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Land The land originally owned by farmers and the working poor were 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>
Admin moved page What is the Bracero Program? to What was the Bracero Program
====Roots of the Bracero Program====
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 Mexican 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.
====The Bracero Programs sought to ensure access to Cheap Guest Workers for American Farms====
Whatever the circumstances, Mexico has long been a source of cheap temporary labor for the United States. Until the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924, citizens of both countries crossed the border at will, and farmers in the southwestern United States recruited seasonal workers from Mexico without government oversight. Mexican workers also maintained the productivity of American agriculture after the United States entered World War I. The bracero program, at least on paper, was an extension of this type of labor arrangement—a more formal and more tightly supervised agreement to provide an adequate labor force during another global military conflict. <ref>Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005. Study of the state of Mexican labor immigration to the United States into the early twenty-first century.</ref>
====The Creation of the Program====
[[File:BraceroProgram.jpg|thumbnail|250px|left|Braceros arriving in Los Angeles in 1942 (picture by Dorthea Lange)]]
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 who 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:
====Bracero Program's Significance====
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.
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