I hate to jump on the band wagon on Donald Trump’s rhetoric about sending illegals back to where they came from, but the subject is vital to the survival of the United States. Dealing with illegals is not new. Three presidents before, Herbert C. Hoover, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower dealt with illegals from Mexico. None of these three signed laws that deported illegals, but their rhetoric was enough to cause a reverse migration to occur. Eisenhower, however, led Operation Wetback and deported two million illegals. It took several years, to carry out but he did it to nurse the USA back to normalcy after a prolonged war.
Whether or not Donald Trump can deliver on his promise to deport illegals remains in the future. History suggests that it can be done, but with great effort and cost. The question is whether the cost has a payback?
A friend sent me this article from the Denver Post. I looked it up, it is legitimate and unaltered.
WHAT IF THEY LEFT
Considering the Denver Post is a very liberal paper I’m surprised they published this. This shows how the hiring of illegals is false economic practice.
Tina Griego is a Free-Lance reporter for the Denver Post. She writes some really good stuff and she is a strong advocate for LEGAL immigration Homework on issues is part of her make-up and fabric.
What if they left? Somebody really did their homework on this one. Best on the subject to date. It does not have a political slant to it, JUST THE FACTS: Not Democratic, not Republican, not liberal and not conservative!
What if 20 Million Illegal Aliens Vacated America?
I, Tina Griego, journalist for the Denver Rocky Mountain News wrote a column titled, “Mexican Visitor’s Lament.” I interviewed Mexican journalist Evangelina Hernandez while visiting Denver last week. Hernandez said, “Illegal aliens pay rent, buy groceries, buy clothes. What happens to your country’s economy if 20 million people go away?”
Hmmm, I thought, what would happen? So I did my due diligence, buried my nose as a reporter into the FACTS I found below. It’s a good question… it deserves an honest answer.
Over 80% of Americans demand secured borders and illegal migration stopped. But what would happen if all 20 million or more vacated America? The answers I found may surprise you!
In California, if 3.5 million illegal aliens moved back to Mexico, it would leave an extra $10.2 billion to spend on overloaded school systems, bankrupt hospitals and overrun prisons. It would leave highways cleaner, safer and less congested. Everyone could understand one another as English became the dominant language again.
In Colorado, 500,000 illegal migrants, plus their 300,000 kids and grandchildren would move back “home,” mostly to Mexico. That would save Colorado an estimated $2 billion (other experts say $7 billion) annually in taxes that pay for schooling, medical, social-services and incarceration costs.
It means 12,000 gang members would vanish out of Denver alone.
Colorado would save more than $20 million in prison costs, and the terror that those 7,300 alien criminals set upon local citizens. Denver Officer Don Young and hundreds of Colorado victims would not have suffered death, accidents, rapes and other crimes by illegals.
Denver Public Schools would not suffer a 67% dropout/flunk rate because of thousands of illegal alien students speaking 41 different languages. At least200,000 vehicles would vanish from our gridlocked cities in Colorado. Denver’s 4% unemployment rate would vanish as our working poor would gain jobs at a living wage.
In Florida, 1.5 million illegals would return the Sunshine State back to America, the rule of law, and English.
In Chicago, Illinois, 2.1 million illegals would free up hospitals, schools, prisons and highways for a safer, cleaner and more crime-free experience.
If 20 million illegal aliens returned ‘home,’ the U.S. economy would return to the rule of law. Employers would hire legal American citizens at a living wage. Everyone would pay their fair share of taxes because they wouldn’t be working off the books. That would result in an additional $401 billion in IRS income taxes collected annually, and an equal amount for local, state and city coffers.
No more push ‘1’ for Spanish or ‘2’ for English. No more confusion in American schools that now must contend with over 100 languages that degrade the educational system for American kids. Our overcrowded schools would lose more than two million illegal alien kids at a cost of billions in ESL and free breakfasts and lunches.
We would lose 500,000 illegal criminal alien inmates at a cost of more than $1.6 billion annually. That includes 15,000 MS-13 gang members who distribute $130 billion in drugs annually would vacate our country.
In cities like L.A., 20,000 members of the ‘ 18th Street Gang’ would vanish from our nation. No more Mexican forgery gangs for ID theft from Americans! No more foreign rapists and child molesters!
