Free Republic

Philip Martin is Professor Emeritus of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Davis...Long essay, but should be of interest to anyone in the food business, and of interest to any general readers who wonder how dinner gets to the dinner table.

Antonio Nuño Gonzalez stood in line in Mexico and waited for his papers to come to the United States. Eventually he was packed into a cattle car with other men for the trip north. After crossing the border, he was sprayed with DDT and stripped naked for a physical examination so thorough he's still making ribald jokes about it more than 50 years later. It was all worth it for the chance to do back-breaking work — picking cotton, strawberries, lettuce and other California crops, from the desert heat of Brawley to the verdant coastal valley of Watsonville. His American...

They are Mexico's boys of summer, their weathered faces liked the cracked brown leather of a cherished baseball glove. They are a part of modern history, forgotten not only in their native country but in their adopted one, as well. They are braceros like Eliseo Gomez Guzman, 81, of Monterey Park, who came to California as a young man in the early 1940s, part of a bi-national program in which Mexico provided laborers to fill the manpower shortage in America caused by World War II. Today, those braceros are waging a war of their own - a legal war to...

Backers of liberalizing immigration rules began a congressional push yesterday to give temporary legal status to up to 1.5 million illegal-alien workers to provide a labor pool for U.S. agriculture. The proposal is a recycled version of parts of a bill that stalled after passing the Senate last year. House Republicans blocked negotiations on the measure, sticking with a get-tough stand against illegal aliens before the November elections. Those wanting to loosen immigration laws hope the combination of a Democratic majority in Congress and support from President Bush will help their proposals. [...] Under the bill, illegal aliens who can...

Well, the U.S. Congress has been given plenty of time to work on addressing our illegal immigration problem. Commentators across the country have provided lots of thoughts on the issue, including lots of ideas on how to address the problem. You would think that our elected representatives would listen to the people (meaning the citizens, not the law-breaking illegals), thoughtfully consider all the polls, review the studies on the economic impact (good and bad) of the huge illegal influx, think back on their oaths of office and what is expected of them by the citizens that vote, and come to...

Mexico's Senate approved a $27 million fund Thursday for ex-braceros, laborers who worked in fields or on railroads in the United States from 1942 to 1964 under a guest-worker plan. The fund will replace retirement deductions that disappeared as they were transferred between the nations.The braceros had about 10% of their wages withheld for savings and pension funds. The money was supposed to be repaid when they returned to Mexico. But the Mexican government bank, where the funds were allegedly deposited, had a poor record-keeping system and went through mergers, a name change and closure. Initially, the Mexican government considered...

I shouldn’t repeat myself, but every rule has exceptions. The Minutemen’s efforts on the US-Mexican border have proved the accuracy of my column on 20 November, 2003. “Double Crossing at the Rio Grande” can be found hereThe gist was that the cure for the alien tide from Mexico is to change the incentives so that Mexico will control its own side of the border with its own troops. Here’s how: Total the cost to local, state and federal governments for finding, rounding up, jailing and expelling Mexican illegals. Divide that cost by the total number of truck crossings of the...

Mexicans who toiled on U.S. farms between 1942 and 1964 under the Bracero program are ready to "besiege" U.S. President George W. Bush's ranch in Texas to press their demands for money owed them in their retirement, an activist who fought with Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels said Tuesday. José Puente León told EFE that the former braceros are determined to march on Bush's ranch just as they did last year on the ranch owned by President Vicente Fox in Guanajuato.

MEXICO CITY (AP) - About 200 Mexicans who worked in the United States during and after World War II protested in front of the U.S. Embassy and the president's residence to demand back pay they said is due them. An estimated 300,000 workers - known as "braceros" - were contracted by the U.S. government to relieve the labor shortage during World War II. They want to recover pay that was withheld and never returned to them after they went back to Mexico. Last month, President Bush proposed a similar program for migrants who now have jobs in the United States,...

In the entire weekend discussion of the President Bush’s “guest worker” proposal for (mostly) Mexicans in the United States, there was a yawning omission. Doesn’t anybody remember Tom Lehrer, George Murphy, or the braceros? As the master himself was wont to say, “Here’s a song about that.” Shortly after the 1964 election in which California elected a singer/actor, George Murphy, as its new Senator, Tom Lehrer presented his musical “salute to your new junior senator” at the legendary Hungry I in San Francisco. Some of what Lehrer said and sang, so long ago, requires updating. In his introduction to the...

President Bush's proposal for major changes in federal immigration policy sparked positive reaction from construction contractors, who view it as a way to ease the industry's worker shortages, but labor unions criticized the plan as too pro-business and lacking a way for undocumented immigrants to become full U.S. citizens. Moreover, the changes would require enacting legislation, a difficult task for such a contentious issue, especially in 2004's election-shortened congressional schedule. The central element of Bush's plan, announced Jan. 7, is a new "temporary worker program." Under the proposal, a non-U.S. citizen who has a job, or job offer, would get...

STOCKTON, Calif. (AP) -- A sculpture honoring the contributions of millions of Mexican immigrant laborers who came to the United States more than 50 years ago, and who are still seeking to recoup some of their wages, was unveiled in Stockton. ``I'm very proud that people are finally showing interest in the work that we did,'' said Leopoldo Hernandez, 68, who began working as a ``bracero'' in Phoenix, Ariz. in 1957. Hernandez was one of millions of braceros, named after the Spanish word for arm, who came to the United States during World War II from Mexico to fill labor...

<p>San Francisco -- Former Mexican braceros and their supporters held a rally at U.S. District Court and Wells Fargo Bank headquarters in San Francisco demanding the payment of wages earned almost 60 years ago. During World War II, the United States and Mexico agreed to withhold 10 percent of the wages of the farmworkers -- who were recruited to replace American workers fighting the war -- until they returned to Mexico. A vast majority, say the laborers, who filed a class-action lawsuit against the bank and the two governments to recover an estimated $500 million in wages and interest, never received the money promised to them.</p>