Deportees

Donald Trump has lately been extolling the virtues of Operation W__B___ under the Eisenhower administration in 1954, claiming it as a model for "humane" deportation.  "You don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier" than Eisenhower, Trump said.

In fact, the Operation was brutal.  Over 1,000,000 people were rounded up in dragnets, including American citizens.  Nearly 100 of them died of sunstroke and exhaustion, before the Red Cross intervened.

Woody Guthrie wrote a haunting and memorable song about the mistreatment of deportees, performed here by Arlo Guthrie and Emmy Lou Harris.  Guaranteed to bring tears to your eyes.

Johnny Cash recognized that the song was about "the maltreatment of aliens."  Let's hope that voters will come to the same realization.

UPDATE:  Here is the classic version by Woody's friend Cisco Houston (with Eric Weissberg on mandolin), and here is Pete Seeger.

SECOND UPDATE: Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

 THIRD UPDATE:  Woody Guthrie appears to have written it as a poem, without music.  The melody was added ten years later by a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman.

 

 

 

Comments

[James Grimmelmann]

Richard Shindell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXmdOXngVCM

[anon]

As usual, Steve, his effort to be as onesided as possible, leaves out the reference to the Truman Admin.

Try factcheck . org for starters, to garner the facts.

Truman's "voluntary deportation" affected 3 million or more persons. Truman's "voluntary deportation" was much worse, but eerily similar in the descriptor (without regard to the program) excoriated by political partisans during the last campaign.

Steve, we know that you wish to run a Republican smear machine from the FL. ANd, we know that Trump makes it easier for you to do this.

But, can you at least attempt, in an academic forum, to be a bit less obvious about your political campaigning and at least mention more even handedly the historical facts?

At least from my pov, the constant drum beat is so tiresome. Can't anyone anymore anywhere believe that the notion of the "other side" as a catch all explanation for all the evil in the world is the recipe for continued failure?

[anon]

Another example:

Steve states:

"Nearly 100 of them died of sunstroke and exhaustion, before the Red Cross intervened."

That is a terrible fact.

From Wiki (not the best source, but there isn't time to locate better sources at present, and the point, IMHO, should be self evident):

"In 2012, the United States Border Patrol found the remains of 463 migrants in the US, of which 177 were discovered along the section of the border near Tucson, Arizona.[18] The Rio Grande Valley of South Texas reported 150 migrant remains found, a jump from 2011 due to the increased numbers of Central American migrants."

WHere are you on this, Steve? Do you just wait for a Republican to make some comment that you can easily (and rightly) ridicule (and thus pretend to be on the "right side" of the issue), or, do you really care about deaths from sunstroke and exhaustion on the border?

Why not post on the current crisis?

[Steve Diamond]

Thank you for this post, Steve (and the link to the Dylan/Baez song in particular). I led a seminar on farm labor in 2014 concentrating on California. Suffice to say deporting immigrants in the manner proposed by Trump would cause California agri-business to collapse. Anyone interested in the videos of the guest speakers can find them here: http://stephen-diamond.com/law-and-labor-in-the-fields/

The presentation by Frank Bardacke who has written a magisterial account of the United Farmworkers movement and Cesar Chavez was terrific as was the panel that included the general counsel from the UFW.

[anon]

Arguing about what Trump says seems pointless and meaningless.

Unless you think that he is a serious candidate who will win the presidency.

Learning about what Truman and Eisenhower did is marginally more useful; especially Truman's three million. (IMHO, it would be much more productive to omit one sided citation to numbers while failing to address the far worse stats under other administrations and today.)

Addressing serious proposals on the table today, and addressing the terrible failure of the policies of today (especially those that SL would never mention because he won't address the failings of his team), would make much more sense.

[Enrique Guerra-Pujol]

FOURTH UPDATE: if the attacks in Paris were carried out by Syrian refugees, this will (at least temporarily) benefit anti-immigrant politicians like Trump and Le Pen.