President Biden and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) will be speaking today about immigration and other topics. AMLO is expected to propose that the United States and Mexico partner to create a new guest worker visa program to allow Mexicans and Central Americans to lawfully work in the United States. According to reports, AMLO proposes that such a program should be 600,000 to 800,000 annually.
This proposed program would be based on the Bracero program, according to AMLO. Bracero was the nickname for a temporary guest worker visa program that allowed Mexican farm workers to work temporarily in the United States. The Bracero program began with a bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico in 1942 as the U.S. draft and war mobilization greatly reduced the supply of labor for lower marginal product occupations like agriculture. It ended in 1964 after lobbying from labor unions.
As a bilateral agreement, the Mexican government regulated emigration on its side and the United States government regulated the in-migration on its side. Both sides regulated the migrant’s wages, duration of employment, age of workers, health care, and transportation from Mexico to U.S. farms. Employers sold transportation, housing, and meals to the migrants for a low price. Employers also had to deduct ten percent of the migrant’s wages from their paychecks and deposit them in an account that would be turned over to migrants once they returned to Mexico. The deduction ensured compliance with the rules of the program and at the insistence of the Mexican government so the migrants would return.
The Bracero program did not limit the number of Mexican migratory workers so long as the government’s conditions were met. As a result, nearly five million Mexican workers used the Bracero program from 1942, when the first group of 500 braceros arrived at a farm in California until the program’s cancellation in 1964. During the early phase of the program during World War 2, the United States government acted as the arbiter and distributor of the Mexican workers to American farms – heavily subsidizing the movement and not requiring total reimbursement for government expenses on medical and security screenings.
The Bracero program became more rigid and regulated in the late 1940s. As a result, Mexican illegal immigrants began to enter in large numbers to work on American farms after the war. By 1952, there were approximately 2 million Mexican illegal immigrant workers in the United States. In 1951 and 1952, the U.S. government began two major reforms to the Bracero program: The first was to make sure that American farmers could hire as many Bracero guest workers as they demanded. The second was to make sure that any Mexican workers who wanted to work on U.S. farms were able to do so legally.
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