Immigration Debates: Mass Deportations

Families across the US are struggling to put food on the table, so the President makes a promise: “American jobs for real Americans.” He vows to remove the millions of immigrants who have crossed the Southern border in recent years, by any means necessary.

That President is Herbert Hoover. The year is 1930.

In his first weeks in office, President Trump has pledged to enforce the mass deportation of up to 15 million immigrants from the United States—rhetoric (and numbers) that would include some legal migrants, like the Haitian workers in Springfield, Ohio.

Sometimes the past is prologue; sometimes history just repeats itself.

If elected in November, former President Trump has pledged to enforce the mass deportation of up to 15 million immigrants from the United States—rhetoric (and numbers) that would include some legal migrants, like the Haitian workers in Springfield, Ohio.

Our Downtown LA immersive audio walk, Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá tells the story of how over a million people were coerced into returning to Mexico in the 1930s. Sixty percent of these “repatriates” were American-born children—US citizens. Many had never been to Mexico; many did not speak Spanish. Immigration raids in public squares were intended to terrorize the community; the only help offered to poor Mexican families was a one-way ticket across the southern border. The shame felt by many of those who were forced to leave silenced them for decades: it was only in the 1970s that the survivors began to talk about the lasting trauma of their “repatriation.”

The US has always treated its Mexican workforce as expendable. By the 1940s, a decade after the repatriations, the bracero program was actively recruiting Mexican labor to fill the worker shortages caused by WWII. Then the economic winds shifted, and President Eisenhower launched another deportation effort, the notorious Operation Wetback. This is one way in which Trump’s promises depart from historical precedent. As economists have noted, it’s likely that far from saving American jobs, mass deportations in 2025 would tip the US economy into crisis.

Today, 1 in 20 Californians is an irregular migrant. When it comes to Californian workers, that figure rises to 1 in 10. Irregular immigrants are part of our California. They grow our food, build our houses, clean our homes and care for our children.

That’s why the histories we uncover at the California Migration Museum are so important; they illuminate the consequences that might follow from the choices we're about to make. Learning from the less palatable parts of our shared past is often messy, complicated, and uncomfortable. But it’s vitally important. As our narrator Karla Estrada reminds us at the end of our Downtown LA tour: when we don’t remember our history, we are condemned to repeat it.

Irregular? Undocumented? Unauthorized?

If you’re confused about the “right” way to talk about immigrants who don’t have legal status, you’re not alone. Many, many papers have been written on the subject! (Also see: who is a refugee?)

At the California Migration Museum we never talk about “illegal” human beings. We also think undocumented is an increasingly inaccurate term. Many immigrants without legal status still have documents from their country of origin and in California, they are also able to apply for and receive driver’s licenses issued by the state.

Instead, we use both irregular and unauthorized. These are words that can reflect many different immigration profiles for non-US citizens, and may not involve rushing across a physical border (such as overstaying a visa, or working while on a student visa).