Losing more than 20 million people would clear up our crowded highways and gridlock. Cleaner air and less drinking and driving American deaths by illegal aliens!
America’s economy is drained. Taxpayers are harmed. Employers get rich. Over $80 billion annually wouldn’t return to the aliens’ home countries by cash transfers. Illegal migrants earned half that money untaxed, which further drains America’s economy which currently suffers a $20 trillion debt. $20 trillion debt!!!
At least 400,000 anchor babies would not be born in our country, costing us $109 billion per year per cycle. At least 86 hospitals in California, Georgia and Florida would still be operating instead of being bankrupt out of existence because illegals pay nothing via the EMTOLA Act.
Americans wouldn’t suffer thousands of TB and hepatitis cases rampant in our country – brought in by illegals unscreened at our borders.
Our cities would see 20 million less people driving, polluting and grid locking our cities. It would also put the ‘progressives’ on the horns of a dilemma; illegal aliens and their families cause 11% of our greenhouse gases.
Over one million of Mexico’s poorest citizens now live inside and along our border from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California, in what the New York Times called, ‘colonias’ or new neighborhoods. Trouble is, those living areas resemble Bombay and Calcutta where grinding poverty, filth, diseases, drugs, crimes, no sanitation and worse. They live without sewage, clean water, streets, roads, electricity, or any kind of sanitation.
The New York Times reported them to be America’s new ‘ Third World ‘ inside our own country. Within 20 years, at their current growth rate, they expect 20 million residents of those colonias. (I’ve seen them personally in Texas and Arizona; it’s sickening beyond anything you can imagine.)
By enforcing our laws, we could repatriate them back to Mexico. We should invite 20 million aliens to go home, fix their own countries and/or make a better life in Mexico. We already invite a million people into our country legally annually, more than all other countries combined. We cannot and must not allow anarchy at our borders, more anarchy within our borders and growing lawlessness at every level in our nation. It’s time to stand up for our country, our culture, our civilization and our way of life.
Interesting Statistics!
Here are 14 reasons illegal aliens should vacate America, and I hope they are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them:
1. $14 billion to $22 billion dollars are spent each year on welfare to illegal aliens (that’s Billion with a ‘B’)
3. $7.5 billion dollars are spent each year on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
4. $12 billion dollars are spent each year on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they still cannot speak a word of English
5. $27 billion dollars are spent each year for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
6. $3 Million Dollars ‘PER DAY’ is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. That’s $1.2 Billion a year.
7. 28% percent of all federal prison inmates are illegal aliens.
8. $190 billion dollars are spent each year on illegal aliens for welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. < http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0610/29/ldt.01.html >
9. $200 billion dollars per year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.
11. During the year 2005, there were 8 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our southern border with as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from other terrorist countries. Over 10,000 of those were middle-eastern terrorists. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin, crack, guns, and marijuana crossed into the U.S. from the southern border.
12. The National Policy Institute, estimates that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion, or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.
13. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $65 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin, to their families and friends.
14. The dark side of illegal immigration: Nearly one million sex crimes are committed by illegal immigrants in the United States!
Total cost a whopping $538.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR!http://www.denverpost.com/ci_15247891
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Excerpted from FactCheck.org.
The true history of presidential policy toward illegal immigration, and of deportations, is neither as simple nor as successful as claimed.
Hoover did not use immigration policy to “create jobs” and never “ordered the deportation of all illegal aliens.” During his four-year presidency, roughly 121,000 persons were officially deported or induced to leave through threat of deportation, according to our analysis of official statistics. (We explain our sources and analytical methods fully in the “Where We Got The Numbers” section below.)
Truman did not try to “create jobs for returning veterans” by ordering deportations. In fact, he signed legislation protecting the rights of Mexican migrant laborers recruited legally to help harvest U.S. crops, and was unable to win congressional approval of measures to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants. During his nearly eight years in office, about 3.4 million were deported or left “voluntarily” under threat of deportation.
Eisenhower did not deport 13 million Mexicans. Only one-tenth that number was ever claimed by the federal officials in charge of “Operation Wetback,” and even that figure is criticized as inflated by guesswork. Officially, just over 2.1 million were recorded as having been deported or having departed under threat of deportation.
