Not subject to general immigration restrictions until 1965, Mexicans crossed into the United States at rates of about a million per year in the 1950s. This migration was largely unregulated and southwest agricultural interests depended on Mexican labor; however, national concerns regarding employment for returning soldiers and uncontrolled migration across the southern border inspired the Immigration Bureau to crack down on Mexican immigrants in the United States. Even as the bracero program continued to recruit temporary Mexican workers, the Immigration Bureau and Border Patrol led these military-style round ups, claiming to have deported one million Mexicans. Among those deported, included many U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.
In 1951 President Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor released a report blaming low wages in the Southwest and social ills on illegal immigration: “The magnitude … has reached entirely new levels in the past 7 years.… In its newly achieved proportions, it is virtually an invasion,” the report said. After touring Southern California in August 1953 to assess the impact of illegal immigration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, Jr., pushed Congress to enact sanctions against employers of undocumented workers and to confiscate the vehicles that were used to bring them to the United States.While neither proposal became law, the administration moved forward on plans for a deportation operation. On June 9, 1954, INS Commissioner General Joseph Swing announced the commencement of “Operation Wetback.”The first phase of the operation began in California and Arizona. Its effectiveness depended on publicity as well as manpower. Extensive media coverage that often exaggerated the strength of the Border Patrol, as well as targeted displays of strength, gave the impression of a greater force. In many regions, this strategy convinced thousands who had entered the U.S. illegally to repatriate voluntarily. In Texas, for example, more than 63,000 individuals returned to Mexico of their own volition; U.S. officials detained an additional 42,000 persons in July 1954. An INS report later indicated that the agency apprehended nearly 1.1 million individuals. The INS operation won at least tacit support from several key groups; the Mexican government, labor groups, and even Mexican-American civil rights groups acknowledged the labor problem, but they withheld extensive criticism.
https://immigrationhistory.org/item/operation-wetback/OPERATION WETBACK.Operation Wetback was a repatriation project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove undocumented Mexican immigrants (pejoratively referred to as "wetbacks") from the Southwest. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the majority of migrant workers who crossed the border illegally did not have adequate protection against exploitation by American farmers. As a result of the Good Neighbor Policy, Mexico and the United States began negotiating an accord to protect the rights of Mexican agricultural workers. Continuing discussions and modifications of the agreement were so successful that the Congress chose to formalize the "temporary" program into the Bracero program, authorized by Public Law 78. In the early 1940s, while the program was being viewed as a success in both countries, Mexico excluded Texas from the labor-exchange program on the grounds of widespread violation of contracts, discrimination against migrant workers, and such violations of their civil rights as perfunctory arrests for petty causes. Oblivious to the Mexican charges, some grower organizations in Texas continued to hire undocumented Mexican workers and violate such mandates of PL 78 as the requirement to provide workers' transportation costs from and to Mexico, fair and lawful wages, housing, and health services. World War II and the postwar period exacerbated the Mexican exodus to the United States, as the demand for cheap agricultural laborers increased. Graft and corruption on both sides of the border enriched many Mexican officials as well as unethical "coyote" freelancers in the United States who promised contracts in Texas for the unsuspecting bracero. Studies conducted over a period of several years indicate that the Bracero program increased the number of undocumeted immigrants in Texas and the rest of the country. Because of the low wages paid to legal, contracted braceros, many of them skipped out on their contracts either to return home or to seek unauthorized work elsewhere for better wages.
Increasing grievances from various Mexican officials in the United States and Mexico prompted the Mexican government to rescind the bracero agreement and cease the export of Mexican workers. The United States Immigration Service, under pressure from various agricultural groups, retaliated against Mexico in 1951 by allowing thousands of immigrant workers to cross the border illegally, arresting them, and turning them over to the Texas Employment Commission, which delivered them to work for various grower groups in Texas and elsewhere. Over the long term, this action by the federal government, in violation of immigration laws and the agreement with Mexico, caused new problems for Texas. Between 1944 and 1954, dubbed "the decade of the wetback," the number of undocumented immigrants coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent. It is estimated that in 1954 before Operation Wetback got under way, more than a million workers had crossed the Rio Grande illegally. Cheap labor displaced native agricultural workers, and increased violation of labor laws and discrimination encouraged criminality, disease, and illiteracy. According to a study conducted in 1950 by the President's Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas, the Rio Grande valley cotton growers were paying approximately half of the wages paid elsewhere in Texas. In 1953 a McAllen newspaper clamored for justice in view of continuing criminal activities by "wetbacks."
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/operation-wetbackWasn't alive during this period, and had never heard of this until the great Larry Kudlow mentioned it several times this week on his Fox Business show. Found it intriguing to research, and there are lots of other WAY more biased links that engage in revisionist history.
While I don't agree with all of this, a similar plan might be effective for our next President once we rid ourselves of the worst Presidency of my lifetime.
