{"id":3303,"date":"2026-09-09T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwts-elimination.myftp.biz\/?p=3303"},"modified":"2026-09-09T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T12:00:00","slug":"commentary-help-wanted-leave-now-how-u-s-immigration-policy-remains-maddeningly-consistently-inconsistent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwts-elimination.myftp.biz\/?p=3303","title":{"rendered":"Commentary: ‘Help Wanted\/Leave Now!’ How U.S. immigration policy remains maddeningly consistently inconsistent"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The reporter may have misheard the comment, or maybe the person being quoted actually said it, or something odd happened in the editing process.<\/p>\n
Whatever: This is what appeared in the Feb. 20, 1985, edition of the Oakland Tribune, quoting a UC Berkeley professor about a protest against immigration sweeps in the Bay Area.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis probably won\u2019t stop the Iron Ass [federal government] from making raids in the Eastbay.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIron Ass\u201d is how someone might hear the acronym INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the forerunner to ICE.<\/p>\n
And now, 40 years on, it fits right into the kind of angry, derisory language many Americans use for the present-day hammer-handed operations of federal immigration officers, around the country, especially here in California.<\/p>\n
California has always been \u2014 and that\u2019s a couple of centuries of \u201calways\u201d \u2014 at the fulcrum of the immigration-deportation seesaw in the U.S., with national policies yo-yoing between kicking workers out and inviting them in. Consider the foreign-born who joined the Gold Rush, the Chinese railroad workers, and still and always the Latino population along the long, wide international border.<\/p>\n
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Get the latest from Patt Morrison<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Los Angeles is a complex place. Luckily, there’s someone who can provide context, history and culture.<\/p>\n
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That underlies the name of a new exhibition at the California Museum in Sacramento, \u201cHelp Wanted\/Leave Now!\u201d about the \u201crevolving door\u201d of programs and practices that have alternately enticed and expelled workers, legal and undocumented.<\/p>\n
The U.S. border with Mexico represents a political borderline but it cannot sever many decades of complicated history and culture. And it\u2019s left us with endless paradoxes and contradictions of who belongs where, with the U.S. government shifting to and fro on deciding and enforcing that, depending on the American economy, and American politics.<\/p>\n
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For the record:<\/p>\n
4:45 p.m. Sept. 9, 2026<\/span>A previous version of the story misspelled the name of the curator of a new exhibit at the California Museum in Sacramento. His name is Sean Manwaring.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Sean Manwaring is curator of the exhibit. \u201cWe have historically recruited foreign workers who set down roots, become members of the community, and then, when there\u2019s an economic downturn or it becomes politically expedient, it\u2019s kind of a revolving door.\u201d<\/p>\n
The endless argument is that undocumented immigrants, who work for less because of their needs and their vulnerability, take jobs that Americans will, or that Americans won\u2019t do. Something else Americans won\u2019t do: pay higher prices for food, 90 years ago or now.<\/p>\n
Last year, the Kansas City Federal Reserve bank, one of 12 regional Feds, noted on its website, \u201cHistorically, the supply of U.S.-born farm workers has not been sufficient to meet demand for farm jobs at the going wage rate, contributing to a largely foreign-born workforce.\u201d Even the H-2A legal process for hiring seasonal foreign workers \u201cwould likely be more expensive than employing undocumented workers.\u201d<\/p>\n
A 1924 immigration law that created the Border Patrol also revealingly put it under the control of the federal labor <\/i>department. Cheaper Mexican workers had been welcomed during World War I, and were still coming north more casually back then, even as a U.S. labor group was beginning to agitate for organizing American migrant farmworkers.<\/p>\n
But when the 1929 market crash and the Depression knifed the American economy, the blame for unemployment in the Southwest and California in particular fell on these Mexicans, and the government\u2019s \u201cMexican Repatriation\u201d program sent hundreds of thousands back to Mexico, some voluntarily, some not, and some numbers of them American citizens.<\/p>\n
Once, border migration patterns resembled a loop: Thousands of laborers, mostly men, commuted here once or twice a year from Mexico to jobs in the fields, then on to other jobs once harvests were over. Then they\u2019d take their earnings home to Mexico as breadwinners and comparatively rich men, and stay until the next year\u2019s season.<\/p>\n
But as U.S. policies over decades squeezed the border shut on this back-and-forth commuting, some workers chose to stay on the side of the border where they could find work, and a number brought their families north to settle, legally or otherwise.<\/p>\n
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Oct. 15, 1963: Mexican workers in the bracero program work in pepper fields in the Firebaugh area in Fresno County. This image is from the Los Angeles Times Archive at UCLA.<\/p>\n
(Bill Murphy \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