Historian Mae M. Ngai calls the message “a most interesting distortion of history,” and our research backs that up. Ngai, now at Columbia University, told us that “none of these presidents presided over any general deportation campaign.”
So this e-mail’s claim that a president could “sure do it today” — that is, easily deport all the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S. — is a conclusion based on false evidence. No relocation effort nearly so large has ever been attempted, let alone accomplished “in two years” as this e-mail states.
Hoover
According to Marian Smith at the USCIS Office of the Historian: “There is no evidence that Herbert Hoover ordered the deportation of all illegal aliens.” And Matthew T. Schaefer, archivist at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, told us in an e-mail message: “President Hoover never issued a statement, executive order or proclamation ordering the deportation of all illegal immigrants.”
Hoover took office in 1929, when the very concept of “illegal immigration” was fairly new. For most of its previous history, the U.S. had encouraged immigration and threw up few legal barriers. The first permanent quotas on immigration had been put in place by the Immigration Act of 1924. And even that law did not apply to Mexico, or to any other country in the Western Hemisphere, because the U.S. didn’t want to alienate its neighbors, and needed Mexican laborers to help with the harvest. It did completely exclude immigrants from Asia, however, and set limits on immigration from Europe.
The Hoover administration, then as now, struggled to enforce the law. His labor secretaries worked to deport criminal illegal immigrants and public charges. (The Immigration and Naturalization Service, predecessor to the present-day USCIS, was in the Department of Labor at the time.) But official statistics show that the total number of formal deportations was less than 72,000 during Hoover’s time in office, plus another roughly 49,000 who were recorded as having left “voluntarily” rather than face official deportation proceedings. As nearly as we can gauge from the official record, 121,067 persons were deported or induced to leave during Hoover’s four-year term.
Where We Got The Numbers
We drew these figures from official statistics published by the INS for each fiscal year. The Hoover figures are drawn from table 24A on page 179 of the “Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service” for fiscal year 1952. The historical table details numbers of “Aliens Deported and Aliens Departing Voluntarily Under Proceedings; Years ended June 30, 1892 to 1952.”
The fiscal-year figures don’t match Hoover’s term exactly, because fiscal years ended on June 30 in those years, and Hoover served from March 4, 1929, to March 4, 1933. So we added together totals for fiscal years 1930 through 1932 — the full fiscal years that fell entirely within Hoover’s term, plus pro-rated portions of fiscal year 1929 and 1933. For example, since Hoover was in office for 118 days of fiscal year 1929, we assigned to him 32.3 percent of the fiscal year totals.
For Truman and Eisenhower, we used the corresponding table (Table 23, page 55) from the INS annual report for 1961. We followed the same method for each to pro-rate figures for partial fiscal years. In the latter document “voluntary” departures are described instead as “Aliens required to depart,” a somewhat more accurate term.
The ‘Mexican Repatriation’
It’s true that the years of the Great Depression saw an exodus of many persons of Mexican heritage — including some who were U.S. citizens. A report in USA Today, published in 2006, stated: “Tens of thousands, and possibly more than 400,000, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were pressured — through raids and job denials — to leave the USA during the Depression.” That report echos the findings of a 2006 book, “Decade of betrayal: Mexican repatriation in the 1930s,” by Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez. Those authors described “a frenzy of anti-Mexican hysteria” that included “mass deportation roundups and repatriation drives.”
It is also true that federal immigration officials sometimes used legally dubious tactics in those days. A report to the 1931 Wickersham Commission, taking note of some “objectionable features” of the deportation system, described immigration officials “forcibly detaining groups of people many of whom are aliens lawfully in this country, or even United States citizens, without any warrant of arrest or search.” The report added: “It is often customary for the immigrant inspectors to jail suspects, however apprehended, without a warrant of arrest or any other kind of a warrant.” And it concluded, “The apprehension and examination of supposed aliens are often characterized by methods unconstitutional, tyrannic, and oppressive.”
But it should be noted that it was Hoover who appointed the commission that brought these abuses to light, and that the descriptions of a “Mexican repatriation” during the Depression don’t put the blame exclusively, or even predominately, on federal officials. They also cite actions by state and local officials, “job denials” by private employers, and pressure by labor unions. In fact, historian Ngai told us in an e-mail message that Mexicans who were sent back “were repatriated by local city and county welfare authorities (e.g. Los Angeles, Detroit), not the federal government.”
