From RT via Rawstory
“To Donald Trump or anyone else in this country who refer to people from Mexico as rapists and criminals,” he said. “That is not an American value, that is old fashioned racism and we will not tolerate it!”
“It is not an American value to talk about rounding up millions of people and simply say that we are going to throw them out of the country. That is xenophobia,” he continued.
Of course Bernie makes a good point, but there’s a bit more I’ve been meaning to mention but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Besides the fact that Trump’s got the entire “Mexican rapists” story upside down and backward (the “rapists” are actually sex traffickers on Mexico’s southern border preying on migrants entering from Guatemala, not migrants entering the U.S.) there’s also something Shaun King once wrote about involving Trump’s fetish for the fabulous ‘50s.
The thing about that was that Trump said that his plan for mass deportation would be “easy” to implement because it had been done before by President Eisenhower. What he neglected to mention was that the program that Eisenhower used to mass deport 1 million “illegal aliens” during the ‘50s was called “Operation Wetback.”
Generally speaking that really doesn’t fit into his “Oh, but I’m really not a racist” mantra.
First, Bernie’s video.
And here’s the relevant video of Trump’s comments.
Starting at 17:25.
"You know, Dwight Einsenhower was a wonderful general, and a respected president—and he moved a million people out of the country, nobody said anything about it. When Trump does it, it’s like ‘whoa.' When Eisenhower does it, 'well that was Eisenhower, he’s allowed to do it, we can’t do it.'
That was also in the ‘50s, remember that. Different time, remember that.
That’s when we had a country. That’s when we had borders; you know, without borders you don’t have a country, essentially. We don’t have a country. Without borders, you just don’t have it.
But Dwight Einsenhower, this big report, they used to take them out and put them on the other side of the border and say, “you have to stay here.” And they’d come right back, and they’d do it again and again, so they said 'Wait a minute, this doesn’t work.” And they took them out and moved them all the way South; all the way. And they never came back again; it’s too far. Amazing.
And I’m not saying this in a joking way—I’m saying this happened. It wasn’t working, they were coming back, and then they literally—literally—moved them all the way. A lot of the politicians—they never came back, it was too far. They’d put them on boats and move them all the way down South, and that was it."
The amazing thing is that, for once, Trump is correct. There was a program founded by President Eisenhower that did succeed in deporting over 1 million people from the U.S. to Mexico, only it wasn’t nearly as much of a “humane way” as Trump told Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes.
“We’re rounding them up in a very humane way, a very nice way,” Trump said, as he has expressed before.
“What does that roundup look like to you?” Pelley pressed. “How does it work? Are you going to have cops going door-to-door?”
Trump interjected: “Did you like Eisenhower? Did you like Dwight Eisenhower as a president at all?”
He’s right that many of them didn’t come back under Eisenhower’s program, because many were essentially being consigned into wage slavery and others, in some cases, were left in the desert to die.
During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were “dumped” after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home.
This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they would have to return to America. But the tactic also proved to be dangerous, as the migrants were left without resources to survive.
After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.
At another drop-off point in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants were “brought like cows” into the desert.
This project was put in place not so much because of efforts in America, but because of the success of the Bracero program that allowed migrant workers to freely travel across the border.
The Bracero program (1942 through 1964) allowed Mexican nationals to take temporary agricultural work in the United States. Over the program’s 22-year life, more than 4.5 million Mexican nationals were legally contracted for work in the United States (some individuals returned several times on different contracts). Mexican peasants, desperate for cash work, were willing to take jobs at wages scorned by most Americans. The Braceros’ presence had a significant effect on the business of farming and the culture of the United States. The Bracero program fed the circular migration patterns of Mexicans into the U.S.
During the ‘50s Mexican businesses found that they had a severe drought of available workers and pressured the Mexican government to correct the problem and bring some of those workers back home. Using the fact that Bracero included a quota on maximum workers—rather than just letting the “market decide”—that didn’t allow everyone who might have wanted find work in the U.S. to do so unless they simply crossed the border without papers and worked under the table for much lower wages, they were able to exploit that weakness. America in the ‘50s being highly xenophobic went along and established Operation Wetback not just to deport those who were without papers back across the border, but to send them deep inside Mexico into the waiting and not so loving arms of Mexican business owners who were just salivating to offer them even lower dirt-floor level wages for back-breaking work.
It was, in short, a reverse-American slave trade facilitated by and paid for by the American government and U.S. taxpayer.
But here’s the thing despite the initial high number of deportations found in the first year of the program it ultimately failed.
Overall, there were 1,078,168 apprehensions made in the first year of Operation Wetback, with 170,000 being captured from May to July 1954. The total number of apprehensions would fall to just 242,608 in 1955, and would continuously decline by year until 1962, when there was a slight rise in apprehended workers. During the entirety of the Operation, border recruitment of illegal workers by American growers continued due largely to the inexpensiveness of illegal labor and the desire of growers to avoid the bureaucratic obstacles of the Bracero program; the continuation of illegal immigration despite the efforts of Operation Wetback was largely responsible for the failure of the program.
And here’s one last point, despite how much Trump (hearts) Operation Wetback the fact is that when you compare even its initial peak of 1 million workers served to their ultimate Mexican fate here’s what the deportation numbers have been like under President Obama for the last few years.
Since he’s been president, Obama has deported over 2 million undocumented residents, which over twice as many as Operation Wetback at its best.
The Obama administration deported a record 438,421 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2013, continuing a streak of stepped up enforcement that has resulted in more than 2 million deportations since Obama took office, newly released Department of Homeland Security data show.
So Trump’s “great plan” to emulate Eisenhower with the Bracero program and brand-new Operation Wetback is likely to only be half as effective as what President Obama has already been doing on undocumented immigration. (Yes, progressives find this to be one one of the things we like the least about Obama. However Trump and his ilk can’t bring themselves to admit that this is even happening or else their entire justification for criticizing Obama on immigration would evaporate in a big puff of yellow hairy smoke.)
America deserves better, much better, than to backslide into Trump’s bigoted callous idea of of our former “Greatness.”