Thread: The 1954 deportation of Mexican migrants and the 'wetback airlift' in Chicago

The 1954 deportation of Mexican migrants and the 'wetback airlift' in Chicago

Ron Grossman Contact Reporter
March 3, 2017 6:17 pm
chicagotribune.com


After U.S. Border Patrol agents raided Chicago's Mexican neighborhoods in 1954, a photographer snapped a striking image of deportees lined up on a Midway Airport runway.

More than six decades later, the Tribune's account is even more striking. It reported "a drive to clear Chicago of 'wetbacks.'"

Linguistic skirmishes continue to mark the debate over immigration policy. During his campaign and as president, Donald Trump has referred to people like those shown in that photograph as "illegal aliens" or just "illegals" — terms considered by many as offensive as "wetback." Some who sympathize with migrants would call them "undocumented immigrants." And some news organizations try to avoid labels altogether by focusing on how the immigration violations occurred — such as overstaying visas, etc.

But in the 1950s, the term "wetbacks" was used by friends and foes of those Mexican nationals photographed just before being herded onto a Border Patrol airplane bound for Brownsville, Texas. There they were to be put on a ship headed to Veracruz, Mexico.

Their itinerary was part of what the U.S. Justice Department announced as a major "drive to return 'wetbacks' to Mexico." Chicago was the focal point of what the Feds called the "wetback airlift." By the end of 1954, under the direction of Walter Sahli, district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, it flew about "three planeloads a week of Mexican workers who entered this country illegally" out of Midway Airport, according to a Tribune article.

As many as 1.3 million immigrants would be rounded up in the United States under the program launched by President Dwight Eisenhower. They were loaded onto trains, buses and planes and deposited deep in Mexico's interior to prevent them from returning. .

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promoted the idea of a "deportation force" to rid the U.S. of up to 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally — an idea that sparked a comparison to the 1954 effort. When challenged, Trump expressed enthusiasm for Eisenhower's program, calling it "very effective."

Even in 1954, the program was controversial. A Tribune story said that our southern neighbor thought the deportation effort was a sham. The headline noted: "Mexicans hint U.S. winks at wetback horde." The Mexican government, said the story, believed that farmers and ranchers in Texas encouraged lax border patrol because they preferred hiring Mexican workers at low wages.

In most stories, the paper inserted an explanation of the term "wetbacks," saying the Mexican migrants are "so named because they swim across the Rio Grande to evade border guards." One waggish reader noted that because there is no water on the border between California and Mexico and not much in the Rio Grande, "I suggest changing the term from 'wetbacks' to 'dusty rogues.'"

But by the 1950s, "wetback" had entered colloquial English as a metaphor for work badly done and workers poorly paid. A Tribune gossip column took note of a U.S. congressman who said that his colleagues "think up more unconstitutional laws than a bunch of wetbacks from Mexico." In one article published in the Tribune, a writer commenting on the success of a Broadway press agent observed that, "In the theater, press agents are casual labor, like Okies and wetbacks."

Strange as it might see, the term came naturally to the lips of Dr. Louis Leal, who doubled as a University of Chicago professor and chairman of the Mexican American Council of Chicago. "One of our problems is that of wetbacks coming to Chicago," he told the Tribune in 1952.

Yet if the language of the era seems offensive, the arguments offered in the 1950s for the deportation effort are no different from today's. A year before the "wetback airlift," a Tribune Washington correspondent wrote that U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell had said "an uncontrolled wave of crime remindful of the prohibition era is sweeping the southwest in the wake of the illegal entry of hundreds of thousands of alien Mexicans across the border." The Justice Department's border patrol has "completely broken down," Brownell told Eisenhower, the correspondent reported.

Prominent U.S. senators were troubled by a government program that allowed some Mexican workers to enter the country legally. Sens. Herbert Lehman, D-N.Y., and Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., the Tribune reported, "charged that the recruitment program makes it easy for Communists and other subversives to enter the United States." Lehman estimated the daily flow of troublemakers as "perhaps many hundreds."

Lehman and Humphrey were unabashed liberals, not reactionaries. But it was the era of the Cold War confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Fear of a communist underground was as potent then as fear of Islamic State terrorists is today.

Brownell said that, having lost control of its borders, the U.S. was being inundated by upward of 100,000 Mexicans "drifting eastward to Chicago and New York seeking work."

Lack of education limited their prospects. Many hadn't finished grammar school, noted Leal, the Mexican community leader. "We want more professional people — more lawyers, more doctors, more teachers," he said.

Between the 1950s and now, the labor movement switched sides in the immigration debate. Currently many unions support the cause of immigrant workers' rights, but back then union activists feared that that jobs were being lost to illegal immigrants. On March 3, 1951, the Tribune reported: "A 'flying squad' of the AFL National Farm labor union today forced the deportation of 115 'wetback' Mexican farm laborers." They were being given a pass by border agents "at the instance of ranchers seeking cheap labor."

Politics, it's said, makes for strange bed fellows, and never more truly than in the era of the "wetback airlift." The farm workers union was on the same side of the immigration issue as an attorney general who saw the labor movement infested by communists and mobsters.

Brownell needed all the help he could get. With only about 1,000 Border Patrol agents at his disposal, trying to curb illegal immigration was an exercise in futility, as he told the Tribune: "It's like sweeping up the ocean."

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1/18/2009

"OPERATION WETBACK" by University of North Texas