Jon Christian Ryter
January 27, 2010
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.
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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.