Former President Donald Trump has sworn that, if reelected, he will deport immigrants by the millions, telling his supporters that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Critics have flagged that language as dangerous and labeled Trump a racist and a xenophobe, but many of his supporters see border security as the real threat.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette compares this moment with the U.S. in 1929-39, when Mexicans and American citizens of Mexican heritage were rounded up and deported. Navarrette warns that Trump intends to run a much larger version of that operation if he wins reelection in November, and then history might repeat itself.
We’ve traveled this road before in U.S. history as Americans and always wind up at a dead end. In the 1930s, President Herbert Hoover needed a scapegoat for the Great Depression caused by the stock market crash of 1929. And he centered on a group of simple and hardworking people living out in the southwest. Don’t ask me why, those dots are hard to connect. Anyway, Hoover gave tacit approval to efforts by state and local governments to round up and expel scores of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and send them south of the border. In all, between 1930 and 1939, as many as two million people wound up leaving the United States from Mexico, some voluntarily after losing their jobs, and others forcibly removed after being put on railroad cars.
Between 1930 and 1933, federal government officers deported more than 80,000 people. By some estimates, more than half of those who were rounded up, deported and pressured to leave, more than half were U.S. citizens, Mexican Americans born in the United States.
That was a tragedy and an injustice as egregious as the wrongful incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. It just didn’t make it into all that many history books. Not to worry though. Historians may get another chance. If Trump is reelected and keeps his evil promise, a sequel could be in the works.