The recent Trump-Sheinbaum exchange and the entreaties made by agricultural interests suggest a different possibility, that we might return to the sort of arrangement that prevailed in the 1950s, with all of its problems.
Although Eisenhower began by deporting more than a million Mexicans from the border area in 1954, apprehensions dropped to 240,000 the following year; 72,000 the next; and 44,000 the year after that. The vaunted “military operation” was a onetime spectacle, not an ongoing mass-deportation drive. Unauthorized border crossings dropped because the government opened up an alternative, allowing growers to hire laborers at the border. In other words, it turned erstwhile “illegal” workers into “legal” ones. Immigration officials called it “drying out the wetbacks.” The growers enrolled them in the so-called Bracero Program, the Mexican agricultural guest-worker program that had been in place since the early 1940s.
Under a bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico, recruitment for the Bracero Program was supposed to take place at designated centers in various states in Mexico’s interior, making access to the program available throughout the country. By shifting hiring to the border, the government solved illegal immigration with a bureaucratic sleight of hand. After 1954, the number of bracero contracts increased. It grew by 25 percent in 1955 and then held steady at about 450,000 a year through the end of the decade.
A new guest-worker program like the Bracero Program might be legal—but its legality would be a sham.
The Bracero Program had begun in 1943 as an emergency measure to alleviate labor shortages caused by the draft during World War II. After the war ended, growers insisted that the program continue. They liked that it provided cheap labor under controlled conditions. Braceros worked on short-term contracts that required them to leave the U.S. upon their expiration. This was meant to ensure that there would be no families or communities established in the U.S.—and, of course, no future citizens.
Bracero farmworkers picked fruit in California, cotton in Arizona, sugar beets in Colorado, and vegetables in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Employers routinely flouted regulations on wages, hours, and conditions because enforcement of such rules was scant. They housed workers in shabby barracks and shacks, gave them substandard food, and forbade them to leave the farms without a pass. Though “legal,” braceros were not safe from deportation either. Employers sent back to Mexico those workers who spoke out or organized to protect their rights. The immigration service also apprehended and deported braceros who “skipped” their contracts.