Operation Wetback under Eisenhower (now invoked by Trump) was a deportation campaign emerging from prior Bracero guest-worker program, and it expressed the deep contradiction in American economic development: dependency on immigrant labor paired with hostility toward immigrants, particularly toward Mexicans by the 1950s.
factualpending
Speaker
Stephen HahnEvidence Quote
“operation was an attempt to sort of um push push that back uh across the Rio Grand and back into Mexico...expressed...the really complicated aspects of of American...economic development policy, which is on the one hand it uh depended so heavily on so many different groups of immigrants and on the other hand there was hostility to them”
Created: 8/11/2026, 7:04:01 AM
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