look back at Operation Wetback
by David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — One of my life’s pleasures is an indirect link to the Right-Wing Chain-Letter Network, whose mad fantasies come to me via Roger, a conservative fishing buddy who gets his wingnut communiqués from a guy whose initials are P.Z. So let’s call him Peezy, because it sounds funny.
And Peezy’s a funny guy. His latest brain-fart, which is actually at least seven years old (misinformation on the Right-Wing Chain-Letter Network tends toward immortality — these people not only believe almost anything that’s paranoid, racist or reactionary, they believe it forever), reads as follows, verbatim:
“Back during the great depression, Herbert Hoover ordered the deportation of ALL illegal aliens in order to make jobs available to American citizens that desperately needed work.
“Harry Truman deported over two million illegal aliens after WWII to create jobs for returning veterans.
“In 1954 Dwight Eisenhower deported 13 million Mexicans. The program was called Operation Wetback. It was done so WWII and Korean War veterans would have a better chance at jobs. It took two years, but they deported them!”
Typically, Peezy’s little bombshell is unsourced. Neither Peezy nor Roger nor any of their co-Kool-Aid guzzlers ever research the source of the wild and wonderful nonsense that worms its way into their e-mail inboxes. This leaves the job up to old newspaper guys like me — which is OK, because “digging” has always been my favorite part of journalism.
I checked 30 sources. Here are some facts.
First, the best site for untangling Peezy’s web of criminal ignorance is probably the gang at FactCheck (http://www.factcheck.org/
Second, on the matter of Herbert Hoover, Marian Smith, a historian at the U.S. Customs & Immigration Service (formerly INS), has written, “There is no evidence that Herbert Hoover ordered the deportation of all illegal aliens.” And Matthew T. Schaefer, archivist at the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, added this: “President Hoover never issued a statement, executive order or proclamation ordering the deportation of all illegal immigrants.”
The fact is that, as of 1929, when Hoover took office, the United States had barely begun to regulate immigration, and had no interest in Mexicans, except to help farmers hire lots of them — to help harvest American crops.
Hoover’s deportation total, in four years, was 121,000 (INS numbers). Very few of these were the Mexican “wetbacks” so deplored by Peezy and his co-religionists.
Third, before Harry Truman took office, the United States was operating a joint program with Mexico to import Mexican “braceros” under contract to U.S. farmers and ranchers. This program, like most previous cross-border initiatives, was proposed by Mexico, to limit the outflow of Mexican agricultural workers emigrating for better wages in the U.S. While America welcomed all this cut-rate farm labor, Mexican crops were rotting, unharvested, in the fields. The “bracero” program, which covered the years from 1942-1964, brought 4.6 million Mexicans legally into the United States. Many stayed.
Truman did express concerns about the influx across the Rio Grande, but did nothing to invalidate existing contracts. He discouraged Mexicans from seeking work in America, but according to Tammy Kelly, archivist at the Harry S Truman Presidential Library: “We have not found evidence that President Truman deported over two million illegal immigrants to create jobs for Americans.” In fact, thanks to the “bracero” program, Harry probably welcomed more Mexicans than he expelled.
So, Harry Truman’s best possible INS deportation tally, in seven years was 127,000 (most of whom were probably German and Japanese prisoners of war).
Fourth, President Eisenhower was indeed in charge when the INS launched a program tastefully called “Operation Wetback.” This was a two-month program — not two years — undertaken in summer, 1954. The number of “wetbacks” actually deported varies wildly among sources, but the largest total available anywhere —including both INS deportations and an estimate of immigrants who simply fled to Mexico to escape capture — is 1.3 million. Even Russell Pearce, the celebrated Arizona bigot, who reminisced fondly about Operation Wetback in 2006, cited that figure. Wingnut blogger Jon Christian Ryter used the same figure in 2010.
Peezy’s “13 million” seems to have emerged spontaneously from the bowels of the Web. According to Marian Smith at USCIS, “The claim that Eisenhower deported 13 million immigrants must be the result of a typo or some other error.”
Even the claim that 1.3 million slippery wetbacks were rounded up in just a couple of months in the Fifties is pretty hard to believe, especially in light of, for example, a report to the Cabinet by the Border Patrol in January, 1955. The Border cops confessed that they were “faced with the disheartening task of apprehending and expelling some 3,000 ‘wetbacks’ each day,” but managed to actually lassoo “slightly less than 300 daily.”
Operation Wetback was so sloppily run that many U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent were rounded up and shipped south. At least seven deaths were recorded.
But let’s give Ike the benefit of the doubt and crown him the 20th-century Deportation Champ at 1.3 million (which comes to roughly 30 percent of the 4.6 million brought INTO the U.S. as “braceros”).
Altogether, then, Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower, during their 19 years in the White House, deported maybe 1.5 million immigration scofflaws, and probably not that many.
So, what’s the big deal? If you you’re looking for a President to crown as the Great Deporter, there’s only one finalist. He’s sitting in the Oval Office right now.
Since taking office, Barack Obama has deported undesirable, illegal and just plain unlucky aliens at a USCIS-verified rate of 34,000 a month. That’s twice the rate of runner-up George W. Bush. (Frankly, compared to Obama and Dubya, those three other guys are chopped liver.)
How mean has Obama been? He’s kicked out 17 times as many people as Hoover, 16 times as many as Truman. In just five years, Obama has unloaded half a million more teeming masses than Eisenhower booted in eight years.
Which brings us back around to Peezy’s xenophobic outcry that it’s possible to round up and expel the 11 million undocumented aliens currently living in the United States. We can do it now, says Peezy, because somebody did it “back then.”
Well, “back then,” in a cruel, mismanaged and abortive program called Operation Wetback, they tried, but not very hard. And they quit after two months.
If you weren’t blinded by hatred, you could look that up.
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