[AmericanThinker] Seventy years ago in 1954, immigration authorities created a mass deportation program in the face of out-of-control intrusions at our southern border. Then, like now, the gravity of the problem called for a dramatic policy response. Unlike now, the federal government rapidly responded, creating a system of roaming "deportation parties" concentrated on border-area factories and farms, netting tens of thousands of illegals in its first few days. The model, which would establish Border Patrol and ICE as we know them today, would later be dubbed, "Operation Wetback."
Intensely reviled by the globalist Left even to this day, the program is recurringly attacked in mainstream outlets and scholarly journals as yet another blot on America’s trail-of-tears history. As something of an immigration scholar myself, one of the better examples of academic treatment I’ve come across is a 2006 paper from UCLA African-American Studies professor, Kelly Lytle Hernández. As she shows, Operation Wetback offers plenty of guidance on how to deal with the current border invasion, especially in reclaiming deportations and border control as essential to both receiving and source countries alike.
No doubt surprisingly to some, Prof. Hernández writes in the piece that "cross-border research [into the program] transforms the typically nation-bound and time-bound narrative of Operation Wetback into an unexpected story of evolving binational efforts at migration control" -- that is, "binational" efforts between the U.S. and Mexico such as "collaborative deportations, coordinated raids, and shared surveillance." Few would know or at least admit that Operation Wetback was indeed a "binational effort" and essentially co-created by the Mexican government; such is the degree of disinformation and slanted revisionism of the program. As Hernández recounts in her piece, due to Mexican agribusiness facing upward wage pressure from what had grown into a mass outflow of domestic laborers by the mid-1940s, Mexican officials met with State and Justice department officials and successfully negotiated for things like an increase in U.S. Border Patrol officers on the border.
Capturing the sentiment on the other side of the border at the time, Hernández writes: "Mexican newspapers, politicians, and activists all tried to convince [would-be illegals] to stay in Mexico... remind[ing] them of their duty to participate in the economic development of Mexico by working south of the border." So patriotic, nationally-minded, and focused on curbing the exodus, Mexican officials "attempted to directly interrupt illegal labor migration to the United States" (think of their simple refusal to deport U.S.-bound migrants today) while some in government even called for "turning intransigents among them into ’forced labor’ within Mexico." (Emphasis mine). |