“.....going on for 30 years.”
30 years? This was going hot and heavy in the late 40’s early 50’s when I was a child in California. Well more than 90% of the agricultural workers in the state during those times were illegal aliens that were allowed to stay long enough to get through the picking season, the last of it the oranges late in the year.
Roughly 25% of California’s population is illegals at around 10 million in the state at any given time. State’s population is just under 40 million. It was even a greater percentage when I was a kid as there weren’t as many residence then.
rwood
I know California has been way ahead of the rest of the country, but most of us didn’t have Spanish speaking people around us until after the 1986 amnesty when the floodgates opened.
No, it was not illegal! I am probably your age and I grew up in California too, in fact, in farm country. As a teenager and in college I worked picking various crops. The braceros absolutely were not here illegally, they had work permits to come here during the growing season and went home in the fall and winter. Whole families would pile into their old but very well cared for trucks, and legally come across the border to work. With the entire family working, with elderly grandmothers taking care of the babies, they actually made quite a tidy bit of money. Enough to give them a nice standard of living in their little villages in Mexico. Indeed, they did not want to stay here in the winter, it was expensive and it was cold! They were given social security cards and the farmers were required to pay into social security for them, and there were certain other safety and financial conditions the state required of the farmers employing these Mexican laborers. When they (the braceros) reached retirement age, they were able to draw their social security benefits in Mexico. It was all legal and above board, a program that worked well for many years. It was governor Jerry Brown who ended the bracero program because he said he wanted Americans to have those jobs. Problem was, not enough Americans wanted those jobs, and the farmers were put in a pretty bad position, it was then the illegal invasion began in earnest. Jerry Brown’s stupidity, I think, may have had a lot to do with keeping the rural areas of California solidly Republican. If the Mexican workers were successfully able to get over the border, they just stayed rather than trying to go back home. Jerry Brown did this during his first term as governor, by the way (about 1975.)