we are witnessing today?