Hoover archivist Schaefer backed that up in his message to us, saying that Hoover himself did not push for deportation:
Hoover archivist Schaefer: The push for deportation arose locally. Los Angeles and California are probably the best known cases. LA paid transportation costs to ‘encourage’ ‘voluntary repatriation’ succeeding in sending tens of thousands of people back to Mexico in 1930 and 1931.
Hoover thought the very idea of restricting immigration from Mexico was futile, Schaefer said. “Hoover saw quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere as unenforceable, so he opposed efforts to secure such quotas.”
Truman
The claim about Truman is also not supported by the historical record. According to Tammy Kelly, archivist at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo.: “We have not found evidence that President Truman deported over two million illegal immigrants to create jobs for Americans.”
Truman struggled with the problem of migrant farm workers — both legal and illegal. On June 3, 1950, he set up a Presidential Commission on Migratory Labor and asked it to look into (among other things) “the extent of illegal migration of foreign workers into the United States” and whether laws could be “strengthened and improved to eliminate such illegal migration.” The commission ultimately recommended that the country should rely primarily on domestic farm workers, not immigrants, to perform farm labor. On July 13, 1951, Truman approved legislation to facilitate the employment of legal migrants to harvest U.S. crops, but also expressed a desire to reduce illegal immigration from Mexico and said additional measures were needed. “These people are coming to our country in phenomenal numbers – and at an increasing rate,” Truman said. “Everyone suffers from the presence of these illegal immigrants in the community.”
But the legislation Truman signed had to do with keeping legal guest workers flowing across the border to harvest U.S. crops. According to Truman archivist Kelly, the new legislation established reception centers to house temporarily legal immigrants from Mexico while the government found employment for them. Truman said in signing it, “We must make sure that contract wages will in fact be paid, that transportation within this country and adequate reception centers for Mexican workers will in fact be provided.” He said it was necessary that the U.S. government “stand behind all contracts and guarantee performance in the future, if any more Mexican citizens are to be legally recruited for work in the United States.”
It’s true that many were deported or induced to return “voluntarily” during the Truman years. We figure, based on the official historical tables, that more than 127,000 were formally deported and more than 3.2 million left voluntarily rather than face deportation — a total of nearly 3.4 million.
But the deportations and quasi-voluntary departures had nothing to do with creating jobs for returning veterans, as claimed in the chain e-mail. As Truman noted in a news conference on Oct. 3, 1946, most returning WWII veterans were quickly absorbed into the booming postwar economy. “Ten million veterans are gainfully employed today, compared with only 2 million at work on V-J Day–a gain of 8 million jobs for veterans in a year,” Truman boasted. He said 900,000 veterans remained unemployed, and that “is still higher than any of us like to see it.” But he drew no connection with illegal immigration.
Truman actually wanted to do more than he was able to stem illegal immigration. He said the bill he signed didn’t go far enough. He said he would ask Congress for stricter sanctions against employers who harbor illegal aliens, and would also seek clear authority for INS inspectors to raid workplaces without search warrants. “Congress did not pass the legislation Truman wanted, however, and the illegal immigration problem was passed onto future generations,” Kelly stated to us via e-mail.
Eisenhower
Truman’s successor pushed harder, presiding over what was officially called “Operation Wetback,” a vigorous, federally led effort to remove illegal Mexican immigrants from the Southwest. (The term “wetback” is a disparaging term applied to Mexicans who swam or waded across the Rio Grande River — and today is considered an ethnic slur.)
But it’s simply not true that “Eisenhower deported 13 million.” The actual number expelled by “Operation Wetback” is no more than one-tenth of that figure, even counting many who were not formally deported at all. “The claim that Eisenhower deported 13 million immigrants must be the result of a typo or some other error,” USCIS historian Smith told us. Since the officially claimed figure was 1.3 million, it is possible that the e-mail’s author simply dropped a decimal point, inflating the figure ten-fold.
