Changes

The bracero program would not have been as easily implemented or as popular without the economic and cultural relationship established between Mexico and the United States since the late nineteenth century and if Mexican citizens could have made a living in Mexico. The nation’s economy had been uprooted by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920); President Porfirio Diaz had opened Mexico’s economy to the United States in the early 1920s; railroad building across Mexico had created passageways to and from the north; and the Mexican government and companies based in the United States had bought land in Mexico for the building of maquiladoras (cotton factories) throughout the 1910s.  Land originally owned by farmers and the working poor was swallowed up by these companies, leaving these Mexican citizens with no other means to provide for their families. The economic circumstances and infrastructural possibilities were set for a culture of migratory labor.<ref> Deborah Cohen, ‘’Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico’’, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 35-37. See also Deborah Cohen, ‘’Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico’’, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 37.</ref>

The Bracero Program, officially named the Labor Importation Program, was created for straightforward economic reasons. In the 1930s, white In mid-1941, as it became clearer to U.S. leaders that the nation would have to enter World War II, American farmers raised the possibility that there would again be a need, as had occurred during the First World War, for foreign workers to maintain agricultural productivity. The United States looked south for that labor, requesting that the Mexican government provide workers to address the ongoing demands of the American agribusinesses supporting the war effort and to replace the poor white, black, and Latino Americans were leaving farms to occupy jobs in better-paying industrialized factories [. <ref>Cohen, 111]. </ref>  Mexico was initially hesitant, owing to strained racist cultural relations that had been brewing through the 1930s. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 ultimately pushed Mexican leadership into providing workers for the United States as a way to actively contribute to the Allied war effort. The Mexican government also believed that participation in such a program would modernize their country, transforming it into a modern nation-state. Even so, before Mexico would enter into a cooperative labor program with the United States, the nation demanded that four major issues be addressed:

Regardless of complaints or violations, the program was renewed in 1947, with Mexicans expanding their work to railroads. The agricultural aspects of the agreement were also renewed in 1951, during the Korean War. Aware of the checkered history of the program, in the early 1950s President Harry S. Truman established a commission to study the agreement, evaluate complaints and violations, and suggest reforms. Any recommendations made by the commission were ignored, ultimately, because the program was economically popular among growers (because of cheap labor) and consumers (who paid lower prices for bracero-harvest crops). President John F. Kennedy finally ended the bracero program in 1964 after his own commission determined (and convinced Congress) that the agreement was negatively affecting wages, employment opportunities, and the working conditions of domestic laborers.

The Bracero Program had major effects on both the Mexican economy and the U.S. agricultural business and immigration policies. Mexico would never truly recuperate from all of the migrants that were lost and the implementation of NAFTA only exacerbated the economic issues that it faced. Small farmers in Mexico would continuously have to compete with U.S. imported produce that was ironically being picked by Mexican migrant workers.  Additionally, the United States would continuously rely on Mexican and Latin American migrant workers while calling for more border reinforcement. NAFTA would continuously allow products to flow through the border but would police the bodies that would cross.  Finally, NAFTA would cause enormous job losses for U.S. citizens to new ‘’maquiladras’’ ‘’maquiladoras’’ that would continue to flourish with the aid of the new trade agreement.<ref> Bill Ong Hing, ‘’Ethical Borders: NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration’’, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 5.</ref>

Essentially, the Bracero Program is important for vital part of U.S. and Mexican history as part of a larger pattern of migrant labor practices, whether considered opportunity or exploitation; only when we acknowledge this pattern can we begin to change the way that migrant labor is handled in the future.