Posted on 09/09/2015 8:31:58 AM PDT by Hojczyk
WASHINGTON — George W. Bush isn't the first Republican president to face a full-blown immigration crisis on the US-Mexican border.
Fifty-three years ago, when newly elected Dwight Eisenhower moved into the White House, America's southern frontier was as porous as a spaghetti sieve. As many as 3 million illegal migrants had walked and waded northward over a period of several years for jobs in California, Arizona, Texas, and points beyond.
President Eisenhower cut off this illegal traffic. He did it quickly and decisively with only 1,075 United States Border Patrol agents – less than one-tenth of today's force. The operation is still highly praised among veterans of the Border Patrol.
General Eisenhower, who was gearing up for his run for the presidency, said "Amen" to Senator Fulbright's proposal. He then quoted a report in The New York Times, highlighting one paragraph that said: "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."
Years later, the late Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower's first attorney general, said in an interview with this writer that the president had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration when he took office.
America "was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale," Mr. Brownell said. "When I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without restraint."
Although an on-and-off guest-worker program for Mexicans was operating at the time, farmers and ranchers in the Southwest had become dependent on an additional low-cost, docile, illegal labor force of up to 3 million, mostly Mexican, laborers.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
We believed in ourselves and our country back then. I hope one day enough Americans do again, and it’s not too late.
The crisis Bush faced was caused by him through his talk of "Comprehensive Immigration Reform", aka "Shamnesty" and through is relaxing of border and interior immigration enforcement.
Worksite arrests of illegal aliens fell some 97 percent, from 2,859 in 1999 to 159 in 2004. Investigations targeting employers of illegal aliens fell more than 70 percent, from 7,637 in 1997 to 2,194 in 2003. Arrests on job sites fell—precipitously, from 17,554 in 1997 to 445 in 2003. Fines levied for immigration-law violations fell from 778 in 1997 to 124 in 2003. Notices of intent to fine employers fell from 865 in 1997 to just 3 in 2004.
” Operation Wet Back
Americans weren’t at all politically correct in 1959. Americans were still grieving our war dead. They would have laughed at a gutless term like “politically correct” used by communists an socialists.
And Mexico was the Sweden of North America, `laying back in the weeds’ during the war, doing nothing but hoping we gringos got whacked.
The Germans had negotiated with them for return of `Aztlan’ in exchange for who knows what—sabotage? Forays into our border states, like 20-30 years earlier?
Go Trump!
Problem: employers = donor class who demand open borders for their workers and welfare for their consumers
Correction. He didn't face anything. He facilitated it. There's a big difference.
Absolutely! All these people saying that we can’t “round up” 20M illegals is a bunch of straw-man nonsense.
If we were to enforce the law with employers AND make it against the law for landlords to rent to illegals, coupled with severe penalties for violations, if the illegals can’t work and can’t find a place to live, they will leave on their own...
done.
Is this the wall both Cruz and Trump envision? Law and order as opposed to ‘brick and steel’?
Tierra del Fuego is even better; a much longer walk!
Cesar Chavez: Anti-Immigration to His Union Core
On February 7, 1979, the New York Times ran a story in which the paper reported that Chavez, during a UFW-led seven-month-long strike outside Yuma, Arizona, five years earlier, had the union establish a “100-mile-long ‘wet line’ of military-style tents to halt the flow of illegal aliens across the border.”
What happened? Said the Times of a strike led by Cesar’s cousin Manuel Chavez: “… hundreds of Mexican aliens were brutally beaten by UFW representatives to keep them from crossing the border and taking the jobs of striking melon workers.”
http://spectator.org/articles/59956/cesar-chavez-anti-immigration-his-union-core
I think they envision both.
ping
bump
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