This is just one part in the Trump Administration’s brutal immigration crackdown, which has focused on mass deportation, broadened policing and enforcement, expanded detention, expedited removals, and travel bans, among other measures. As the announcement makes crystal clear, the Trump Administration is interested in targeting not only undocumented immigrants they consider “criminal” but also those who are here legally and seeking more permanent status.
At first glance, mass deportation and heightened immigration restrictions may seem at odds with the expansion of guest-worker programs. But in fact, they are mutually reinforcing. The Trump Administration is increasing access to temporary migrant labor while making undocumented migrants more vulnerable and stable legal status harder to secure for many others.
But Trump is not doing anything new. The same logic structured the Bracero Program that began in 1942. Then and now, the United States has tried to separate labor from belonging: to welcome migrants’ work while denying them stability, rights, and permanence. Although the Bracero Program officially ended in 1964, its logic remains whenever the United States treats migrant labor as essential but migrant belonging as unacceptable.
Bracero Program workers in 1963. —Bettmann—Getty ImagesWhile the U.S. expanded the number of legally contracted braceros, it simultaneously cracked down on undocumented immigrants. In 1954, in the middle of the Bracero Program, as many as 1.3 million people, almost entirely Mexicans, were rounded up in what would become the largest mass deportation in American history, derogatorily named “Operation Wetback.”
Historian Mae Ngai describes how Lieutenant General Joseph M. Swing, Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization (INS) from 1954 to 1962—a retired army general and West Point graduate—conceived of and executed the immigration sweep as a military operation, fully mobilizing all resources at his disposal, including planes, jeeps, cars, buses, and other equipment. Swing described the move as a “direct attack . . . upon the hordes of aliens facing us at the border.” During the operation, Mexicans were inhumanely crammed into buses, trains, planes, and cargo ships for deportation back to Mexico.
Ngai’s research indicates that in one instance, 88 people died of heatstroke after they were abandoned in the extreme heat of Mexicali. Swing also proposed the construction of a chain-link fence along sections of the border in order to deter the illegal migration of supposedly “disease-ridden” women and children.
Both the Mexican and U.S. governments saw the Bracero Program as a means for reducing unauthorized migration. It was also touted by both governments as an economic opportunity for Mexican workers, a way to protect workers from the abuses and exploitations often encountered if they were undocumented, and a chance to “modernize” Mexican workers—who would supposedly gain new skills and knowledge of new agricultural technologies working on American farms.
And it did little to curb unauthorized migration. In fact, it increased during the bracero years, especially in states like Texas, where growers continued to depend on low-wage, undocumented Mexican labor. By the early 1950s, INS apprehensions had surged. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández notes, for example, that the “number of apprehensions made by the U. S. Border Patrol in the Mexican border region rose from 279,379 in 1949 to 459,289 in 1950 and 501,713 in 1951.” While some of this increase was certainly due to the apprehension of “repeat crossers” and to innovations in Border Patrol policing practices, the substantial increases in the raw numbers in these years still underscore a central fact: the Bracero Program did not curtail but actually stimulated the unauthorized migration of Mexicans.
As in the era of the Bracero Program, today’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants has not diminished the demand for migrant labor. If anything, that demand has remained high—without stronger protections for workers and with serious questions about whether the government is willing, or even able, to prevent abuse or monitor poor living conditions and unsafe labor practices at such a scale.
That non-constitutional space has since expanded. Since the dismantling of the INS and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, immigration enforcement has become broader, more diffuse, and more deeply embedded in everyday life. Agencies like CBP and ICE, together with programs such as 287(g) and Secure Communities, have extended the reach of immigration enforcement far beyond the border itself. Researchers have also shown how immigration authorities increasingly rely on digital databases and ordinary records—such as driver's license information, utility bills, and other routine data—to identify, monitor, and track migrants deep inside the United States. Immigration enforcement today is no longer confined to the physical border. It has become a vast interior regime of surveillance, policing, detention, and deportation.
The recent expansion of guest-worker admissions is not in contradiction with current immigration restrictions. It is one of the ways that restriction works.
What this reveals is simple: the United States still wants migrant labor. What it resists is migrant belonging.
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