History Lesson: How Dwight Eisenhower Dealt With Illegal Immigration

[rangerrebew]

History Lesson: How Dwight Eisenhower Dealt With Illegal Immigration

 

V. Saxena 
April 3, 2015

During his tenure as president of the United States from 1953 to 1961, Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower became the first American leader to ever have to deal with illegal immigration.

Unlike our current leader, however, “Ike” dealt with it quickly and decisively. Using only 1075 Border Patrol agents — less than 10 percent of today’s border force — he immediately sealed the porous border.

“Ike” then set out to rid our nation of the three million illegals that were living and working among us. First he appointed retired Gen. Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Swing as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

According to the CS Monitor, Swing stepped up to the plate by designing “Operation Wetback,” an initiative to send a combination of local/state officials and Border Patrol agents scouring through Mexican neighborhoods in search of illegals.

Within a month of it being implemented by Attorney General Herbert Brownell in June 1954, “Operation Wetback” had resulted in the capture and deportation of 50,000 illegal immigrants. Another 488,000 had fled the country out of fear of being arrested.

By September 1954, another 80,000 illegals had been forcibly removed from the state of Texas alone, while another 500,000 to 700,000 fled had voluntarily.

And unlike contemporary illegals, these illegals were in no rush to return:
 
Mexicans caught in the roundup were not simply released at the border, where they could easily reenter the US. To discourage their return, Swing arranged for buses and trains to take many aliens deep within Mexico before being set free.

Tens of thousands more were put aboard two hired ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south.

The sea voyage was “a rough trip, and they did not like it,” says Don Coppock, who worked his way up from Border Patrolman in 1941 to eventually head the Border Patrol from 1960 to 1973.

The end result was that President Dwight Eisenhower managed to rid of us nearly three million illegal immigrants by using just a smidgen over 1000 Border Patrol agents.

Now compare his methodology to that of President Barack Hussein Obama, who prefers instead to hand out amnesty as if illegal immigrants somehow deserve it.

Last but not least, pay attention to how Eisenhower responded when the New York Times asked him his opinion about what had caused the huge uptick in illegal immigration:


“The rise in illegal border crossing by Mexican [illegal immigrants] to a current rate of more than 1 million 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.”

H/T Red Statements, Freedom Outpost

http://downtrend.com/vsaxena/dwight-eisenhower-illegal-immigration

[Lando Lincoln]

Can you imagine the term "Operation Wetback" being used today?  That alone would end a presidency.

[Lando Lincoln]

According to PBS: http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/history/timeline/20.html

In 1949 the Border Patrol seized nearly 280,000 illegal immigrants. By 1953, the numbers had grown to more than 865,000, and the U.S. government felt pressured to do something about the onslaught of immigration. What resulted was Operation Wetback, devised in 1954 under the supervision of new commissioner of the Immigration and Nationalization Service, Gen. Joseph Swing.

Swing oversaw the Border patrol, and organized state and local officials along with the police. The object of his intense border enforcement were "illegal aliens," but common practice of Operation Wetback focused on Mexicans in general. The police swarmed through Mexican American barrios throughout the southeastern states. Some Mexicans, fearful of the potential violence of this militarization, fled back south across the border. In 1954, the agents discovered over 1 million illegal immigrants.

In some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born children, who were by law U.S. citizens. The agents used a wide brush in their criteria for interrogating potential aliens. They adopted the practice of stopping "Mexican-looking" citizens on the street and asking for identification. This practice incited and angered many U.S. citizens who were of Mexican American descent. Opponents in both the United States and Mexico complained of "police-state" methods, and Operation Wetback was abandoned.

[aligncare]

...and in January 1956, three people, myself and my parents, stepped off the Italian steamer, Christopher Columbus, from Palermo, Sicily, and were welcomed in the Port of New York, as legal immigrants.

I guess Republican haters like Eisenhower were golfing the day my family snuck in to the United States with all our papers in order.

[Fishrrman]

Lando wrote above:
[[ Can you imagine the term "Operation Wetback" being used today?  That alone would end a presidency. ]]

That reaches to the heart of our problems, as [what was until the end of the 1950's] a Euro/Christian nation.

We are no longer able to call the spades for what they are...