- Headline
-
Deportation?
- Publication Date
- Monday, March 19, 1934
- Historical Event
-
“Repatriation” of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals continues
This database includes 249 articles about this event - Article Type
- Newspaper
- Location
- Page Section and Number
- 4
- Author/Byline
- --
- Article Text
- The Ohio Relief Commission has announced a plan to use welfare funds for repatriating some eight to ten thousand Mexicans now resident in Ohio and dependent on public relief in greater or less measure. Properly administered, this might be a desirable use of relief funds. But as the officials appear to be inclined to enforce it, this scheme becomes the equivalent of forcible deportation, operating on many families with unwarranted severity.
In substance, the plan is to send indigent Mexican citizens to the border in special trains, at a cost of $8 a person, and then shove them across the border, to pick up the loose ends of their former lives there, or to become charges on Mexican relief authorities. Furthermore, the plan anticipates the withholding of relief here, as a means of "inducing" these unfortunate people to see the "advantages" of returning to their native land.
Many of these people came here 10 or 20 years ago, recruited by leading industries of Detroit and Cleveland. They have made homes here and reared children who, in many cases, are more American than Mexican in speech and education and in all other respects save legal nationality. To compel them to return to Mexico against their wishes is to deport them, much as we deport criminal aliens.
There is no justification for such action, save as they indicate a desire to return. Certainly there is no legal basis for such a policy. Mexico has repatriated hundreds of thousands of her people in the last three years, and wishes to continue this policy. Ohio relief officials might well cooperate with the Mexican Government. But this need not go to the extent of tearing families away from communities which they have come to regard as their homes, and sending them to a "native land" which by now is more alien to them than Ohio. When they wish to return, of course, they should be aided. - History Unfolded Contributor
- Carol S.
- Location of Research
- Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)
Learn More about this Historical Event: “Repatriation” of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals continues
- Anthony Acevedo, a Mexican-American deportee, and US Army medic held POW at Berga (Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition)
- America’s Forgotten History of Mexican-American ‘Repatriation’ (NPR interview with Francisco Balderrama)
- Mexican Americans and Repatriation (Texas State Historical Association)
- Aqui Estamos y No Nos Vamos / Fighting Mexican Removal Since the 1930s (Boyle Heights Museum)
- INS Records for 1930s Mexican Repatriation (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services)
- Texas’ Mass Mexican Deportation (Think; KERA interview with Melita M. Garza)
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