Our Nation’s ICE Officers have shown incredible strength, determination, and courage as they facilitate a very important mission, the largest Mass Deportation Operation of Illegal Aliens in History. Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People. ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.
In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!
I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day. The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos. That’s why I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia. Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.
To ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department, you have my unwavering support. Now go, GET THE JOB DONE! DJT
Trump on "Truth Social".
Over the last few days soldiers of the California National Guard have been backing up ICE in immigration raids in Los Angeles. The Marine Corps is as well. The Marines, we now are told, have actually performed an arrest. There are somewhere between 11.0 million to 18.6 million illegal immigrants, mostly, but not exclusively, from Central America in the country. During his run for a second term, Donald Trump basically promised to deport them all, but he's really not been much more successful than President Obama was on the same topic.
Of that number, probably about 1.6 million came in during the Biden Administration, not all of them as Republicans seemingly like to suggest.
Lots of reasons are given for this situation, most of which are devoid of historical analysis, and therefore, inaccurate. We'll take a more indepth view here.
As noted, most illegal immigrants into the US are from Central America. At one time, "illegal alien" almost always tended to mean an illegal entrant who was Mexican, but that never really reflected the entire situation. As late as the 1980s, the second largest group of illegal entrant into the US were Irish, something almost uniformly ignored. Indeed, illegal aliens in the US come from all over the globe. Nonetheless, the big problem is a Central American one.
When you conquer a foreign people and arbitrarily draw a map of convenience for yourself on what you are keeping, you create a problem.
That may sound like a non sequitur, but we need to start there.
The United States fought Mexico from 1845 to 1848, wi th most of the last part of that period being an occupation of the country. The Mexican War is more complicated than its generally considered to be, and I'll not go into the origins of the war. Suffice it to say, however, that a result of the war, the principal result in fact, was that the US acquired 55% of Mexico.
Now, that 55% is a bit deceptive in that the US did not acquire 55% of the Mexican population. In 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Mexican representatives chosen by hte US to sign it, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans lived south of the Rio Grande. There were, however, Spanish speaking populations north of the river, with most of them living in Texas, which Mexico had not regarded as properly lost, New Mexico, and California. Mexican populations, however, stretched all the way up into Spanish speaking settlements in Colorado as well.
Depending upon where they lived, many of those Hispanic populations were distinct with distinct histories, which also set them apart from the population of Mexico, although that population is more diverse then imagined. The closer you got to the Rio Grande, however, the more "Mexican", the population was.
The border was extremely fluid, although real, and would be for decades thereafter. People crossed back and forth over it fairly readily for various reasons. To the extent there was control of the border, on the US side it was by the US Army, and on the Mexican side, the Mexican Army, both of which occasionally crossed the border in pursuit of Native Americans.
It was the Mexican Revolution that really began to change things.
Mexican refugees crossing into the United States in 1915.
The Mexican Revolution saw an increased rate of border crossing as various groups of displaced people picked up and fled into the US. The US was a haven for combatant leaders and politicians from all sides of the war itself, which remained the case for decades. Villa famously attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, but he also had taken refuge in the US prior to that.
The Revolution caused the US to really patrol the border in earnest for the first time, with the National Guard serving on the border up until early 1917, while the U.S. Army crossed the border in pursuit of Villa. In the popular imagination the war ended in 1920 when Obregón sworn in as President after having rebelled against Carranza, but that simply isn't true. Villa was assassinated in 1923 and Plutarco Elías Calles came into power as a radical anti Catholic in 1924, which resulted in heavy repression of CAtholicism even though over 80% of the population was Catholic. This sparked the actual last major rebellion against the government in the form of the Cristero War, which lasted until 1929.
As with earlier phases of the Revolution, the Cristero War caused refugee populations to migrate to the US. Indeed, the Cristero's weren't even the first religious refugees of the war, as Mormon populations had in some instances migrated out of Mexico earlier. As that had an ethnic component to it, the Mormons were mostly Americans culturally or in fact, we should note that migrant Japanese populations in Mexico were in some instances evacuated by the U.S. Army during the Punitive Expedition.
There were concerns about the large number of migrants even then, with it interestingly being the case that some of the existing Hispanic populations were amongst those concerned, which has tended to be the case more recently as well. Colorado passed the first law in the US banning marijuana as Hispanics native to the state associated it with Mexican refugees, with whom they did not wish to be confused or associated.
