On January 28, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting immigration from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia for 120 days as well as putting an indefinite stoppage of all Syrian refugees coming to America. As word of the order spread over the media, confusion began to be seen at several of the nation’s major airports. Immigration agents began stopping hundreds of foreigners from these countries, even those who had valid visas and Green Cards. Protesters began demanding that those detained immediately be released and local officials seeing a resourceful sound bite and a chance to embarrass the Trump Administration denounced the order in the strongest terms they could.
For the past week, the many conservatives have supported the
spirit of the order, if not the way it was done. In contrast the media has
denounced Trump’s order and people have repeated the oft quoted “Give me your
poor, your tired, your huddled masses” and held up signs that simply say “No
Ban.” No one, either from the conservatives, media, the protesters or the
Democrats who have come out in support of them have offered any cohesive
alternative to a halt on immigration. When people say “build a wall” are they
prepared to spend the billions of dollars that it would take? For the people
that shout “No Ban,” do they literally mean that that there should be no borders
at all? No border fence with Mexico? No checkpoints on the Canadian border? No
need to show ID at the airport?
The history of U.S. immigration is complex and would take
too long to discuss, but two examples from that history show the dangers of
either total deportation or total acceptance and hold an important lesson for
both sides of the debate.
“Operation Wetback”
(Seriously, that’s what it was officially called)
By the early 20th century, Mexico was still
struggling to recover from the loss of half its territory to the United States
in the 1840s and decades of upheaval that followed. In 1884, Porfirio Díaz seized
dictatorial powers in Mexico City and soon began a program of economic
development. Mexican cites soon had modern buildings, roads and street lights.
But this came at the price of the largest benefits going to European and
American businesses and a handful of Mexican officials. In 1911, Díaz was
overthrown and the country split into different warring factions. With new
governments constantly falling apart, common Mexican citizens decided to look
for safety and new job opportunities.
By the 1920s, the continued exodus to the
United States had become an embarrassment to the Mexican government. Officials
attempted to increase the number of border officers and get people to immigrate
legally in smaller numbers. However, in order to go to the United States with
official approval, Mexicans had to pay expensive fees, which they often could
not afford and show they had sign work contracts in the United States. Unable
to pay or get to the U.S. to sign contracts, families in depressed farming
regions simply left under cover of darkness and went across the lightly guarded
U.S. border.
This all changed in 1929 when the U.S. Stock Market crashed,
sending economic shockwaves around the world.
In places like Tacoma, Washington, over 40% of Americans were suddenly
out of work. Without badly-needed bank loans, farms across the southwest failed,
leading many families to pack up and drive or ride the rails across the country
in search of work. Mexican immigrants were no longer welcome. America had
already passed a new immigration law in 1924 that strictly limited numbers of
all immigrants and created the U.S. Border Patrol. While these new rules were
impossible to enforce on either side of the border, many Mexican migrant
families, seeing a sudden lack of opportunity and hearing calls to come home,
voluntarily returned to Mexico. Politicians jumped on the bandwagon, calling on
citizen groups to help organize and transport Mexicans back to the border.
With the outbreak of World War II, hundreds of thousands of
Americans left their jobs to go off and fight in Europe and the Pacific. With
the loss of their preferred labor source, factory owners and large-scale farmers
had to suddenly make up for this loss, hiring women, blacks and Mexican migrant
workers. At the same time as the U.S. loosened restrictions, Mexican farmers
and factory owners saw a drop in their
labor resources. Reports poured into Mexico City that fields along the border
were being left unharvested and factories were emptying out. Meanwhile, legal
immigrants in places like Texas and California began writing angry letters home
that the increase of cheap illegal immigrant workers were causing American
owners to fire their more expensive legal immigrant workers.
Seeking to stop the unchecked flow to north, the Mexican
government called a meeting of American officials from the Justice Department
and Immigration Services. Mexico demanded that in return for the legal labor
Mexico was providing the U.S, Americans had to get serious about stopping
illegal immigration. The key to this was to shift the vast majority of existing
border agents along the Canadian border to the porous southern border. On top
of this, they demanded budgets for immigration be increased and the number of
agents doubled. In return for these changes, Mexico would increase its police
presence along the border, allowing more suspicious travelers to be stopped on both
sides. American officers would be directed to launch raids aimed at rounding up
Mexican immigrants across the Midwest. The results of these changes were
dramatic: overnight, arrests at the border tripled from 11,000 in 1943 to 28,000
in 1944. With the end of World War II one year later, pressure for deportation
increased. Over the next eight years, thousands of suspected illegal immigrants
were caught, thrown on a train, plane or bus, and physically shoved into the
arms of Mexican officers.
