Where did you get this rewritten history? Drago told you to look it up on Google six weeks ago. Here's a description from a Cato economist wonk (due to it's very name it's difficult to find references to Operation Wetback that aren't tainted by a writer's political agenda):
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- " In 1954 the INS made a concerted effort to control the flows. The result was called "Operation Wetback" and universally deemed a success. The 1955 INS annual report concluded that "the so-called 'wetback' problem no longer exists.... The border has been secured." The commissioner of the INS who accomplished this feat was retired Army General Joseph Swing, who was appointed in the spring of 1954. The INS annual report reveals the tactics and character of Operation Wetback.
A large scale task force operation in the Southwest, working in proximity of the border, accounted for a great majority of apprehensions. This "Special Mobile Force Operation" began in California in the last days of fiscal 1954 and after the backbone of the wetback invasion was broken in California, shifted to South Texas. Mobile task forces were assembled and set into action. Light planes were used in locating illegal aliens and directing ground jeeps to effect apprehensions. Transport planes were used to airlift aliens to staking areas for prompt return to Mexico....
These activities were followed by mopping up operations in the interior and special mobile force units are continuing to discover illegal aliens who have eluded initial sweeps through such cities as Spokane, Chicago, Ransas City and St. Louis, which removed 20,174 illegal Mexican aliens from industrial jobs.
Advocates of increased enforcement should recall the militaristic tactics used in Operation Wetback and the price paid by the Mexican-American community. The incentives for immigration are so strong that it can't be stopped with anything short of military force."
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President Eisenhower instituted this operation due to cries from agricultural interests when too many of the "braceros" they brought in found industrial work to be far more lucrative than the pittance they were paid by the growers. Post WWII America also had no more need for the Mexicans who (like women as a group) shored up the labor shortage the war caused. When the troops were decommissioned the women went back to their traditional roles as homemakers and the Mexicans were distinctly alien bodies in the way of societies returning heroes (yet another instance of a group's refusal to assimilate with their host society backfiring on them).
One thing the economist failed to mention was the way illegal immigrants began to self-deport as word of the operation spread. Some estimates account for around half a million self-deporting, far more than the number actually rounded up and forcibly deported. This is why I maintain on these threads that just beginning prosecutions of the blatant employers, cutting as many services as possible, a serious crackdown on document frauds and making the motions toward mass roundups will find a seeming miracle occur - mass exodus of illegals on their own dime. Hopefully they'll finally take up the long put-off business of improving their own governments and societies.
By the way, keep your eyes open out there. You may have heard what happened to a nice family of Egyptian Coptics in New Jersey. The fanatics responsible for that would surely like to get their hands on you and everyone else they consider apostates.
In 1949 the Border Patrol seized nearly 280,000 illegal immigrants. By 1953, the numbers had grown to more than 865,000, and the U.S. government felt pressured to do something about the onslaught of immigration. What resulted was Operation Wetback, devised in 1954 under the supervision of new commissioner of the Immigration and Nationalization Service, Gen. Joseph Swing.
Swing oversaw the Border patrol, and organized state and local officials along with the police. The object of his intense border enforcement were "illegal aliens," but common practice of Operation Wetback focused on Mexicans in general. The police swarmed through Mexican American barrios throughout the southeastern states. Some Mexicans, fearful of the potential violence of this militarization, fled back south across the border. In 1954, the agents discovered over 1 million illegal immigrants.
some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born children, who were by law U.S. citizens. The agents used a wide brush in their criteria for interrogating potential aliens. They adopted the practice of stopping "Mexican-looking" citizens on the street and asking for identification. This practice incited and angered many U.S. citizens who were of Mexican American descent. Opponents in both the United States and Mexico complained of "police-state" methods, and Operation Wetback was abandoned.