Operation Wetback...

Alright, one last time and I’ll get off the immigration stuff. I’d like to talk a little bit about another email I received yesterday. By now most of you have probably seen it. It’s the one that asks, what do President’s, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower have in common?

Turns out that between the three of them, they deported something like 16 million illegal immigrants in order to provide jobs for American citizens. I suppose the mass-deportation crowd is trying to use this message as proof that it can be done. Yeah, they did it alright. But damn!

Google, Mexican Repatriation and Operation Wetback and see what you come up with. Since nobody’s really talking about it, I’m not sure that if I were trying to convince the American people the only way to fix the problem is to deport all illegals, I’d really want to bring any of this up.

I’m not sure I’d want to call attention to the fact that the Mexican Repatriation (yes, this is straight out of Wikipedia) refers to the forced migration that took place between 1929 and 1939, when as many as 1 million people of Mexican descent were forced or otherwise pressured to leave the U.S. It’s estimated that up to 60% of those driven out were U.S. citizens. And the event was carried out by American authorities and took place without any kind of due process.

Operation Wetback was carried out in 1954 by the Eisenhower administration in order to make jobs available to vets returning from WW11 and Korea. Just makes sense, right?

The effort began (yes, this one’s straight out of Wikipedia too) in California and Arizona. Tactics included going as far as systematic police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random ID check points of “Mexican-looking” people. Some 750 agents targeted agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions per day.

Yeah, I suppose if the emailer’s intent was to prove that mass-deportation is possible, he accomplished that. But it also proves that the people like our very own, mrwednesdaynight and nimper, you know the one’s out there jumping up and down and yelling about “civil rights” are right too.

And damn, I hate it when that happens…

Kevin McGinty