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Operation "Wetback"

by Tryan Hartill

As Ike was was going after the presidency, this was how he felt about the situation:

“The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican ‘wetbacks’ to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government.”

And this is what he did:

In 1954, Ike appointed retired Gen. Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Swing, a former West Point classmate and veteran of the 101st Airborne, as the new INS commissioner.
Influential politicians, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D) of Texas and Sen. Pat McCarran (D) of Nevada, favored open borders, and were dead set against strong border enforcement, Brownell said. But General Swing’s close connections to the president shielded him – and the Border Patrol – from meddling by powerful political and corporate interests.
One of Swing’s first decisive acts was to transfer certain entrenched immigration officials out of the border area to other regions of the country where their political connections with people such as Senator Johnson would have no effect.
Then on June 17, 1954, what was called “Operation Wetback” began. Because political resistance was lower in California and Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.
By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.
By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.

Some of the Border Patrol agents that were involved with this are now speaking out, they say we can solve the Southern border issue without huge roundups and fences with a few simple steps:

1. End the current practice of taking captured Mexican aliens to the border and releasing them. Instead, deport them deep into Mexico, where return to the US would be more costly.

2. Crack down hard on employers who hire illegals. Without jobs, the aliens won’t come.

3. End “catch and release” for non-Mexican aliens. It is common for illegal migrants not from Mexico to be set free after their arrest if they promise to appear later before a judge. Few show up.

4. A legalized guest- worker program that permits Mexicans to register in their country for temporary jobs in the US. Eisenhower’s team ran such a program. It permitted up to 400,000 Mexicans a year to enter the US for various agriculture jobs that lasted for 12 to 52 weeks.

Sounds simple enough, but we live in different times and this is just not possible under our current leadership. Fair plans, where every party involved gets a fair shake, is out of the question.

We’ll just call it “a curious relaxation in ethical standards”.

Click stars to rate this article. Rated 4.3 out of five stars.
This article has been rated 6 times.

13 comments on this article (post your own)

1 On Jul 6, 11:40 am, The Guy Who Writes This wrote:

You saw how pissed off people got over $3/Gal of gas…wait until they have to pay $5 for a head of lettuce and when people have to do their own land scaping.

2 On Jul 6, 12:43 pm, Walter Richards wrote:

RE: #1. Forget that. Drop them either in Cuba, or south of the Mexican southern border. Mexico is VERY … “unforgiving” ... of anyone crossing its border illegally. And if they manage to get here from Cuba, good for ‘em. But in the mean time, they can pester Castro.

RE: #2. That’s only 1/2 the reason they come here. The other, of course, is all the freebies. By all means, crack down on the employers … but, at the same time, end the handouts. We also need to enforce banking laws that prohibit loans to illegals.

As to seasonal work – change the laws to once again allow school kids to do the work. And you can bet John Deere could build harvesters, if needed, to replace the illegal pickers. After all, slaves were once “necessary” to keep the price of cotton down.

3 On Jul 6, 01:55 pm, Carrie Bartoldus wrote:

What handouts would those be Mr. Richards? Or did you not believe the articles I wrote, showing that the undocumented workers paid more than 100 fold for any supposed or imagined “handouts,” with the confirmation of irrefutable evidence per Alan Greenspan’s accounting.

I think, to make all of this JUSTICE true, the 1,000,000,000 people (or their descendants) of Hispanic descent that were kidnapped and dropped off deep into central Mexico should sue the crap out of the United States for the lost wages, social security, land, and everything else they were stripped of.

Part of the justice also is that the USA should be responsible to identify each and every person it kidnapped and each and every person that is a descendant so that those people have an opportunity to decide whether or not they wish to persue a course of action aagainst the USA government. As long as we all are so concerned with justice.

Or is justice only afforded to the powerful and the wealthy, be it people or nations?

4 On Jul 6, 03:44 pm, Walter Richards wrote:

Handouts = any gov’t “charity” program they are on. And no, I don’t believe they pay more than they take – based on personal experience with illegals.

5 On Jul 7, 10:33 am, Lee wrote:

Hate groups of the “turner diary” persuasion are not considered terrorists by the feds anymore. What has changed?


Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts

By JOHN KIFNER
Published: July 7, 2006

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists” to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.

“We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. “That’s a problem.”

A Defense Department spokeswoman said officials there could not comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.

The center called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to appoint a task force to study the problem, declare a new zero tolerance policy and strictly enforce it.

The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote “The Turner Diaries,” the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.

The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.

The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.”

Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. “They don’t want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military,” he said, “because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists.”

The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.

The defense secretary at the time, William Perry, said the rules were meant to leave no room for racist and extremist activities within the military. But the report said Mr. Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, Wash., had said that he had provided evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year, but that only two had been discharged. He also said there was an online network of neo-Nazis.

“They’re communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military,” he said. “Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq.”

The report cited accounts by neo-Nazis of their infiltration of the military, including a discussion on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront. “There are others among you in the forces,” one participant wrote. “You are never alone.”

An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.

The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance’s “military unit coordinator.”

“Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman’s war,” he wrote. “It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and ‘cleansed.’ ”

He concluded: “As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood.”

6 On Jul 8, 01:41 am, Carrie Bartoldus wrote:

Handouts = any gov’t “charity” program they are on. And no, I don’t believe they pay more than they take – based on personal experience with illegals.

Well, that is a ludicrous statement! To assume your narrow vision, to state your anecdotal observation of a group of people as more valid than the accounting of Alan Greenspan! We aren’t even talking about Mr. Greenspan’s opinion, we’re talking about the FACT that these people ARE, as a group, contributing to the economy of the United States and are a large part of its individual tax base w/o receiving compensatory services, matched dollar for dollar, to what they put in. However, your anecdotal observance is that the few that you know take more. This is the definition of incongruity.

And how would you even know? How would you know when no matter what they make each year they cannot file taxes so there is no way they can get anything back. Are you filing their taxes for them? Their employers should be paying in to the system via their W-2s, so unemployment is getting ALOT of money, that can NEVER be collected, along w/SAIF, Medicaid, SSI, and all the other little dings that come out of a paycheck. For a fact I KNOW that the only “welfare” benefits adults in Oregon can get are emergency, temporary ones, so there is no way they are getting more then a couple hundred for that, and as a group it has been covered statewide, 100 fold. If you mean school education for their children, subsidized by both state and federal government, again I will take Greenspans accounting over your anecdotal knowledge.

The way to stop the flow of undocumented workers is to be just. Pay the ones the USA kidnapped in the first place. Also, stop the jobs. Do more than just fine the companies that are hiring workers who are undocumented. Arrest the CEOs of these corporations. Make them spend jail time, their the ones earning the big bucks, make them do the time. Completely close down corporations who use undocumented workers. Quit playing patty cake. If the USA is truly serious about stopping “illegal” immigration then stop it at its source, the J-O-B-S that make it worth the risk to come.

Otherwise it is all a good appearance of caring, and the wise ones will wonder -why is this the hot topic all of a sudden?

7 On Jul 9, 06:14 pm, PAT wrote:

ILLEGAL IS ILLEGAL. SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? IF THIS ISSUE IS NOT ‘NIPPED IN THE BUD’ IT TAKES ROOT, AND THEN IT IS HARDER TO ENFORCE. I KNOW MOST ARE HARD WORKING FAMILY PEOPLE, BUT THE OTHER 10-15% SCREW IT UP FOR THEM ALL. I AM ALL IN FAVOR OF HAMMERING THE EMPLOYERS THAT HIRE ILLEGALS, AND THE ‘TROUBLE MAKER ILLEGALS’ SHOULD BE SENT BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM. BUT THE HONEST ONES SHOULD HAVE THE CHANCE TO REGISTER, PAY WHATEREVER PENALTY REQUIRED TO GET “LEGAL” AND BE PROVIDED THE OPPERTUNITY TO BECOME A CITIZEN.THAT, AND OUR BORDERS SHOULD BE ENFORCED TO PREVENT UNWANTEDS AND TO ENCOURAGE HONEST ONES TO CROSS AT APPROVED CROSSINGS WITH THE PROPER PAPERWORK. THEN THE LAWS COULD TAKE EFFECT TO DEAL WITH THE FUTURE ILLEGALE ALIAN INVADERS TO SEND A MESSAGE WE WILL NO LONGER TOLERATE THAT INVASION. PERHAPS, THE OUR GOVERNMENT WILL MAKE IT MANDATORY FOR OUR OWN WELFARE RECEPIANTS TO ‘DO A TOUR OF DUTY’ ENFORCING OUR BORDERS TO ENSURE THAT THEIR BENEFITS WILL SURVIVE FOR THEM, AND NOT BE PAID TO ILLEGALS??

