Bracero Program Research Paper

The Bracero Program was a series of agreements from 1942 to 1964 between the U. S. and Mexican governments that facilitated the migration of short-term Mexican contract laborers into (and out of) the United States. Along with the legal immigration, illegal immigration poured in United States.

There are some reasons why illegal Mexican immigrants headed to the north. Land privatization, mechanization, and the export orientation of agricultural production combined with food shortages and a dramatic rise in the Mexican population to force many Mexican rural laborers to seek economic survival through migration. To some extent, poverty in Mexico and expansion of agribusiness in the United States forced them to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in seek

. Actually, the Mexican government could be seen as a critical partner in the design and implementation of migration control strategies by the U. S. Border Patrol along the southern border. They cooperatively set up a series of law enforcement priorities and practices to interrogate, apprehend, and deport undocumented workers.

Initially, when the U. S. Border Patrol released deportees at the border, deportees simply and easily reentered the United States. Therefore, rather than just releasing deportees at the border, U. S. Border Patrol began to transport deportees to the inland of Mexico by bus, train or airplane.

Mexico would have to shoulder a part of responsibility for deportees’ care, supervision, and transportation.

Sometimes even when the Mexican government declared a national emergency in agriculture, the authorities supported the military's efforts to transfer Mexican immigrants to obedient workers. Indocile workers were threatened to face imprisonment and fine.

As a matter of fact,during the Bracero Program, overwhelming majority of these illegal Mexcian immigrants were unskilled or low-skilled. Also they were almost engaged in