For weeks, President Donald Trump made a big deal about the Great Raid his administration was planning that would deport up to one million undocumented immigrants. Everyone in the media had a field day discussing the moral and economic implications of this new offensive. Then, the day of the big event, Sunday, July 14, arrived and it was a big dud! If Donald Trump would take the time to read some Mexican American history instead of tweeting nonsense, he might realize that his strategy has been tried before and made little difference.
When the U.S. went through an economic downturn in the Roaring Twenties, the government adopted for the first time a policy of deporting Mexican nationals many of them recently arrived after the Mexican Revolution. Soon, the American economy soared again and the immigrants were allowed back into the country in droves.
In the following decade, as the ravages of the Great Depression spread across the USA, to allay the fear and the pain of the native population, massive deportation of Mexicans ensued across the nation, organized by federal, state, and local governments. Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez give an excellent account of these shameful years in their book Decade of Betrayal.
Raids were common and caused mayhem in Mexican communities in many parts of the USA. One of the most famous raids or razzias, as they were also called, happened in 1931 in La Placita, the heart of Los Angeles. Though this razzia didn’t net many deportees, the psychological effect was massive, causing fear and panic throughout the barrio that had sprung east of Los Angeles.
As many as one million Mexicans nationals, in many cases along with their American-born children, were coerced into leaving the country or outright repatriated back to Mexico. Ironically, when the U.S. entered World War II, they promptly asked the American-born Mexicans to return and join the military. Incredibly, many of them did return to serve a country that only a few years earlier had violated their constitutional rights by deporting them. American hypocrisy was much in evidence also when the U.S. asked Mexico to provide guest workers to fill the jobs in agriculture and the railroad left vacant by American men who had joined the armed forces. The Bracero Program went into effect in 1942 allowing Mexican immigrants to return to American soil where they were instrumental in winning the war.
In the aftermath of World War II, American agribusiness became heavily dependent on Mexican cheap labor and the Bracero Program was twice extended until 1964. The program, however, could not meet the demand for cheap labor and undocumented workers became a needed reality. In the mid-fifties, the infamous Wetback Operation again deployed deportations to solve the problem without much success. Like rock and roll, documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants were here to stay.
Since the 1970s, successive waves of undocumented immigrants have arrived (lately more from Central America than Mexico) and made the U.S. prosperous, yet they have been denigrated and persecuted. Also, raids have become as common as tortillas and pan dulce. Every administration has tried the same old tired strategy culminating in Obama’s Great Deportation (three million by some accounts). The hypocrisy is still there. Presidents try to appease nativist American sentiment knowing well that the U.S economy is as addicted to undocumented cheap labor as many of its people are addicted to cocaine.
Trump can build his beautiful wall and concoct his Great Raid, but all of these efforts will be of no avail. The Latino community has a long history of suffering these raids and as they say in Mexico: “Le hacen lo que el viento a Juárez,” in other words, nothing.
Read more:
Greek Tragedies Get A Mexican-American Rewrite That Hits Close To Home
ICE Prepares To Arrest And Deport Thousands Of Immigrants Across The US
There’s 1.5 Million Americans In Mexico And Most Of Them Have Overstayed Their Visas