By the 1950s, over 800,000 illegal immigrants were being
captured each year. Yet, despite increased enforcement on both sides of the
border, thousands more slipped across, taking up jobs as basic laborers and
farmhands. Again, people started complaining on both sides of the border.
Mexican fields were again empty and businessmen were unable to find employees.
American workers were also growing increasingly frustrated. Many of them were
still trying to find their footing after the war. How could the rest of America
prosper, they objected, when they saw their own jobs going to people who would
work under unbearable circumstances for far less money?
In early in 1954, U.S. officials announced that, starting in
May, they would begin an unprecedented law enforcement sweep. Hundreds of
agents, backed by local and federal officers, would begin patrolling the main
avenues along the border and launch a series of fast moving raids on suspected
illegal hideouts, and anyone attempting to cross the border would have to first
be inspected at one of numerous checkpoints and roadblocks. At the same time,
the Mexican government announced that it too would have checkpoints and
increased border security.
On the first day of what was officially called
“Operation Wetback,” agents from California to Texas, followed closely by media
cameras, hit a series of locations, dragging off “illegals.” Soon, Mexicans in
the hundreds were forced aboard buses and
driven straight to the Mexican border. Others were grabbed as they came over
the fence and immediately handed back to Mexican police officers. All through
the summer, Greyhound buses loaded with Mexican immigrants and with roofs piled
high with belongings journeyed south as intense raids along the border
continued to take place. At the end of August, U.S. officials reported that 1.8
million illegals had been sent back to Mexico and the success of the operation
was portrayed by the media as a victory for the America worker.
Since the summer of 1954, historians have increasingly
criticized Operation Wetback. A careful history of the operation by Kelly Lytle
Hernández found that there was almost no basis for the 1.8 million number and
that, in fact, examination of deportation reports before and after Operation
Wetback show that only about 250,000 Mexicans were actually moved. Other
sources have pointed out that among those deported were hundreds of legal American
citizens swept up by law enforcement and not allowed the chance to appeal.
Rather than finding out where native Mexicans lived, local authorities dropped
them wherever it was convenient, even if it meant that the illegals were now
hundreds of miles from their homes in Mexico. Finally, the absolute failure of
Operation Wetback can be seen in the fact that for years afterward,
statisticians found that at least 20% of those who had been arrested and driven
to Mexico returned to their old jobs in the U.S. Hernández writes that the point of the
operation actually had not been to stop illegal immigration, but to convince
the press and the American public that something was being done when it really
wasn’t.
The Mariel Boatlift
If Operation Wetback illustrates the shortcoming of the “throw them all out”
mentality of Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters, the Mariel Boatlift
in the spring and summer of 1980 clearly shows the dangers of unchecked
immigration that many appear to support today.
In 1959, communist guerrilla leader Fidel Castro overthrew
the U.S.-backed government on the island of Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of
Florida. While the U.S. was initially friendly to the new Cuban leader, as
Castro’s ties to communist Russia and his repression of the Cuban people became
more apparent, the U.S. decided to cut all political and economic ties with the
country.
By the 1960s, Castro had officially closed off Cuba and
sharply limited the movement of the people in it. As political opponents were
rounded up, their friends and family, fearing for their own safety, began
fleeing to the United States. Soon a large community of Cuban exiles formed in
Miami, Florida. Throughout the two decades that followed, the United States was
sympathetic to Cuban refugees fleeing the evils of communism, but the police
state in Cuba kept the flow of immigration at a relative trickle.
Then on April 1, 1980, a bus hijacked by Cuban locals smashed
through the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana and demanded alyssum. Cuban
soldiers immediately surrounded the complex and demanded the Cubans inside be
handed over. When the Peruvians refused, word spread across the city and more
Cubans showed up to try and get through the line of soldiers blocking the way
in. On the morning of April 3, residents awoke to find that the soldiers in
front of the embassy had left. Within hours, thousands of Cubans fill the small
courtyard and continued to climb over the walls.
