Ike, Trump and politics on the border
Perhaps only a few of us would compare President Donald Trump to one of his predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower. Neither held publicly elected office before becoming president, but most of the important similarities end there. Trump came from a wealthy family. Eisenhower did not. Trump never served in the military. Eisenhower, educated at West Point, became famous by leading the greatest army to victory in the deadliest war the world had seen.
Eisenhower carried the image of a quiet hero when he ran for president. Trump was a flamboyant television celebrity from his business ventures and his reality show.
Yet 65 summers ago in the Southwest, Eisenhower authorized a government crackdown every bit as ugly as any of Trump’s tactics.
In the racist atmosphere of Eisenhower’s time, he saw no need to sanitize language or disguise how his administration regarded Mexicans. Eisenhower in 1954 launched a deportation program called “Operation Wetback.” That term has long been a slur against Mexicans, purporting that they unlawfully entered the United States by crossing the Rio Grande. But in Eisenhower’s time, he could link himself to it without fear of a backlash.
It was no coincidence that a recession had hit America in 1953 and continued into the next year. Immigrants are often a scapegoat, and this is especially true when the U.S. economy sags.
Eisenhower made border security a high-profile program during the economic slide. Many newspapers accepted government handouts about his program’s usefulness without skepticism.
For example, the Messenger Inquirer of Owensboro, Ky., proclaimed Eisenhower’s border crackdown a smashing success.
“During Operation Wetback, the U.S. Border Patrol’s greatest roundup of illegal Mexican laborers, jeep-aircraft teams flushed hundreds of wetbacks from their hiding places,” a photo caption stated.
But the accompanying image in the Kentucky newspaper only showed two unidentified men in California. They appeared to be farmers in a field.
Eisenhower’s initiative was less popular on the border. The reasons had nothing to do with human dignity.
United Press, a wire service, reported from McAllen, Texas, that farmers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley said they were being “driven to the poorhouse by the U.S. Border Patrol’s Operation Wetback.”
Braceros, Mexican citizens who had labor contracts to work on U.S. farms, were being paid $2.05 per hundred pounds of cotton picked. No pay scale existed for Mexicans who crossed the border without a labor contract. Farmers criticized Eisenhower’s immigration crackdown because they preferred cheaper labor to authorized guest workers.
The Bracero Program for seasonal agricultural workers was in its 12th year when Eisenhower launched his deportation effort.
Braceros first arrived in the United States in 1942, America’s first full year of fighting in World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Bracero Program by executive order, saying it was necessary to replace 5 million younger workers who went from farms to military service.
Bringing workers from Mexico was Roosevelt’s solution to a labor shortage. With a pool of Mexican workers, Roosevelt could keep agricultural production strong.
World War II ended in 1945. The Bracero Program, though, would continue until 1964.
The reasons were numerous. Many returning military veterans had abandoned farm life to study at universities or take jobs in cities. Then another war, this time in Korea, revived the same anxieties about labor shortages in American agriculture.
U.S. farmers had become dependent on Mexican labor, and they liked it cheap. This created a market for workers who were not part of the Bracero Program.
Eisenhower’s administration ended Operation Wetback in the latter part of 1954. Joseph Swing, who was commissioner of immigration and naturalization, later released an eight-page report calling it a success.
“Prior to Operation Wetback, border patrolmen were apprehending 3,000 illegally entered Mexicans a day in the Southwest. … Apprehensions for the past six months have averaged 300 a day, and at present are only 350 per day, despite the fact it is now the height of the Texas cotton-picking season,” Swing stated in July 1955.
The politics were impossible to miss. Eisenhower was preparing to run for a second term in 1956. He could say he had won another war, this one checking lawlessness on the border.
For all their differences, Eisenhower and Trump seized on the Southwest as a flashpoint of human emotion — and a political opportunity.
Eisenhower would have gotten a second term anyway. His popularity never dipped.
Trump’s reelection is anything but a sure bet. More certain is that the border will continue to be a club, not just a plank in his platform.
Eisenhower authorized a government crackdown that was every bit as ugly as any of Trump’s tactics.