Time - For more than two decades after WWII, the United States beckoned Mexicans to move north to work in American agriculture. To facilitate this migration, the United States formally enlisted the cooperation of the Mexican government, which was to recruit Mexican men and transport them north, proceeding from the understanding that migrants were to be guaranteed certain baseline wages, housing, and food provisions. The treaties outlining this cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico came to be known as the Bracero Program. All told, it brought over four million Mexicans to the United States between 1942 and 1964.
Farmers argued such a program was necessary—at first because World War II shrank the domestic labor pool, as 16 million American men were deployed to fight Nazi Germany and Japan. But once the war ended, farmers emphasized a different rationale to keep the program going: farm labor jobs were so demanding—the hours, the climate, the constant stooping—that white Americans would never fill them. Their economic destiny, amid the U.S. post-war boom, was to join the expanding middle class, ensconced in proliferating suburban developments. Mexicans, on the other hand, were framed as being especially suited to arduous toil.
In reality, growers were attracted to the cost structure of institutionalized Mexican migration. Mexico took care of conveying migrants to the border, sparing growers expenditures on labor recruitment and transportation. Growers were also seduced by the disciplining power they gained. Migrants who engaged in labor organizing could be summarily deported back to Mexico, meaning growers could exploit migrants with less fear it might lead to labor unionism. Millions of migrants subjected themselves to this system to experience life in the United States and earn their livelihood in dollars.
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