These various events caused the Border Patrol to be created in 1924. By that time, the really hot period of the Mexican Revolution was over, and the Cristero War had not yet begun, so the early Border Patrol entered the story at a time that is quite different from the present.
Indeed, while the Cristero War saw an influx of migrants, its end came with the arrival of the Great Depression, during which illegal immigration was not a major problem.
But that brings us to why this Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist is being published first here, rather than on Lex Anteinternet where they normally are.
Let's take a look at pre World War Two agriculture. . . and economics. . . and marriage. Well, let's take a look at the US before World War Two.
It's easy to say, "it's was a different country", but it wasn't. It was much different, however.
Ironically, lots of rank and file Trump supporters look back to that era, or the one that came immediately after it in the 1950s, as a Golden Age they'd wish to return to. And to some extent, now without good reason. . . although they themselves would largely choose to keep the moral laxity of the post 1960s, as long as it applied to men and women. What they seemingly want, sort of, is the economy of the 1950s with the personal morality of the high Playboy era. Or maybe they want the 60s themselves, but without the drugs and Vietnam, but with good paying industrial jobs, no fault divorce, and Fran Gerard.1
The pre World War Two world, indeed, the pre 1980 world, was much less corporate than it is now. While there were chain stores of one kind or another, Piggly Wiggly, Safeway, Woolworths, etc. much of retail was very local.
From Safeway's website.
Agriculture in much of the country was of the classic "family farm" type. Ranching definitely was. Outside of the South, remote owners of farms and ranches was extremely unusual. The South stood out as an exception due to historical reasons, as there was a tremendous amount of sharecropping in that region, but the owners of the land were still local. Hobby agriculture was a thing, but it wasn't a major thing.
Economics were almost much thinner. The middle class was much poorer than it is today and large portions of it lived very near the poverty line. The reverse is true today. Much of the middle class slips into the upper class periodically, and drops back out of it, without realizing it. They don't consider themselves "rich", but they periodically, statistically, are.
Indeed, while its disturbing to many, including frankly distributist, the modern American economy has had the effect of making Americans as a whole extremely wealthy. Americans like to note that the average wage hasn't rising in years, but because average prices have effectively dropped, in comparison to inflation, their spending power has continually grown.
Not that everything has been perfect, by any means. As often noted, it's impossible for families, for the most part, to get by on a single income, which cuts against what I just stated.
Popular traditionalist meme with some truth to it, but it requires more thought than this. Also, this pertains more to the 50s and 60s, than it does to eras before it.
Considering that, however, we need to start off with noting that what people imagine as "traditional" really means the 1950s, in this sense, with the "1950s" really being the years from about 1955 to 1965, that is from the end of the Korean War to the beginning of largescale troop deployments in Vietnam. The "American Graffiti" era, in other words, which is set in the early 1960s, ot the 1950s as sometimes imagined. The economy really was exceptional then for a wide variety of reasons. Europe and Asia's economies had been flattened by the Second World War. China's economy, which was not a major player in the world in any event, was removed from the international scene by its fall to Communism. The US was really on the only major industrial power in the world that didn't suffer two decades of economic recovery due to the war. Technological advances of the 30s and 40s came inot the American market on a largescale due to the end of the Great Depression. American education advanced enormously due to the GI Bill.
Before 1940, however, families got by on one income due to home economics, to a large degree. That is, people lived in smaller houses, they had one car, they didn't go on extended vacations, they didn't buy "home entertainment centers", and so on. We've dealt with it extensively, but unmarried women and men living in the communities they grew up in, lived with their parents. It was unusual for an unmarried man to own a home. Men and women basically went from their families home and economic care right into marriage, as a rule.
If they got married.
We haven't dealt with that much either. By and large, most people in American society got married. But there were entire classes of people that did not. One we've dealt with before is Catholic Priests. As we've noted, the Priesthood, and religious orders, were two ways in which Catholic men and women could have what amounted to a middle class existence without getting married.2
Other professions of that era had the same feature, however. Enlisted soldiers in the services were largely unmarried. They were not paid well, particularly in the lower grades, although that was somewhat made up for by the government providing housing, food and clothing. If they were married, it was usually only after they'd climbed in rank, which in the pre World War Two Army took an extremely long time. Junior officers were rarely married either, although more senior ones normally were.
