OPERATION WETBACK.
Operation
Wetback was a repatriation project of the United States Immigration and
Naturalization Service to remove illegal Mexican immigrants
("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 illegal 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 illegal aliens 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 work
elsewhere for better wages as wetbacks.
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 illegals to cross the border, 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,
"the decade of the wetback," the number of illegal aliens 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.
The
resulting Operation Wetback, a national reaction against illegal immigration,
began in Texas in mid-July 1954. Headed by the commissioner of Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Gen. Joseph May Swing, the United States Border Patrol
aided by municipal, county, state, and federal authorities, as well as the
military, began a quasimilitary operation of search and seizure of all illegal
immigrants. Fanning out from the lower Rio Grande valley, Operation Wetback
moved northward. Illegal aliens were repatriated initially through Presidio
because the Mexican city across the border, Ojinaga, had rail connections to the
interior of Mexico by which workers could be quickly moved on to Durango. A
major concern of the operation was to discourage reentry by moving the workers
far into the interior. Others were to be sent through El Paso. On July 15, the
first day of the operation, 4,800 aliens were apprehended. Thereafter the daily
totals dwindled to an average of about 1,100 a day. The forces used by the
government were actually relatively small, perhaps no more than 700 men, but
were exaggerated by border patrol officials who hoped to scare illegal workers
into flight back to Mexico. Valley newspapers also exaggerated the size of the
government forces for their own purposes: generally unfavorable editorials
attacked the Border Patrol as an invading army seeking to deprive Valley farmers
of their inexpensive labor force. While the numbers of deportees remained
relatively high, the illegals were transported across the border on trucks and
buses. As the pace of the operation slowed, deportation by sea began on the Emancipation,
which ferried wetbacks from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, and on other ships.
Ships were a preferred mode of transport because they carried the illegal
workers farther away from the border than did buses, trucks, or trains. The boat
lift continued until the drowning of seven deportees who jumped ship from the
Mercurio
provoked a mutiny and led to a public outcry against the practice in Mexico.
Other aliens, particularly those apprehended in the Midwest states, were flown
to Brownsville and sent into Mexico from there. The operation trailed off in the
fall of 1954 as INS funding began to run out.
It is
difficult to estimate the number of illegal aliens forced to leave by the
operation. The INS claimed as many as 1,300,000, though the number officially
apprehended did not come anywhere near this total. The INS estimate rested on
the claim that most aliens, fearing apprehension by the government, had
voluntarily repatriated themselves before and during the operation. The San
Antonio district, which included all of Texas outside of El Paso and the
Trans-Pecos, had officially apprehended slightly more than 80,000 aliens, and
local INS officials claimed that an additional 500,000 to 700,000 had fled to
Mexico before the campaign began. Many commentators have considered these figure
to be exaggerated. Various groups opposed any form of temporary labor in the
United States. The American G.I. Forum, for instance, by and large had little or
no sympathy for the man who crossed the border illegally. Apparently the Texas
State Federation of Labor supported the G.I. Forum's position. Eventually the
two organizations coproduced a study entitled What Price Wetbacks?, which
concluded that illegal aliens in United States agriculture damaged the health of
the American people, that illegals displaced American workers, that they harmed
the retailers of McAllen, and that the open-border policy of the American
government posed a threat to the security of the United States. Critics of
Operation Wetback considered it xenophobic and heartless.