I’m going to examine the action of deportation during the great depression and answer questions associated with it. The questions are if whether or not deportation was justified during the years of 1929-1939. Was it a practical solution and whether or not there were problems with the plan? I will be providing insight on the questions and start with the first query while following with remaining two after.
I do not think that the idea of a mass deportation, commonly referred to as repatriation, was or will ever be justified in this context. I feel that when you look at how they went about this deportation, it was completely out of fear and spite. The great depression caused a mass amount of hostility towards immigrants and Mexican Americans like the Martinez family that had to live in a tent near the town of Clovis, just because their employer refused to pay for housing for those seasonal farm workers. (p 63) This caused special regulations to be put in play regarding employment. Many politicians felt that the immigrants may cause civil unrest in the midst of this economic climate and many …show more content…
citizens felt that they (Mexicans) were standing in the way of receiving employment. In all actuality, no one wanted to approach the problem at the source and attempted to use Mexicans as a scape goat.
This practicality of deportation concept was severely lacking but was carried out just as swiftly on the Mexican-American public.
More than 400,000 “immigrants” were pressured or deported to Mexico but half of them were natural born citizens of the U.S. Los Angeles lost a third of its Mexican population along with Mexican-born Texans through scare tactics, intimidation and even minor captivity. The costs associated with this movement greatly outweighed the money or jobs they were attempting to gain from deportation. Families were split up leaving underage dependents to be taken care of by the Federal Government through food, clothing, shelter, relief etc. The expenses of transporting, along with everything involved with deportation, ate up the budget and only made the country’s economic status worse (Repatriation During the Great
Depression).
Works Cited
Guerin-Gonzales, Camille. At Mexican workers and American dreams: Rutgers University Press, 1996
Repatriation During the Great Depression (N/A) Digital History. Retrieved from: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=3&psid=3699Ned H .Hi Theresa,
During the depression, immigrants have been deprived of the same protections accorded to U.S. citizens, simple things like the right to an attorney and to request bail. Many aspects of the deportation system were drawn from the forced removal of indigenous people and Fugitive Slave laws, as well as decades of racist laws aimed at deporting Chinese laborers after they helped build the nation’s railroads., the deportation machine has grown larger in recent years, especially During the Obama administration. The INS indiscriminately consumed criminals and non-criminals alike, be they unauthorized immigrants or long-time legal permanent residents. If the government wants to really deport all 11 million illegals, it would probably take hundreds of thousands of buses. Even if the government had the will to do such a huge operation, it would be impossible to locate most of these millions of illegals.