Five hundred prisoners marched into the ship’s rusting hold, replacing the cargo of bananas that had been unloaded onto the docks at Port Isabel, Texas. For the next 48 hours, children, women and men were packed below deck into berths just two feet wide and three feet long. There was just one toilet and no clean drinking water. Late in 1956, after a mutiny that saw dozens jump into the sea in a desperate effort to escape this hell, investigators likened conditions to an “eighteenth-century slave ship”.
Thousands of migrants were also being rounded up into trucks and dumped into the desert across the border. Eighty-eight immigrants, one labour inspector reported in 1955, had died after being held in 45ºC heat, and more would have been killed had the local Red Cross not intervened.
Estimated to involve annual costs of up to $88 billion, the details of the deportation programme are not known. Experts and media accounts, though, suggest it will aim to remove at least 1 million of America’s estimated 11 million illegal migrants each year.
Trump’s programme will be watched closely across the West. Facing growing Right-wing rage, Europe has been struggling to harden its borders and return illegal immigrants to their homelands. Even Canada has begun rolling back its liberal immigration policies. For its part, India has a special interest in what Trump does: The Bharatiya Janata Party has cast illegal immigration as a key issue, while Indians make up the fourth-largest group of illegal immigrants in the US.
Even as he prepares to launch his war on illegal immigration, though, Trump has a problem: The model he’s chosen failed seven decades ago and has kept on failing since.
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“The day of judgment,” San Fernando resident Maria Luna called it. On a late Ash Wednesday afternoon in 1931, the first day of the weeks of prayer and fasting before Easter, immigration officials and police descended on migrants returning from work in the lemon groves. “The deputies rode around the neighbourhood with their sirens wailing and advising people to surrender themselves to the authorities,” Luna recalled. “The women cried, the children screamed, others ran hither.”
Since the late 19th century, Mexican migrants had provided the sinews of America’s economic growth, historian Francisco Balderama writes, “harvesting sugar beets in Minnesota, laying railroad tracks in Kansas, packing meat in Chicago, mining coal in Oklahoma, assembling cars in Detroit, canning fish in Alaska, and sharecropping in Louisiana”.
Fred Bixby, a prominent rancher, was among many in America who objected to efforts to stem this tide of immigration, Balderama records: “We have no Chinamen, we have no Japs. The Hindu is worthless, the Filipino is nothing, and the white man will not do the work.”
The end of the First World War, however, saw the rise of a new isolationism: America limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe, distanced itself from global conflicts and raised tariffs. The isolationist impulse grew stronger after 1929 when the Great Depression broke over America. The infamous Tariffs Act of 1930, intended to protect American agriculture, ended up hurting global trade and the country’s economy.
Labour pushed hard, in this climate, for migrant workers to be pushed out—believing it would improve wages for citizens. Led by Labour Secretary William Doak, the US government began pushing tens of thousands of migrant workers back across the border into Mexico.
Fifty thousand people—farmhands, labourers, shopkeepers, even cripples and lepers—are estimated to have been repatriated from the Los Angeles region alone, coerced onto jam-packed repatriation trains. Tens of thousands of others drove back across the border on open trucks or simply walked. Excélsior, one of Mexico City’s leading newspapers, reported that 25 people, including children, died of illness and malnutrition on one repatriation train.
The beginning of the Second World War reversed the immigrant tide once again. Farms across the US desperately needed workers to make up for men drafted into the military. This time, however, Mexico also needed to ensure it had a pool of cheap, flexible labour to power its own fledgling modernisation of agriculture and its fledgling industrial sector. The two countries, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez explains, agreed to put in place a regulated labour regime to provide seasonal agricultural workers, or Braceros, to America.
In the 1940s, Hernandez records, American immigration authorities and the military in Mexico cooperated closely, deporting large numbers of illegal immigrants. Five thousand Mexican troops were deployed in 1949 to seal the border after farmers complained too many labourers were travelling north. In some cases, Mexican soldiers opened fire to stop immigrants from escaping US border guards.
From just 8,189 in 1943, the number of Mexicans deported rose to 875,318 in 1953, scholar Mae Ngai records in a magisterial history of the making of America’s immigration regime. Employers weren’t delighted: In 1951, Rio Grande landowners described the Border Patrol as a “Gestapo outfit” that was their willing unlawful workers away from work on their fields.
There was an important caveat to these figures, though. Even as the US expelled illegal immigrants, it provided work permits to hundreds of thousands of migrant workers at the same time. In many cases, the expelled immigrants were simply re-hired on work permits, a process wryly described as “drying out”. American immigration policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh notes that “the Department of Labor actually gave preference to legalising unlawful migrants over admitting new Braceros”.
Even as a political polemic warning of a demographic invasion from across the Rio Grande grew in the US, former General Joseph Swing was given charge of Operation Wetback and ordered to declare war on immigrants. He declared victory in 1954, a year in which over a million immigrants were expelled.
The following year, though, amid growing concerns over human rights abuses and angry protests from employers, Operation Wetback ended. Legal work permits would continue to be issued until 1954, and large-scale illegal immigration resumed.
From numerous studies, it’s clear the numbers don’t justify the panic over illegal immigration. In 2022, demographers Jeffrey Passel and Jens Krogstad showed that illegal immigrants made up just over 3 per cent of the country’s population and 23 per cent of lawful, foreign-born residents. Immigrants make up some 14.3 per cent of the country’s population, lower than the 14.9 per cent recorded in 1890. Lawful immigrants, moreover, have grown far more rapidly than illegal ones. Large-scale removal of illegal immigrants, one study shows, would hurt key sectors like construction and childcare—ultimately damaging the livelihoods of all.
And even though Trump stoked White anxiety with stories of violent immigrants, the reality is at some distance from his claims. Criminologist Ariel Ruiz Soto has shown that illegal immigrants living in Texas commit crimes at significantly lower rates than US-born citizens as well as lawful immigrants.
Europe’s experience bears out these lessons. Even though European Union states have spent over €11 billion combating illegal migration since 9/11, expert Emma Lang writes, the movement of people seeking new lives there hasn’t significantly ebbed. For all the hype, moreover, illegal immigrants constitute just a small fraction of legitimate migrant flows into the region.
The cultural anxieties fuelling the immigration debate aren’t hard to see. As Gabriel Sanchez and Kwadwo Frimpong observe, foreign-born voters will outnumber US-born ones by 2060, and whites will become just the largest of many racial minorities by 2045. As International Monetary Fund economist Giovanni Peri argues, only net immigration can address the problem of shrinking Western populations.
Even though immigration stokes ethnic and racial anxieties, it’s worth considering each wave of people arriving in America has been decried as unassimilable—only for them to establish themselves as agents of economic growth. For anti-immigration populists, history holds an important lesson: There is no way for a nation to wall itself off from the world without impoverishing itself.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)