The “Handbook of Texas,” sponsored by the Texas State Historical Association, says in its entry on “Operation Wetback” that the number forced to leave is “probably less than 1.3 million”:
Handbook of Texas: The INS claimed as many as 1,300,000, though the number officially apprehended did not come anywhere near this total. The INS estimate rested on the claim that most aliens, fearing apprehension by the government, had voluntarily repatriated themselves before and during the operation. … Many commentators have considered these figure[s] to be exaggerated.
We also contacted the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas. Director Karl Weissenbach told us his staff had researched the library’s holdings to determine the veracity of the 13 million claim and could find nothing to support it. Indeed, the staff turned up a report to Cabinet dated Jan. 26, 1955, that suggests a much lower total:
Report to the Cabinet, Jan. 26, 1955: [A] year ago the Border Patrol was faced with the disheartening task of apprenhending and expelling some 3,000 ‘wetbacks’ each day, apprehensions now are running slightly less than 300 daily.
“Operation Wetback” lasted only a few months. It was announced June 9, 1954, and focused initially on California and Arizona. According to the 1954 Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, (page 31) federal officials set up roadblocks and stopped trains at points at some distance north of the border. Some 800 Border Patrol agents, using jeeps, trucks, automobiles and spotter airplanes, used a system described officially as “blocking it off and mopping it up.” Agents quickly expanded the operation to the entire state of California, including industrial areas as well as agricultural areas. By mid-July, 1954, the operation was extended to Texas. And it eventually encompassed “mopping up” activities in northern cities as well, according to the 1955 Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service:
INS, 1955: These activities were followed by mopping up operations in the interior and special mobile force units are continuing to discover illegal aliens who have eluded initial sweeps through such cities as Spokane, Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis, which removed 20,174 illegal Mexican aliens from industrial jobs.
Mexican nationals were shipped back using trucks, buses, planes and ships. According to the Texas State Historical Society, the use of ships was discontinued after some drownings caused a public outcry in Mexico.
Handbook of Texas: Ships were a preferred mode of transport because they carried the illegal workers farther away from the border than did buses, trucks, or trains. The boat lift continued until the drowning of seven deportees who jumped ship from the Mercurio provoked a mutiny and led to a public outcry against the practice in Mexico. Other aliens, particularly those apprehended in the Midwest states, were flown to Brownsville and sent into Mexico from there.
The ‘Problem No Longer Exists’
As we said, the operation lasted only a few months, not the “two years” claimed in the e-mail message. “The operation trailed off in the fall of 1954 as INS funding began to run out,” according to the Texas State Historical Society. Nevertheless, INS officials later claimed the operation had been a complete success and that the U.S.-Mexico border “has been secured.”
INS, 1955: The so-called ‘wetback’ problem no longer exists. … [T]his is no longer, as in the past, a problem in border control. The border has been secured.
More than half a century later, history has shown that official claim to be a fantasy, just like nearly all the claims made by this chain e-mail. In fact, about the only true statement in it is that “we never hear about” the events it describes. That’s because they never happened.
— Brooks Jackson
Sources
U.S. Department of Justice, “Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service” Table 24A. “Aliens Deported and Aliens Departing Voluntarily Under Proceedings; Years ended June 30, 1892 to 1952.” 10 Nov 1952.
U.S. Department of Justice, “Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service” Table 23. “Aliens Apprehended, Aliens Deported, and Aliens Required to Depart; Years ended June 30, 1892 to 1961” 1961.
Koch, Wendy, “U.S. urged to apologize for 1930s deportations” USA Today. 5 Apr 2006.
Balderrama, Francisco E.and Raymond Rodríguez, “Decade of betrayal: Mexican repatriation in the 1930s” University of New Mexico Press. 2006.
Oppenheimer, Reuben “The Administration of the Deportation Laws of the United States; Report to the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement” (Wickersham Commission) U.S. Government Printing Office. 1931.
Koestler, Fred L. “Operation Wetback” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association Undated, accessed 30 Jun 2010.
Ngai, Mae M. Email message to FactCheck.org. 22 Jun 2010.
Weissenbach, Karl. Director, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. Email message to FactCheck.org, 11 Jun 2010.
Schaefer, Matthew T. Archivist, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. Email message to FactCheck.org, 11 Jun 2010.
Kelly, Tammy. Archivist, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. Email message to FactCheck.org, 11 Jun 2010.
Smith, Marian, Historian, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security. Email message to FactCheck.org, 25 Jun 2010.
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