Mexican Immigration
Timeline:
- 1911-1929: The Mexican Revolution killed an estimated one million Mexicans and forced at least 1 million refugees temporarily into the U.S.
- 1930-1940: This recorded number of Mexican immigrants drops to only 23,000
- 1944-1954: After the war, there were jobs for nearly everyone who wanted one, including immigrants. This led to “The decade of the wetback"; the number of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent, more than one million Mexicans crossed the border illegally, searching for work.
- 1954: “Operation Wetback” The U.S. county, state, and federal authorities, as well as the military, began an operation of search and seizure of all illegal immigrants
- 1965: The Immigration and Nationality Act: Quotas on Immigration were removed, so increasing numbers of Mexicans could immigrate legally
- 1965 -1975: 453,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico arrived.
- 1986: The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed, allowing, in theory at least, penalties for employers who hired illegal immigrants. In practice, amnesty for about 3,000,000 was granted to immigrants already in the United States, mostly from Mexico.
- 1990: The Immigration Act (IMMACT) modified and expanded the 1965 act. It significantly increased the total immigration limit to 700,000 and increased visas by 40 percent.
- 1996: The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) widened the categories of criminal activity for which immigrants, even the ones with a green card, can be deported out of the USA. As a result, well over one Million immigrants have been deported since.
- 2000-2007: Approximately 500.000 – 700.000 illegal Mexican immigrants arrived.
Today:
About 57% of the total illegal immigrants in the US are from Mexico, totalling about 6,840,000.
The United States Border Patrol:
The objective is to deter and apprehend illegal immigrants as well as forestall drug trafficking along the 3,360 km border between the United States and Mexico.
Operation Gatekeeper in California, Operation Hold-the-Line in Texas, and Operation Safeguard in Arizona.
Wall of Shame:
The term is used in relation to the barrier which is located in the urban sections of the border, the areas that have been the location of the greatest number of illegal crossings in the past, such as San Diego, California and El Paso, Texas. Due to that, between 1998 and 2004, 1,954 persons died along the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to make their way past the inhospitable desert or through the Rio Grande. In 2006 president George Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, a plan to build a 1,125 km fence between the United States and Mexico, to further prevent illegal immigration.
Read more about this topic: The Rain God
Famous quotes containing the words mexican and/or immigration:
“The germ of violence is laid bare in the child abuser by the sheer accident of his individual experience ... in a word, to a greater degree than we like to admit, we are all potential child abusers.”
—F. Gonzalez-Crussi, Mexican professor of pathology, author. “Reflections on Child Abuse,” Notes of an Anatomist (1985)
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)