Mass Deportation May Sound Unlikely, But It’s Happened Before
*Trump’s idea of rounding up and deporting 11 million immigrants isn’t new. It happened 80 years ago, during the Great Depression. Up to 2 million Mexican and Mexican-Americans were deported. VL
By Adrian Florido, NPR Code Switch
Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to deport all 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally, along with their U.S.-born children, sounds far-fetched. But something similar happened before.
[pullquote]It was the Great Depression, when up to a quarter of Americans were unemployed and many believed that Mexicans were taking scarce jobs.[/pullquote] [tweet_dis]During the 1930s and into the 1940s, up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were deported or expelled from cities and towns across the U.S.[/tweet_dis] and shipped to Mexico. According to some estimates, more than half of these people were U.S. citizens, born in the United States.It’s a largely forgotten chapter in history that Francisco Balderrama, a California State University historian, documented in Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. He co-wrote that book with the late historian Raymond Rodriguez.
“There was a perception in the United States that Mexicans are Mexicans,” Balderrama said. “Whether they were American citizens, or whether they were Mexican nationals, in the American mind — that is, in the mind of government officials, in the mind of industry leaders — they’re all Mexicans. So ship them home.”
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[Photo courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library/Herald Examiner Collection]