And then that pendulum swung again. In 1942, Americans by the millions left their peacetime jobs for the war and wartime industries, and the \u201cbracero\u201d program \u2014 from \u201cbrazo,\u201d the Spanish word for \u201carm\u201d \u2014 filled in the gaps in the domestic workforce with contracts for employers of Mexican workers, usually in agriculture or on railroads.<\/p>\n
Under the program, the U.S. screened Mexicans for aptitude for the work, and for attitude. Manwaring shared with me the notes of Henry P. Anderson, a historian and farm labor organizer, who took a guided tour of a Calexico bracero processing center in 1958:<\/p>\n
\u201cThose deemed expendable were described one at a time: this one is too tall, he is too \u2018cocky,\u2019 that one a \u2018loafer,\u2019 another \u2018lazy and irresponsible,\u2019 he\u2019s a \u2018smart aleck,\u2019 this one a \u2018ladykiller\u2019 and not \u2018peon\u2019 enough. On the other hand the \u2018right man,\u2019 according to the guide, was \u2018built right. He\u2019s a farm worker, you can tell that \u2026 he hasn\u2019t got any big ideas. He\u2019s got the right attitude. He\u2019s humble, not fresh and cocky. He\u2019s an Indian type, probably from Jalisco or Guanajuato.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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Feb. 1, 1954: Unpublished photo from the Mexicali border crossing during the bracero program. Not known if these men are entering or leaving United States.<\/p>\n
(Frank Q. Brown \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
Through the bracero program\u2019s 22-year span, as many as 4 million workers came in and presumably went home \u2014 though not always; a generation of families came here, or were born here, and stayed. About 15 years after it ended, a former Texas labor commissioner and ranking Labor Department official overseeing the program went public. He characterized wages for braceros as unconscionably low, the food substandard and the housing prison-like. \u201cIt was not altruistic at all. The bracero program was definitely created by the farmer who needed to make a dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then America\u2019s policy yo-yoed again: In 1953, even as the bracero program was still operating, the federal government launched \u201cOperation Wetback,\u201d to rid the country of undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n
With its heavy-handed \u201csweeps\u201d of labor camps and factories, American citizens were indiscriminately caught up in the operations, just as ICE is doing now.<\/p>\n
Consider the breezy tone of a 1931 story in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, reporting on 1,200 Mexicans deported from L.A. County in a day, with the casual note that \u201cvirtually none of them\u201d was \u201can undesirable alien \u2014 many are American citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cL.A. was really ground zero for these raids during Operation Wetback and the Mexican deportation,\u201d said Manwaring. Those 1,200 deportees were among at least 50,000 deported from L.A. County in five months of 1931 \u2014 as much as a third of the county\u2019s Mexican and Mexican American population.<\/p>\n
Emilia Castaneda was no more than 10 years old when her Boyle Heights family was deported in the 1930s. In an archival videotaped interview made when she was in her late 70s or 80s, and now part of the exhibition, she remembered being teased by the girls in the parochial school she ended up attending in Mexico. \u201cYou\u2019re not one of us,\u201d they mocked her. \u201cGo home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just like today, as agriculture and other food chain businesses were hard-hit by Trump\u2019s aggressive deportations, some industries and regions in earlier \u201csweeps\u201d also asked for carve-outs and exemptions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say there was a backlash, but it really impacted agricultural networks across California and Arizona,\u201d said Manwaring. \u201cWe came across specific requests from county officials like in Yuma, Arizona, asking for exceptions because they needed these workers, they didn\u2019t have enough help.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s called the Texas Proviso was a wink-and-nudge agribusiness-friendly federal loophole crafted in the early 1950s that for more than 30 years made it a crime to harbor or transport undocumented immigrants \u2014 but not a crime to hire them. (Federal law criminalized that in 1986.)<\/p>\n
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From the Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1954 front page headline: 500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders.<\/p>\n
(Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
The 1950s enforcement drive also put the word \u201cwetback\u201d into casual use. Official statements and news stories used it to mean anyone here without documentation. It was derived from the people who waded across Texas\u2019 Rio Grande into the U.S., but it was sometimes used interchangeably with any Latino workers. Sometimes it just got clipped to \u201cwets.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1961, as astronaut Alan Shepard sat aboard his Redstone rocket waiting to become the first American launched in space, hours of delays forced him to urinate in his spacesuit. \u201cWell,\u201d he remarked nonchalantly, \u201cI\u2019m a wetback now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not much has changed. Court records released this July confirmed that ICE agents had been referring to immigrants during raids with such slurs as \u201cwet\u201d and \u201ctonk,\u201d the last term reportedly derived from the sound an agent\u2019s utility flashlight makes when hitting a migrant\u2019s head.<\/p>\n
