Coerced Removal from the Great Depression through Operation Wetback

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how and why voluntary departure and anti-immigrant fear campaigns became the dominant mechanisms of expulsion during the middle decades of the twentieth century. It also reviews how and why immigration officials came to target Mexicans through a fine-grained analysis of the repatriations of the 1930s and Operation Wetback of the mid-1950s. It looks into the voluntary departures between 1927 and 1964 that outnumbered formal deportations nearly nine to one, representing more than 90 percent of the nearly 6.4 million expulsions the federal government recorded. The chapter discusses the coercive mechanisms that enabled authorities to unilaterally execute mass expulsions on an unprecedented scale and on a shoestring budget, bolstering institutional legitimacy within the growing federal bureaucracy. It also describes the effective denial of due process rights to citizens and noncitizens and infliction of trauma on individuals, families, and communities.