And agricultural workers, those who worked for wages, were often unmarried. Working cowboys almost never were. Their jobs just didn't pay enough for them to marry.
Cowhands are a particularly interesting example. The end of the open range meant that ranches became more established and were normally family outfits. But the sons of those who were not to inherit the ranch, as well as some men who were just attracted to an outdoor life, provided a pool of men who became cowboys working for wages. There was more of a need for cowboys at the time than there is now, as machinery had not made inroads into agriculture like it has since. There are lot of things a person could point to in the case of farming, which became much more mechanized in the 1950s, but this is also true of ranching, which had not yet seen the introduction of the 4x4 truck. Cowhands were expected to provide their own equipment, but the ranch provided everything else for them.3 Even on farms, there were lifelong farm workers who were just that, unmarried men who spent their lives working on a farm they did not own.
That's where things circle back into the story of immigrants and agriculture.
Prior to World War Two, temporary agricultural labor was usually local. Farms tended to be small in comparison to the giant ones that exist now, and the labor was often made up of the extended families of the farmers. There was temporary labor, including Hispanic labor from Mexico near the border, but its need didn't exist to the extent it later did. As noted, people lived closer to poverty, which meant that they endured those conditions more readily, by necessity. The world was simply smaller too. People didn't consider it odd to send teenagers, or even children, into the fields during the summer months.
World War Two removed thousands of those people from their pre war lives, including their prewar economic existences. Men who had been sent all around the country, and overseas, didn't tend to return to agricultural work involving remaining single, and they didn't have to either, given the post war economy. Women who had worked in fields prior to the war worked in factories during it, and had grown used to a new life. They had no interest in returning to the pre war lifestyle either, and they also didn't have to.
Somebody had to do the work.
During the war, Mexican labor was brought in to do it under the Bracero program. And to some degree, the situation it created, has been with us ever since. Yeoman's Fourth Law of History at work.
So now what?
Well, in order to really reduce the number of immigrant farm workers, legal and illegal, at work in American fields, you'd need to create a situation in which Americans would do the work. That won't happen in the current farm economy, however.
After the Second World War the US went to a "cheap food" policy, and we've had it ever since. We note this as one thing you could do is pay Americans the necessary rate to work in the fields, but that would be grossly in excess of what immigrant laborers are now getting paid. That raises all kinds of moral issues, but one practical issue is that if we are going to address this, just like the topic of imported foreign products, the time to do it was decades ago, not now. Indeed, in the case of immigrant farm labor, the time to address it would ideally have been 1945.
In other words, it'd cause a huge spike in food prices.
Another thing you could do would be to try to address industrialization of agriculture. When farms were smaller and there was less of a need for extra labor. That could be done by making the remote corporate ownership of farms illegal, although that would frankly not address all of the problem by any means.
Any way it is looked at, it would mean that Americans would pay more at the grocery store, and the question there is whether or not they're willing to do it for a major societal shift. Hardcore National Conservatives are banking on Americans being able to be forced into this.
Trump?
Richard Ortiz is a migrant worker in Nipomo, California where famous photographer Dorothea Lange took a photograph of the Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson in the 1930s
Florence Owens Thompson. The mother of ten children, her first husband was the son of a farmer with whom she became a migrant farm worker. Her second, if he was a second, would have been a common law arrangement. She also occupied a wide variety of other occupations through the 1940s. In 1952 she marred a hospital administrator and her life obtained stability. Essentially, her life demonstrates exactly what we've set out above.
I somehow doubt it. But who knows.
Suffice it to say, in much of this, basic morality seems to have gone right out the window.
Footnotes
1. This is not how National Conservatives see things, however, which is one of the ironies of the Trump movement. National Conservatives have a definite Benedict Option worldview and the libertine nature of the post 1960s American culture doesn't fit into that at all. Immigrants frankly don't much either.
2. I'm not suggesting that people's callings were not real. Indeed, because of economic conditions, and society norms, particularly regarding the conduct of young women and men, callings were easier to hear. I would note, however, that the economic realities of the era probably at least influenced the thinking of some people.
3. Good descriptions of this can be found in Louise Turk's book Sheep! and Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, all of which discuss this in the context of cowboys. A good description of it in a novel can be found in Horseman, Pass By, by McMurtry.
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