8 On Jul 9, 07:53 pm, Tryan Hartill wrote:

Here is the thing.

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t have laws and then not enforce them. This is the most dangerous part of the whole situation.
It sets a precedent that only some matter.
Either have open borders or limit the flow by enforcing a small, but effective set of laws.
There really isn’t anything worth a damn in between.
But we all know that the D.C. critters will come up with some half-assed scheme that will keep all of the capital in the hands of a few, which is the only goal when policy is written these days.

9 On Jul 11, 11:16 am, Walter Richards wrote:

The reason I don’t believe Greenspan’s numbers is because he is a political flunky covering his ass.

According to the last figures I saw from the GAO, illegals pay $10 billion in taxes … and use $20 billion in services. Why do I believe the GAO? Because, though gov’t bureaucrats, they are consistant “whistleblowers” on gov’t fraud and waste.

As to cracking down on employers … the SSA has said it won’t tell employers when an employee is using fake SSN, because the employee might get fired. Then there’s the threat of the ACLU filing suit for “discrimination”. Until those 2 attitudes change, it’s hard for employers to NOT hire illegals.

10 On Jul 14, 09:37 pm, Wendy Lestina wrote:

The other thing that makes it hard to crack down on employers is that there is no one else available to hire who actually shows up and works.
I would like an accounting of that $20 billion in services, because I believe that a significant part of that figure is public school costs for the children of undocumented workers—and the children may or may not be citizens. Also, much of it is prenatal and immediate postnatal care and nutritional care (again, the children born here are citizens). I have accompanied many an “illegal” worker who was temporarily unemployed and needed food stamps to tide them over, and the only people in their families who qualify for food stamps, on a carefully prorated schedule, are children who were born here.
I have worked with families for four years now, on everything from automobile accidents and deaths (which would have been a workman’s comp claim for a legal worker) to taxes, school registration, weddings, and court appearances and deportations.
I am puzzled by the outraged reaction of “Americans” over this issue. I have received many forwarded vitriolic, ugly e-mails supporting everything just short of genocide or pogroms…and why? Please don’t tell me it’s taxes. No one who sent me those e-mails is living in poverty, or even at the edge of the “working poor.” Whatever their share is of the “cost” of undocumented workers, it’s less than what they spend on wine or their RVs or their new kitchens or their kids’ car, I can assure you.

11 On Oct 29, 10:44 am, Michael L. Smith wrote:

I think all Illegals should be deported,they bring nothing but disease and burden the American Taxpayer with more Debt.It’s hard enough for our people to stay employed let alone support them

12 On Dec 3, 01:01 am, Kyeung Kim wrote:

The absolute most pissed off people in America should be the Chinese, Japanese, Germans, Korean (my people) and others. We do not print these respective languages on cereal boxes and government documents. We do not name schools after their/my heroes and people. I still can’t figure out why in the hell America celebrate CINCO DE MAYO? Did I miss the link? I am also sick of all this crap about civil liberties being stepped on. If I get drunk and get pulled over, I am a fellon. I would be given a huge fine, possibly some jail time and a blemish on my employee file. The illegal is breaking the law every day but we have accepted this? I also do not care if lettuce goes to 5.00 a head. At least it will be called lettuce and not some spanish name. By the way, I learned English in 3 years, what the hell is your problem?

13 On Aug 28, 07:03 pm, hosa hermanes wrote:

I read all your stuff without prejudice. All I can say is Mr Swing should be in office right now so we can round up all the illeagle people in this country not just from mexico but from all of the world and if that dosnt work then lets kill them all and let god sort them out oh yeah hes illeagle too. By the way I want to give my time to patrol the border if anyone could help me out let me know thanks. Dont let government block the efforts of people like Tom Tancrado vote for Tom for US persident

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