2014-11-18

Nothing Changes: USA Immigration

This article shows the USA of the 1950s is very much like the USA of the 2010s. The difference is that instead of only ranchers and farmers corrupting the immigration process, billionaires like Mark Zuckerburg are also pushing for cheap labor in the technology industry, and corruption reaches all the way to the top of the White House. On the other hand, if you think social mood has an impact on events, another Eisenhower-type policy reversal may be right around the corner. The USA has the most extreme immigration policy in the developed world and has continued moving in the direction of open borders even though much of the developed world started moving the other way in the 2000s. When policy switches back, it will be a shockingly fast and extreme reversal.

How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico
General Eisenhower.......quoted a report in The New York Times, highlighting one paragraph that said: "The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican 'wetbacks' to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government."

...America "was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale," Mr. Brownell said. "When I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without restraint."

...a study by the President's Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas in 1950 found that cotton growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where most illegal aliens in Texas worked, paid wages that were "approximately half" the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.

Profits from illegal labor led to the kind of corruption that apparently worried Eisenhower. Joseph White, a retired 21-year veteran of the Border Patrol, says that in the early 1950s, some senior US officials overseeing immigration enforcement "had friends among the ranchers," and agents "did not dare" arrest their illegal workers.

Not much different from the U.S.A. of today, where billionaires lobby the government for cheaper labor, and the near complete lack of enforcement of immigration laws.

Then on June 17, 1954, what was called "Operation Wetback" began. Because political resistance was lower in California and Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.

By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.

By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.

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