Immigration Reform In The 1930's

Immigration law has always been a long-standing issue in the United States. Throughout U.S. history, politicians have debated immigration reform like path to citizenship or mass deportation of illegal immigrants as possible solutions. Although Mexican nationals were blamed and deported, for “taking American jobs” during the Great Depression in the 1930’s (Mexican Repartition of 1930’s), labor shortages during World War II will put pressure on Congress to set forth a legal guest worker program known as the “Bracero Program.” This program allowed Mexican nationals to legally work in the United States on a short-term contract, but as the program continued, illegal immigration from Mexico also increased. This increase in illegal immigration resulted

Congress responds by passing the Immigration Act of 1924, which “granted immunity from prosecution or deportation to unauthorized migrants who had entered the United States before passage of the law.” The law also placed restrictive quotas giving immigration visas to only 2 percent of each nationality into the United States, excluding Latin America and most of Asia. Nativists politicians were unsuccessful in pushing to place quotas on Latin America so instead they used deportation methods. Starting in 1928, large-scale deportations in South Texas deported as many as 20,000 Mexicans from the Rio Grande Valley. When the stock market crashed, the aggressiveness of the deportations increased with raids now targeting Mexicans in health facilities and children at school. These arrests would “occurred without a warrant, often forced coerced confessions and guilty pleas.” By 1931, deportations in the Rio Grande Valley had declined; as the Immigration Services turns their focus to California and

Mexican interest groups argued that the “Mexican government should not encourage Mexican migration while pursuing an internal project of economic development and industrialization that needed Mexican laborers.” The Mexican government responds by the threatening to alter the Bracero Program if the United States did not improve its border policing and slow the flow of immigration into the country. The United States changed how deportees would be sent back to Mexico; the old way, releasing them at the border, was not working. Mexican nationals dropped at the border had a much higher chance of returning to the United States illegally. In collaboration with Mexican immigration officials, the U.S. would instead turn over the deportees to Mexican officials and forcibly relocate them based on where they originated from. The U.S. sent deportees through two ports, one in El Paso, Texas and the other in Nogales, Arizona. Mexicans from the interior or southern part of Mexico were airlifted or sent by train back to their home province, while those in border provinces had the choice of voluntarily