Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?

Mexican Labor Migration to the United States

Gilbert G. Gonzalez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317264804
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Economía laboral

A decade of political infighting over comprehensive immigration reform appears at an end, after the 2012 election motivated the Republican Party to work with the Democratic Party's immigration reform agendas. However, a guest worker program within current reform proposals is generally overlooked by the public and by activist organizations. Also overlooked is significant corporate lobbying that affects legislation. This updated edition critically examines the new guest worker program included in the White House and Congressional bipartisan committee s immigration reform blueprints and puts the debate into historical and contemporary contexts. It describes how the influential U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO agreed on guidelines for a new guest worker program to be included in the plan. Gonzalez shows how guest worker programs stand within a history of utilizing controlled, cheap, disposable labor with lofty projections rarely upheld. For courses in a wide variety of disciplines, this timely text taps into trends toward teaching immigration politics and policy.Features of the New Edition"

Chapter 1 Constructing Transnational Labor Migration

DOI: 10.4324/9781315636368-2

Along-standing convention employed by American academics specializing in Mexican migration, as well as by legislators concerned with migration policy affecting Mexico, maintains that U.S.-Mexico relations are normal relations, an expression of reciprocity, interdependence, and equality. The convention further holds that a hundred years of Mexican migration comprise one more migrant stream coming to America to struggle for and experience the mythological “American Dream.” However, this commonly held perspective of U.S.-Mexico relations has not always been borne by Americans, particularly large-scale investors and corporate heads, who in the late nineteenth century deemed Mexico a colonial prize to be exploited for its natural resources as well as for its cheap and easily accessed labor.

Well into the twentieth century a widespread imperial mindset regarding Mexico mirrored an ongoing economic expansionism, or what amounted to a neocolonial strategy to systematically exploit Mexico’s resources and labor. That international relationship, which assumed a central place in U.S. State Department policy going back to the late nineteenth century, bears the imprints of imperialist domination. The major social consequences of this U.S. imperialist domination—the mass uprooting of people from the countryside and the migration of that labor to the heart of the U.S. economy—will be the subject of the chapters that follow.

U.S. Imperialism and Mexican Migration

The U.S. imperialist agenda and, specifically, the labor policies contained within that agenda provide the context for this study. The analysis covers the long-standing American tradition by large-scale enterprises of employing temporarily imported Mexican workers, known today as “guest workers.” Particular attention is accorded here to the bracero contract labor agreements lasting from 1942 until 1964, designed and initiated by U.S. agribusiness interests and signed onto by the Mexican government. By examining the bracero program (with attention to the 1917–1921 labor importation program and the current H2-A “guest worker” program), we can better understand the historic antecedents for the currently discussed guest worker agreements proposed by President George W. Bush (as well as those of then–Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry) and thereby more effectively evaluate current guest worker proposals.

The vast majority of commentary on the Bracero Agreements analyzes the program as if it were unique, no more than an agreement between two sovereign nations; indeed, none comes to mind that defines the program as a labor policy fitting an imperialist scheme.¹ In this book, however, the bracero program is understood to comprise a series of state measures designed to organize Mexican migration—measures that, in the period under discussion, conformed to an imperialist schema. Ample evidence demonstrates conclusively that, in many respects, bracero labor utilization paralleled traditional forms of colonial labor exploitation such as that practiced by the British and French colonial regimes in India and Algeria, respectively. In each case, workers were transported across borders as indentured labor; in other words, they were systematically placed under employer control (as well as state control), segregated, and denied the rights to organize, to bargain for wages individually or collectively, to protest, and to freely change residence or employer. Moreover, little if any oversight enforced rights and privileges legally accorded to the laborers.

Over the course of the bracero program, nearly a half-million workers were imported to the United States to work in agriculture and during the war on railroads, for wages—and in housing and working conditions—considerably less than the depressingly low standard for the period. Braceros who demonstrated “rebellious” tendencies or poor work performance faced a quick departure to Mexico and were placed on a blacklist. In their colonies the British and French commonly applied these practices as well.

