Illegal Immigration: Eisenhower Stopped it Cold

"We Can't Deport 12 Million People"
--Various illegal immigration shills



The Big Lie: a propaganda technique.

It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".

We continue to see the Big Lie technique at work in the new century.

Right after Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, America's southern border was as bad as it is today: porous, with people streaming across into America.

Two years ago, the Christian Science Monitor did a report "How Eisenhower Solved Illegal Border Crossings from Mexico". It's a good read for the so-called immigration "experts" who insist that "you can't deport 12 million people".

It's estimated that as many as three million illegal migrant workers had crossed north for jobs in Arizona, California, Texas and beyond.

Unlike George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Eisenhower cut this illegal flow off--and he did it in a matter of months with only a tenth of the Border Patrol agents the U.S. now has. Veteran Border Patrol agents still talk proudly of the operation, which took less than 1100 agents to implement.

Although there is little to no record of this operation in Ike's official papers, one piece of historic evidence indicates how he felt. In 1951, Ike wrote a letter to Sen. William Fulbright (D) of Arkansas. The senator had just proposed that a special commission be created by Congress to examine unethical conduct by government officials who accepted gifts and favors in exchange for special treatment of private individuals.

General Eisenhower, who was gearing up for his run for the presidency, said "Amen" to Senator Fulbright's proposal. He then quoted a report in The New York Times, highlighting one paragraph that said: "The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican 'wetbacks' to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government."

But President Eisenhower has something going for him that neither Bush nor Clinton had: political will and determination about solving the problem. Eisenhower didn't rely on contributions from employers dependent on artificially-low wages, either.

Years later, the late Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower's first attorney general, said in an interview with this writer that the president had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration when he took office.

America "was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale," Mr. Brownell said. "When I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without restraint."

Then in 1953, as now in 2008, the magnet north was work for the illegal aliens; the magnet was funded by companies looking to cut labor costs.

Although an on-and-off guest-worker program for Mexicans was operating at the time, farmers and ranchers in the Southwest had become dependent on an additional low-cost, docile, illegal labor force of up to 3 million, mostly Mexican, laborers.

According to the Handbook of Texas Online, published by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association, this illegal workforce had a severe impact on the wages of ordinary working Americans. The Handbook Online reports that a study by the President's Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas in 1950 found that cotton growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where most illegal aliens in Texas worked, paid wages that were "approximately half" the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.

The rest of this article relates how Eisenhower cut off the flow of illegal immigrants.

There's NO reason we can't do it today.

Except the American political elites (are we to follow Europeans down the road to a sneering, unresponsive political elite class who tells everyone else what to do--for their own good?), do not have the desire, nor the will, to take action.

Close the southern border, another 9/11. The U.S. can do it, if desired.

Anyone who says otherwise is telling The Big Lie.

by Mondoreb
image: RidesAPaleHorse
Source: How Eisenhower Solved Illegal Border Crossings from Mexico
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