NOTE:I’m not justifying, normalizing, or endorsing trump’s mass deportation plans. But I didn’t know about this thing the article talks about. I was only a toddler at the time . And it was the era of rounding up black people with police dogs. And putting Japanese citizens in camps. More of our glorious history to look back on with alarm and disgust.
While pledging to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in history, President-elect Donald Trump has pointed to one example from history that he wants to out-do: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s often brutal effort to send as many as 1.3 million migrant workers back to Mexico.
Under the operation that began in 1954, the Border Patrol, military and state and local police rounded up hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. They were sent across the border by bus, train and boat, in conditions that a congressional investigation later compared to an “eighteenth-century slave ship.”
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The military-like operation – named “Operation Wetback” after a racial slur used to describe migrants who had crossed the Rio Grande – would eventually expand to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, where many undocumented immigrants had long been settled, according to “Impossible Subjects,” a book by Mae Ngai, an immigration historian at Columbia University.
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The Immigration and Naturalization Service, which ran the operation, claimed to have removed 1.3 million immigrants during the operation, though historians say that is likely an inflated figure. According to the state historical association, federal officials claimed that most immigrants fled voluntarily, fearing they would be apprehended in the operation.
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Article is worth reading. This happened in the lifetime of some of us on this board.
I became aware of it after reading Mike Davis’ City of Quartz and some other background on Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Not only was it a not very proud moment in US history, it also materially harmed agriculture and contributed to the “Eisenhower Recession” of 1958. But hey, why not repeat the mistakes of the past? How else can you learn that doesn’t, you know, require reading and remembering useless historical facts and significant blunders. While we’re at it, why not reinstate the Chinese Exclusion Act and have the Supreme Court revisit and overturn Loving v. Virginia for good measure.
Let’s just head back to the era with tarriffs instead of income taxes, far fewer government restrictions on industry and finance, etc. – in other words, before that commie Teddy Roosevelt messed things up. Back to the McKinley administration!
By national park, I assume you mean the new McKinley Open Pit Mine.
And given recent events, is the story of McKinley the best one to promote? Well, it may help people learn how to say and spell Czolgosz, I guess. What a world.
Did Eisenhower, Hoover, McKinley et al wait till the crops were picked for their wetback ops?
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Now, my friends, I’ll offer anybody here $50 an hour if you’ll go pick lettuce in Yuma this season and pick for the whole season. So — OK? Sign up. OK.
You sign up. You sign up, and you’ll be there for the whole season, the whole season. OK? Not just one day. Because you can’t do it, my friend.
Trump has already in his speech said of the Mexicans “We will stop catch and release” yet that fish reference was probably coined long ago by the fair and responsible ICE army.
Nobody asked the Arapaho, Cheyenne or Sioux if carving President’s faces in their sacred mountain was okay. Trump is 45 & 47, and it looks to me like there’s room for him above and to the left of Washington. If not, take Jefferson’s spot.
