KNITTING OF AMERICAS PREDICTED BY DEWEY:
Governor Tells Latin Group of Dwindling Barriers
Governor Dewey ... made a prediction that the barriers of language differences between the United States and the Central and South American Nations “will soon dwindle if not disappear entirely.”
“The barriers of distance are well on the way to being abolished, thanks to the development of air transport,” he went on. “Actually, there will be far more in common between us of the North and you of South and Central America than ever before.
“I look forward to the day when it shall become a matter of course for our young people to learn Spanish and Portuguese before they study any other foreign tongues.”
***
Is this a Jeb Bush campaign release, or from 1944? I think Gov. Dewey is thinking about importing Latin Americans to do the “jobs Americans won’t do,” post-War. This fits with his assumption that Americans will need to learn Spanish or Portuguese, rather than Latin Americans’ learning English: he expects the well-off, employer-class students to be able to learn the language of their servants, not the other way around.
The white elites of Latin America are happy to cooperate in the plan to ship their excess dark-skinned citizenry to El Norte.
There are some differences in the situation in 1944, but what was done then did lay the groundwork for our problems.
During the first half of the 20th century, our border with Mexico was fairly porous. People could travel across the border with relative ease and immigration was not really an issue, as a lot of historic Mexican families in Texas and the Southwest lived on both sides of the border. Also, Mexico had a fairly stable population.
World War II began the change to the new situation we see today. The United States war economy became a massive black hole for labor, any labor. The young men went to war, and “Rosie the Riveter” worked in the airplane factories, munitions plants and shipyards. The economics of the war drove large internal migrations. For example, the Firestone plant here in Noblesville Indiana (since shut down) was a war plant. To get the work force, Firestone went down to Lee County Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia. Hundreds of hillbillys came north, and to this day, Noblesville is referred to as “Nobletucky.”
The same economic forces led to the massive immigration of unskilled Mexican farm workers. The porous border allowed them to come north, and since America needed the workers, there were no questions asked. Nobody wondered whether or not they would stay after the war. I think it was sort of assumed that they would just go back to Mexico, but instead they stayed and more or less replaced all the Okies in the California produce fields. And as with every other ethnic group that came to the United States, they invited the relatives from the old country.
So the pattern of freely entering the United States for work was set, and then Mexico’s population exploded in the 1960s. By the 1980s, there were literally millions of Mexicans wanting work, and they came here to find it. Why not? That’s exactly what their fathers and grandfathers had done, no questions asked.
But this time it was different. Now instead of thousands, it was millions. And not all of them came to work. Many came to sponge off LBJ’s great society. And they did not assimilate as other immigrant groups had done. The ties to the old country were not completely severed; instead of having to cross an ocean, they just had to cross a shallow river.
Dewey doesn’t see all this happening. He sees a dynamic of the porous border not changing. A few thousand Mexicans come to the United States to do physical labor, a few thousand Americans go south to do business in Mexico. Seems like a fair deal. It just didn’t turn out that way.