Just as quickly as they had disappeared, Cuban soldiers came
back and stopped more people from coming in. By now there were as many as
10,000 inside the embassy. With little food or water, the refugees began
falling ill as the standoff stretched into days and then weeks. In the United
States, President Jimmy Carter announced it was America’s moral responsibility
to do something for the Cubans and announced that the U.S. would take 3,500 people.
Hearing this, Castro turned to his brother and said "They want them, then
they can have them. I will flush my toilets."
Castro quietly released an order saying that if Cubans could
get the required travel permits and go to the port of Mariel, they could then
make their way to Florida.
When the first Cuban vessels arrived in Miami and word got
out that the border was suddenly open, Cuban exiles in the U.S. began buying up
small fishing and sport boats that were not all seaworthy and paying disreputable
captains to make the dangerous voyage to Mariel to pick up family members they
had left behind. The number of boats going into and out of Florida soon
overwhelmed the Coast Guard, who reported that far more than the 3,500 refugees
were coming in. Florida state officials were soon bitter about Carter’s
decision, believing that they had been largely left alone to carry the burden
of this unexpected human flood into southern Florida ports.
Among all the people who were merely trying to reunite their
families, Coast Guard and Florida officials began to notice something strange
about many of the people on the boats. Some babbled incessantly and otherwise
showed signs of mental illness. Others exhibited symptoms of severe alcoholism.
Worse yet, many sported gang tattoos and prison uniforms. It would later turn
out that Castro had ordered prisons and insane asylums emptied and the streets
cleared of the homeless.
After only a few weeks, President Carter announced that the
U.S. would no longer take Cuban refugees. Castro continued sending boats
overloaded with people from Mariel. The Coast Guard could do little but escort
them to Florida. Throughout the summer, thousands of Cubans kept coming. Two
giant tent cities sprang up in the vast parking lot of Miami's Orange Bowl and
along I-95. Still other large camps filled on Miami’s South Beach.
Miami residents began complaining that there were more
people than houses. Apartment managers who had opened their doors to refugees
began to openly fear that they would never see a dime in rent. Widespread abuse
of the Food Stamp program began being reported in Florida and the unemployment
rate skyrocketed from 5.7% to 13%. Crimes involving Mariel refugees involved in
murder and rape doubled.
In late September 1980, Castro abruptly closed the port of
Mariel to any further emmigration and re-implemented strict travel laws. In
all, 125,000 Cubans had found their way to the United States. Of these,
Immigration and Naturalization Services would later determine that up to 24,000
were criminals and 5,000 of these had been among Cuba’s worst.
The Boatlift was over and in November Jimmy Carter lost the
Presidential Election to Ronald Reagan. For the residents of Florida, the consequences
of the mass immigration were just beginning.
Charlie Seraydar would later tell journalist Gerald Posner, “We went
from being a seasonal tourist town to suddenly dealing with seasoned criminals
who had nothing to lose," Seraydar continued, "No matter how badly we
treated them, no matter how low they lived, it was better than the jails they
called home in Cuba. That first year, our crime rate went up 600 percent. Our
entire police force was smaller than a single New York City precinct. It felt
like we had been invaded and were losing the battle."
The next year it was reported that Miami, already suffering
from a growing cocaine trafficking industry in the late 70s, had become the
murder capital of the world. 48% of those murdered were refugees from Mariel.
For the next decade, local and federal officers would
investigate and hunt down the drug networks that emerged in the 1980s. It would
take a serious crackdown on drug dealers and re-investment in Florida real estate
and tourism before the state began to recover in the 1990s.
Were the Mariel people to blame for all that followed?
Certainly not. The cocaine industry had been emerging in Latin American
countries in the 1970s. However, the Cuban refugee crisis in the summer of 1980
allowed for bad people to be spirited in with regular people and overworked immigration
officers could do nothing, short of stopping them as they got off the boat.
While we will continue to debate Trump’s developing policy
on immigration, the lessons of Operation Wetback and the Mariel Boatlift should
serve as stark reminders to both Republicans and Democrats. You cannot simply
stop people from going over the southern border, no matter how much money or
time you invest in it. But neither can you simply open the gates and allow
everyone to come in simply because of moral responsibility. Rather, both sides
need to work on a middle ground solution that strengthens border security
everywhere and sets up an adequate vetting process that ensures, as much as humanely
possible, that good people come in.
