Bracero Program

History of Foreign Manual Labor

The first U.S. use of foreign manual labor in the west was by the cattle industry of the 19th century and the fruit orchards of California between 1850 and 1880. Dry land agriculture in the southwest and California required large acreages for cultivation of wheat, and large farms continued to grow as farmers shifted to Mediterranean climate crops such as fruits and vegetables. For laborers, conditions and pay were dismal.

The Chinese were the first source of labor. Two hundred thousand Chinese, barred from work in the cities after they built the railroad, contracted to work in California's agriculture fields until 1882, when they were banned from entering the United States by the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Japanese were the next to work in the fields, but the Mexicans were there, too. Between 1850 and 1880, 55,000 immigrant laborers were working in U.S. agriculture, industry, and the railroads.

The development of the railroad that tied central Mexico to the United States brought in an increase of Mexican workers, with upwards of 60 percent of the railway crews coming from that country. Many of these workers were fleeing worsening living conditions in Porfirian, Mexico, in the years preceding the 1910 Mexican Revolution. They also found work in the United States as miners, ranch hands, and other labor-intensive jobs. Then came the revolution and constant deterioration of the Mexican agricultural sector. Mexican peasants suffered two million deaths during the revolution and the following decades of government neglect.

In 1917, Congress restricted the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexican border but exempted agricultural workers, bringing in over 200,000 laborers between 1917 and 1923. World War I had increased migration, but labor abuses persisted, despite a Mexican model labor contract that delineated the rights and conditions of all migrant workers. In 1924 the United States defined undocumented workers as illegal and established the Border Patrol.

The Great Depression ended the demand for farmworkers. Surplus Mexicans—those with no proof of employment—were deported. Mexican nationals had been recruited for work in mines, railroads, and agriculture during the prosperous years, but the Depression made Mexicans economically superfluous, placing potential burdens on U.S. welfare systems. In California and then in Congress, pressure mounted to deport Mexican nationals, including many who had been recruited in the first place. Some 500,000 Mexicans left the United States during the 1930s, some [Page 389]by deportation, others by voluntary repatriation under pressure.

By the late 1930s, jobs in Mexico were getting increasingly hard to find so Mexican laborers began to look elsewhere. The obvious place to look was the United States, where a shortage of all labor, particularly manual labor, had resulted from America's entry into World War II.

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