The Braceros Program and the immigration process
Immigration plays a big role in the world’s economy and the United States is one of the top countries in relation to the immigrants traffic, both incoming and outgoing. Nowadays, the American government has come up with a large number of strict laws in order to control such transit and prevent undocumented entries, but it has not always been like this. In fact, during World War II and the years beyond that, the American government was in need of immigrants in order to get the economy going and to provide enough labor for the demand. Mexico was a neighbor country with lower wages, therefore an easier task for the government to deal with.
The solution was to make a series of laws and political bilateral agreements with Mexico to import workers. But the Mexican Government was expected to lay down certain conditions for its approval of the American plan. Unregulated hiring of its citizens for employment abroad had been prohibited by Article 123 of the Constitution of 1917, which provided that such employment must be validated by local municipal authorities and by the employer’s consular representative, and on the basis of a formal contract, since American government had kicked out over 50,000 immigrants to Mexico due to the great depression.
The demands for Mexican farm workers that were rejected by the United States Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice in 1941 were happily established in the spring of the subsequent year. This program was called Emergency Farm Labor Program, popularly known as the Braceros Program; a name derived from the words “strong arms” in Spanish. Starting during World War II, it was one of the first legal guest workers program as a response to the labor shortages caused by the war and it encouraged many Mexican men to work in thousands of temporary jobs in the United States.