More important, the bracero program operated within the context of an economic relationship between Mexico, which is an underdeveloped nation, and the economically powerful United States. Three fundamental themes related to this relationship underscore the present study. First, the economic relations between Mexico and the United States since the late nineteenth century have exhibited the classic hallmarks of neocolonialism.² Beginning in the 1880s, large-scale U.S. enterprises under the control of men of the Robber Baron era—such as J. D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, William Randolph Hearst, and David Guggenheim, among others—sought to control significant sectors of the Mexican economy and accomplished that goal well before the 1910 Mexican Revolution. In the postrevolutionary period, U.S. capital not only maintained its dominance in several critical areas of Mexico’s economy, including oil, mining, and agriculture; it strengthened its position.³ U.S. capitalist interests expressed their power in ways other than through direct investment by entering into Mexico’s banking and financing institutions. In the mid-1930s, for example, the Mexican government under Lazaro Cardenas established Nacional Financiera, Mexico’s central financing body, and U.S. banking institutions occupied the leading position, holding a one-third stake in the institution’s capital assets in the mid-1940s. It is therefore understandable that future economic programs ostensibly aimed at Mexico’s economic development would follow the path established by the first wave of American investors during the late nineteenth century.

Another example is the construction of main highways in the northwest in the 1940s (largely funded by U.S. banks), which followed the blueprint of the U.S.-built railroads that were laid out in a north-south pattern. Building the roads in this fashion facilitated the export of goods, particularly natural resources, to the United States—and only secondarily were these roads connected with Mexico’s economic heartland (an objective of British and French railroads in their colonies). In the immediate postwar period no fewer than 350 foreign-owned companies, most of them American, took advantage of the propitious investment climate and set up shop in Mexico. During the 1950s the American economic presence predominated in a number of areas, as pointed out in a 1953 Yale Review article:

Many of our big corporations, like General Motors, General Electric, Ford, International Harvester, and Du Pont, have branches in Mexico. Current American investments in Mexico, which compose about 70 percent of all foreign investments there, are concentrating in industry, rather than in oil and mining, as they once did.⁴

One could add many more names to this “who’s who” of major American corporations, including Monsanto, Anaconda, B. F. Goodrich, Westinghouse, Sears, Anderson Clayton, and banks such as Pan American Trust, Chase Bank, National City Bank, J. P. Morgan and Company, Bank of America, and the Export Import Bank.⁵ Gradually, Mexico became a debtor nation, drawn into programs allegedly designed to develop Mexico economically but ultimately leaving it under the sway of foreign banks and investors.

A second theme concerns the bracero program itself, which expressed one variation of what then amounted to a half-century of Mexican migration and of the migrants’ integration as labor within the heart of the U.S. economy. The bracero program was established at the behest of the United States, and under its oversight, the two nation states managed and organized an ongoing migration. Elsewhere it has been argued that the continuing migration that began in the first decade of the twentieth century comprises one social consequence of U.S. economic domination.⁶ Rather than viewing Mexican migration as a classic supply-and-demand “push-pull” affair (the conventional model) as well as newer versions of push-pull, which hold that migration is “self perpetuating” based on “social networks that sustain it,” migration here is explained through acknowledging the critical impact effected by U.S. imperialism upon the demography and social organization of the Mexican nation.⁷ Explaining migration in this fashion is virtually unheard of today, even though the vocal critic of the bracero program, Ernesto Galarza, understood as early as 1949 the transnational forces leading to Mexican migration. He explained that the Mexican migrant “is forced to seek better conditions north of the border by the slow but relentless pressure of United States agricultural, financial, and oil corporate interests on the entire economic and social evolution of the Mexican nation.”⁸ These migrations, generated by the economic expansion of the United States into Mexico, manifested first as internal migrations that eventually continued into the United States and ultimately led to the ongoing formation of the modern ethnic Mexican community.

Finally, convention has it that the roots of Mexican migration are much like those of the majority of other migrations coming to the United States, most often compared to European migration. The heated rejoinders to the publication of Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Hispanic Challenge” are a good case in point.⁹ Huntington deplores what he contends is an emerging cultural divide in the United States between bilingual Hispanics and English-speaking America, and in response a chorus of critics counter that Mexican immigrants are undergoing experiences having much in common with previous European immigrants. Rather than using the European migrations to the United States as a “one size fits all” model for explaining Mexican migration to the United States, the present study emphasizes the neocolonial status of Mexico as the precondition for migration to the United States and for the subsequent Mexican immigrant experiences within the United States.

