Bracero Program

I mean, 25 years ago, uh, was 9/11.

But go back to World War II and a little bit further back when the Bracero Program was in place, where the United States was actively recruiting Mexican nationals to come to the US to fill some of those jobs, especially in agri- agriculture and factories, and do some of that labor that, uh, the men that were overseas fighting in, in, uh, World War II were n- unable to fill.

So it's the-

No, I, I agree.

We, you know, average replacement rate is 2.1 children per family.

Uh, we are at maybe 1.3, 1.4 children per family, so you know, uh, we have a, a, a, a challenge in replacing people who have retired or are passing away from the baby boomer generation and, and, and, uh, the greatest generation before them.

And, uh, we've gotta f- realize, too, the Bracero Program, that the, there are some jobs that, uh, you know, are going unfilled that are needed to provide the economy growing.

In the Bracero Program, w- after World War II, we had fewer working males at the time, and females, and we needed to, uh, shore up, uh, the folks that were doing the jobs that nobody else wanted to do at the time.

That was the day the Delano grape strike began in California.

The strike came a year after activists had forced Congress to end the Bracero contract labor program.

The Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Italong, Philip Vera Cruz, and others, called the strike against the Delano growers and the Coachella Valley grape growers.

It had been a record harvest.

The first law of exclusion on immigration policy was actually the Anti-Chinese Immigration Act at the turn of the century, in which after the Chinese immigrants came and built a railroad, then we expelled them.

We saw that also, and this is a more recent case, During World War II, when Americans were fighting the war overseas, we actually created for the first time this program with Mexico called the Bracero Program, in which about 600,000 Mexicans were allowed to come to the United States to work legally.

Once the war ended and Americans came back home from war, we began attacking Mexican immigrants as the ones to blame for the lack of jobs in some of our industries in the United States.

Mind you, the Bracero program was a violation of civil rights law, was caught with a lot of exploitation of Mexican workers, but it provided a legal entry for workers from Mexico into the United States.

But I put that as an example that Every time we need labor, we open immigration.

Every time there is an economic contraction, we attack immigrants.