In July 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order seeking to establish a large-scale labor agreement with Mexico. The entry of the United States into World War II the previous year had meant a considerable decrease in the agricultural labor force, so the Roosevelt administration wanted to implement a program to legally import seasonal workers from Mexico. The Bracero Program, as the initiative was called, began in August of that year hiring thousands of workers who went to work on farms in California, Oregon, and Washington. The agreement between the United States and Mexico guaranteed a minimum wage of 30 cents an hour and decent working and housing conditions for the immigrants. By the time the program ended two decades later, in 1964, it is estimated that nearly 4.6 million Mexican workers had entered and left the United States legally on multiple occasions.

The program, however, was mired with all sorts of setbacks from the beginning. The braceros were not treated according to the conditions stipulated by the binational agreement and many were racially discriminated, paid less than they were entitled to, and forced to live in deplorable conditions. Accordingly, more than a dozen strikes took place between 1943 and 1954. One of the most memorable took place in 1943 at Blue Mountain Cannery in Dayton, WA, when hundreds of Mexican braceros joined Japanese-American workers to protest the conditions on local farms just as the pea harvest was about to begin. If the braceros situation was already critical, that of the Japanese seemed worse: most came from Manzanar and other concentration camps that the U.S. government had established for Japanese—out of which two-thirds were U.S. citizens—after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But it was not only this kind of problems, which sometimes bordered on slavery, that plagued the Bracero Program. As U.S. farmers became more dependent on Mexican labor many chose to bypass the program’s complex contract process and directly hire illegal workers. By the time the program finally ended in 1964, “the number of Mexican workers who had entered the U.S. illegally surpassed the nearly 5 million legally-processed braceros.” The Bracero program ushered in a new era of illegal immigration, made possible by the same people who half a century later would cry out for a wall between the two countries.

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1. Robert Longley, “The Bracero Program: When the U.S. Looked to Mexico for Labor”, Thoughtco., May 9, 2021, https://www.thoughtco.com/the-bracero-program-4175798. ↩︎