A 1956 crime drama called \u201cWetbacks\u201d was a B picture about a human smuggling ring victimizing the undocumented. The Los Angeles Examiner\u2019s movie reviewer called it a \u201ctedious, amateurishly made picture [that] supposedly deals with how illegal Mexican immigrants are smuggled into this country.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the paradoxes of these periodic anti-undocumented worker campaigns is how they divided Latino communities: the \u201cI did it the right way\u201d people who managed to get visas, the people whose forebears may have come illegally but are now themselves established, and the paperless people who have just arrived, or who have lived here for years under the radar.<\/p>\n
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Cesar Chavez with Richard Ybarra during the 1973 Coachella Grape Strike.<\/p>\n
C\u00e9sar Ch\u00e1vez lived that paradox. The co-founder of the United Farm Workers \u2014 along with Dolores Huerta, an advisor on this exhibition \u2014 was a U.S. citizen. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, he wanted immigration officials to keep out undocumented workers, believing they\u2019d be exploited as strikebreakers for growers and erode his union\u2019s bargaining power. By the 1980s, though, he was endorsing immigration reform and protections, especially in the face of President Reagan\u2019s recession-era 1982 \u201cOperation Jobs\u201d sweeps.<\/p>\n
A Los Angeles Times survey that same year found that within three months of those raids, 80% of the booted-out workers were back on the job. Many of the Americans hired to replace them soon quit. They didn\u2019t like the wages or the working conditions. <\/p>\n
The employment manager of B.P. John furniture maker, in Santa Ana, told The Times that 75 of the American-born workers soon quit on him. \u201cThey told me they found another job, that the work was too hard, that there wasn\u2019t enough pay.\u201d<\/p>\n
In June 1954, The Times covered the Border Patrol\u2019s plans for L.A. Herman Landon, the local immigration chief, described a \u201cstockade\u201d being built in Elysian Park to \u201cimprison illegal Mexicans flushed out\u201d of factories, hotels and \u201cskid row saloons\u201d at the rate of a thousand or two per day.<\/p>\n
Farmers had once requested immigrant workers from smugglers by the truckload, and counted by \u201cthe head,\u201d like livestock. When the feds moved in, workers were deported south of the border, sometimes far south, by bus, by ship, by plane. The feds briefly charged each worker $10 each for the cost of being deported.<\/p>\n
The caption of a June 1952 photo in the McAllen, Texas, Evening Monitor that showed men boarding a deportation plane read, \u201cIt\u2019s a quick bite to eat then off into the wild blue yonder for these wetbacks.\u201d The newspaper offered a $5 prize in a contest to name the airborne deportations. Not all readers were cheering. One acidly suggested calling it \u201cTruman\u2019s Gestapo Airlift.\u201d<\/p>\n
The human numbers for any of these programs, coming in or kicking out, are hardly ever confirmed, but over all this time we are talking about the movement of millions \u2014 and the deaths, still uncounted.<\/p>\n
Trump said he always planned to model his deportations on the Eisenhower-era operation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re rounding them up in a very humane way, a very nice way,\u201d Trump told \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In July 1954, under Eisenhower, 88 workers died of sunstroke in the desert below Calexico, where they\u2019d been deported.<\/p>\n
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A poster size photo in San Pedro of Alex Pretti, a registered nurse who was fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n
(Gina Ferazzi \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
In the first 17 months of the second Trump administration, at least 52 people died in ICE custody. ICE agents have shot and killed at least six more people, some in their cars, and some right out in public, like Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and Keith Porter Jr., shot last New Year\u2019s Eve in front of his L.A. apartment building by an off-duty ICE agent.<\/p>\n
The deaths recall a deportation sweep in 1948, when a plane carrying 28 workers back to Mexico, with a crew of four, caught fire and crashed near Coalinga. The press coverage then identified the crew but not the dead Mexican workers, whose individual stories were finally told 70 years later in Tim Z. Hernandez\u2019s book \u201cAll They Will Call You.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The grave marker for the Mexican nationals killed in a 1948 plane crash did not include their names.<\/p>\n
(Michael Robinson Chavez \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
The title is a line from Woody Guthrie\u2019s celebrated song \u201cDeportees,\u201d about the crash, and what it signified in a nation that used and used up its foreign workers, and it ends like this:<\/p>\n
\u201cIs this the best way we can grow our big orchards?\/Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?\/To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil\/And be called by no name except \u2018deportees\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n
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Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison<\/p>\n
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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