Operation Wetback
Friday, January 27, 2010
By Jon Christian Ryter
NewsWithViews.com
Three
times in the history of the United States US Presidents took what would
today be considered a politically unpopular position by rounding up
and deporting illegal aliens to create jobs for US Citizens. The first
attempt occurred shortly after the banker-induced Stock Market Crash
of 1929 when President Herbert Hoover ordered the round-up and deportation
of illegals by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. The program,
dubbed "Operation Wetback," was carried out without
any protests from US government-funded Hispanic advocacy groups—since
there were none. The Clintonesque-liberal media political correctness
dictionary was still 63 years in the future and the communist-left FDR
(America's white Barack Obama) federal bureaucracy was still some 4-years
in the making.
The
Hoover roundup sent over one million Mexican illegal aliens packing—freeing
up jobs for out-of-work US citizens. In addition, some 47 thousand Mexican
nationals who were in the country legally, with visas, also opted to
leave due to rising animosity by out-of-work Americans for any foreigner
in the United States with a job. Operation Wetback was launched
in the Southwest: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. But deportees
also came from Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and New York. Since Mexican
illegals tried hard to remain under the radar screen, few of them traveled
far beyond the border States, thus we can assume that most of the deportees
from the States north of the Mason-Dixon line were legal residents.
During the Hoover years, immigration to he United States was virtually
stopped.
The
Hoover deportations caused an outcry from the Mexican government demanding
to know what gave Hoover the right to deny Mexican citizens the right
to jobs in the United States under what was called the "Good
Neighbor Policy." At the end of World War II, President Harry
S. Truman was faced with the same problem that plagued Hoover in 1931—no
jobs for US citizens. Under Roosevelt's Public Law 78 agri-giants, who
needed dirt cheap labor were allowed to import labor from Mexico even
though 25% of the American labor force was out of work—and in
the dust bowl farm states, unemployment stood at over 70%. Under Public
Law 78, when work contracts were fulfilled, the employer was responsible,
under law, to transport the migrant worker back to Mexico. As thousands
of migrant workers simply vanished into the human landscape, taking
what few jobs were available from American workers, Truman's solution
was to issue a terse public statement admonishing Congress, and telling
the American people that Congress assured him they would fix the problem.
(Yeah, we can see how well the buck stopped at his desk.)
During
the prosperity of the war years (1943-54), illegal alien immigration
increased by 6,000%, triggering Operation Wetback II and III.
In 1954, the INS estimated that illegals—not legal migrant workers—were
crossing the US border at the rate of one million per year and that
they were penetrating much deeper into the nation that in preceding
decades because the INS concentrated their efforts only in the border
States. The INS, on orders from the White House, went through the motions
of rounding up both illegal aliens and migrant workers who overstayed
their visas. Truman deported about 30 thousand Mexicans during his seven
years in office.
Truman's
blamed his poor record on guarding the border on Public Law 78, enacted
by FDR's 73rd Congress and S.984, which was enacted by the 82nd Congress
(that expanded the use of migratory workers from Mexico) and made it
more difficult to expel illegals under Woodrow Wilson's "Good Neighbor
Policy" with Mexico.
Truman
became one of the three "deportion presidents" not for deporting
Mexicans under Operation Wetback II, but under Presidential
Proclamation 2655, an edict requiring the deportation of potentially
dangerous WWII detainees from the Axis nations. Deported were several
thousand men, women and children of German and Italian ancestry who
spend most of World War II in internment camps. It appears that only
about 900 Pervian Japanese farmers, held by the US government in that
country, were deported to Japan at the end of war.
Eisenhower
was stuck will cleaning up the mess created by the open door polices
73rd and 82nd Congresses. As Eisenhower took office, illegal immigrants
were now crossing at the rate of about 3 million per year. When Eisenhower
assumed the Oval Office, illegal alien migration was one of his top
priorities. He attributed the lax attitude of Congress about illegal
immigration with a relaxation of Congressional ethical standards. A
Truman-initiated study on Mexican migratory labor in 1950 found that
cotton growers in Texas paid migrant workers about half what a US citizen
was paid to chop cotton. As Eisenhower met with current and retired
border patrol agents he learned that the big ranchers and farmers who
relied on the cheap migrant labor had friends "in high places"
in government. Agents were subtlety warned not to arrest the workers
employed by what turned out to be powerful campaign donors. When that
didn't work, they were very bluntly told to back off, or they were simply
transferred where they would become someone else's problem. The two
most influential Senators who blocked the efforts of the INS to do their
job were then Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson [D-TX] and Sen. Pat McCarran [D-NV].
Eisenhower
hired Gen. Joseph May Swing to head the INS and with units of the US
National Guard, began what history now views as a quasi-military operation
to find and seize illegal immigrants As hard as Johnson tried to get
rid of Swing, Eisenhower protected his man in Immigration. On July 15,
1953, the first day of Operation Wetback III, Swing's men arrested
4,800 illegals. After the first day, the INS averaged the seizure of
1,100 illegals per day. The INS devoted 700 men to the project, hoping
to scare enough more illegals to flee back across the border. The INS
claims that under Eisenhower's Operation Wetback, they deported
1,300,000 illegals. The open-border social progressives insist that
all three phases of Operation Wetback were dismal flops, and
that only a few thousand people—all of whom, they claim, were
legal residents—were deported.
It
was Truman who pushed the Federal Immigration and National Act of
1952 through Congress in the closing days of his administration.
Under Section 8 USC 1324[a](1)(A)[iv][b](iii) any US citizen that knowingly
assists an illegal alien, provides them with employment, food, water
or shelter has committed a felony. City, county or State officials that
declare their jurisdictions to be "Open Cities, Counties or States
are subject to arrest; as are law enforcement agencies who chose not
to enforce this law. Police officers who ignore officials who violate
Section 8 USC 1324[a](1)(A)[iv][b](iii) are committing a Section 274
federal felony. Furthermore, according to Federal Immigration and
National Act of 1952, if you live in a city, county or State that
refuses to enforce the law for whatever reason, the officials making
those rules are financially liable for any crime committed within their
jurisdiction by an illegal alien.
We
now have approximately 25 million illegal aliens in the United States
(even though the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that
number at around 7.3 million). It's time to demand, under threat of
impeachment, that Barack Hussein Obama launch Operation Wetback
IV, and complete the job started by Hoover and Eisenhower.
Although
they think they are, the President of the United States (legitimate
or illegitimate), and the members of Congress are not above the law
of the land. If Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV] and
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] and any other member of Congress refuses
to enforce Section 8 USC 1324[a](1)(A)[iv][b](iii), they need to be
impeached for committing a federal felony, tried and removed from office,
and then placed on trial in a US federal court (not of their choosing),
and sentenced to federal prison for harboring illegals.
Furthermore,
the United States needs to seize all of the assets of those individuals
so that the people of the United States who have been robbed, raped
or otherwise injured by an illegal alien can be made financially whole
from their asset pool.
Jon Christian Ryter is the pseudonym of a former newspaper reporter with the Parkersburg, WV Sentinel. He authored a syndicated newspaper column, Answers From The Bible, from the mid-1970s until 1985. Answers From The Bible was read weekly in many suburban markets in the United States.
Today, Jon is an advertising executive with the Washington Times. His website, www.jonchristianryter.com has helped him establish a network of mid-to senior-level Washington insiders who now provide him with a steady stream of material for use both in his books and in the investigative reports that are found on his website.
E-Mail: BAFFauthor@aol.com
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