In addition to describing the bracero program as an expression of U.S. economic domination over Mexico, this study analyzes the marked similarities between colonial forms of labor and the bracero system. For example, several students of the bracero program have pointed out parallels with Spanish colonial forms of labor.¹⁰ However, a more important comparison is that between the Indian and Algerian labor migrations (during their colonial periods) and the Mexican bracero program. That is, whereas the Spanish system evokes similarities, the British and French colonial labor systems and Mexican migration in its varied forms exhibit well-defined parallels, thus implying that Mexican migration is a manifestation of colonial labor migration rather than an independently spurred migratory flow similar to European migrations.

Interestingly, parallels with Roman imperial labor allocation have also been found. In their defense of bracero usage, agricultural entrepreneurs presaged by several decades the current imperialistic neoconservative outlook.¹¹ Indeed, many years earlier, at a 1958 congressional hearing on migratory labor, advocates of the bracero program were queried regarding the need for braceros. Their response, offered in a moment of unusual candor, ironically reflected the colonial character of the bracero program_ “The same thing was true even in the Roman Empire. When they reached a stage of civilization they had to reach out to other areas where there was a lesser standard of living to bring in those people to do the menial tasks.”¹²

Agriculture and Seasonal Harvest Labor

The vast majority of braceros worked in agriculture in a setting that had been well established for several generations before their arrival, and the heaviest users of bracero labor were Texas and California. Agriculture had developed to become the region’s principal economic sector and one dominated by large-scale enterprises. Early in Texas’s and California’s agricultural development, a system evolved for securing labor through contractors hired by growers or grower associations to recruit a specified labor force. These contractors hauled workers to the work site for the harvest and performed the service of foreman. Growers seldom paid workers directly; instead, the contractors determined each worker’s earnings and paid wages accordingly. Rarely if ever did workers come face to face with an employer or their representatives, and once the task was finished the labor force dispersed. With the next harvest, the cycle repeated, although workers were sometimes distributed to new farms from day to day. The only consistent factor in the organization of labor, and the main avenue available for farm workers to seek work, was the contractor system.

Throughout the history of southwest agriculture, tradition and sheer appropriation of power allowed growers to dictate wages, working conditions, work schedules, and standards in grower-supplied housing. That power secured the lowest wages in any industry and guaranteed extreme forms of poverty. Working and living conditions were abysmal, and health problems among farm workers and their families were common. It was into this historic context that braceros labored; the abilities and work habits accorded to braceros, as well as their placement in agriculture as seasonal labor, had been firmly established by two generations of Mexican laborers who, by then, had dominated the labor supply. The arrival of the braceros did not alter this historic legacy; indeed, the treatment that harvest labor had been subjected to fell upon the braceros with even greater intensity. Within this setting, braceros represented one variation on the theme of Mexican migration that entered into key sectors of the southwestern economy and society beginning in the early 1900s.

Reviewing the Bracero Contract Labor Program

Over the past several years the Bush and Fox administrations have engaged in highly publicized discussions over establishing a new guest worker program. Officials from both nations have met on numerous occasions to hammer out an agreement that has yet to bear fruit. However, the Fox-Bush discussions do not represent the first attempt at creating an international agreement to import Mexican labor. By reviewing the bracero program we can begin to understand the proposed Bush guest worker agreements. An estimated 450,000 Mexican males worked in the United States as temporary laborers under this program from 1942 until 1964—an export of labor considered by some observers to be one of the largest mass movement of workers in history. Under the auspices of a binational agreement, men (and only men) were recruited, processed, and transported from dirt-poor farming villages in remote sections of Mexico and, to a lesser extent, from urban centers to work as cheap, controlled, reliable, experienced, and easily-disposed-of laborers.

During the war, braceros were employed mainly in agriculture but also as railroad maintenance workers. Upon the termination of the contract, which lasted from six weeks to eighteen months, the men were immediately returned to Mexico. The war’s end did not signal the end of the program as agriculturalists lobbied successfully for annual extensions without recourse to allegations of “labor shortage.” After a series of extensions, a new formal agreement was negotiated and Public Law 78 was signed in 1951. This legislation, which codified a temporary labor importation program exclusively for agriculture, continued with minor modifications until the bracero program ended in 1964.

Over the course of the bracero agreements, the United States served as a labor contractor, Mexico served as the labor recruiter, and both worked for the emplo...