The U.S.-Mexico border ― and the infamous border wall that Trump has promised ― has been a hot button topic during the 2016 election. So, it’s no surprise that misinformation abounds when it comes to immigration on the border.
But Editor at Large for Fusion Alexis Madrigal is setting the record straight in a new video posted Saturday. The correspondent takes viewers back in time to give a breakdown of how immigration into and out of the United States has changed since the Bracero program.
The U.S. government’s need of inexpensive manual labor in the ‘40s temporarily brought in over 4 million Mexican migrants into the States under the Bracero program. But, as Madrigal explains, the U.S. would simultaneously backtrack those efforts and put limitations on Mexican migration:
While the Bracero Program of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s brought 4.6 million Mexican laborers into American fields there was another government effort, in 1954, actually called Operation Wetback that indiscriminately rounded up over 1 million Mexicans living and working in the U.S. and sent them back south, including some U.S. citizens.
But that was just the beginning, Madrigal goes on to detail the effect other government efforts, like the 1965 Hart-Celler Act and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, had on migration across the border.
“The United States wanted the labor but not the people doing that labor,” Madrigal explains in the video. “So we created economic structures like NAFTA that encouraged free trade, and ignored the migration that experts said would inevitably come with it.”
The Fusion correspondent also notes how the border has drastically changed in the 21st century, as efforts to curb migration across the border have heightened with border fences and the Obama administration’s record number of deportations. But while the border may be the most secure it’s ever been, research has actually shown that more Mexicans are leaving the United States than entering it since 2009. How’s that for irony?
Watch Madrigal quickly break down how immigration has drastically changed on the border since the 1940s in the video above.
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