Anonymous Coward User ID: 1251542 United States 02/10/2011 01:24 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | [ link to en.wikipedia.org] Operation Wetback was a 1954 operation by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about one million illegal immigrants from the southwestern United States, focusing on Mexican nationals[1]. Burgeoning numbers of illegal Mexicans prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to appoint longtime friends John Cox and General Joseph Swing as INS Commissioner. According to Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., Eisenhower had a sense of urgency about illegal migration upon taking office. In a letter to Sen. J. William Fulbright, Eisenhower quoted a report in The New York Times that said, "The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican "wetbacks" (rooted from the watery route taken by the Mexican aliens across the Rio Grande) 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."[2] The operation was modeled after a program that came to be termed the Mexican Repatriation, which put pressure on citizens of Mexico to return home during the Great Depression, due to the economic crisis in the United States. |
Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 1251542 United States 02/10/2011 01:31 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Mexican Repatriation [ link to en.wikipedia.org] The Mexican Repatriation refers to a forced migration that took place between 1929 and 1939, when as many as one million people of Mexican descent were forced or pressured to leave the US. |