Institutional Racism

have been U.S. citizens for several generations (see Internment of Japanese Americans
and Mexican Repatriation). Later growth in immigration was fueled by changes
engendered by the 1965 Immigration Act, reversing the national origins quota system in
place since the 1920s which discriminated against certain ethnic minorities, particularly
those originating in the eastern hemisphere.
Bracero Program
Between 1929 and 1939, during the Great Depression,
close to one million Chicanos of Mexican descent were
deported or pressured to leave the US. About half of
them were US citizens, most of whom had never
crossed U.S. borders or traveled to Mexico. The
campaign was a response to migration west of the
Oakies and housing and wage labor shortages in
California during the Great Depression. The Secretary
of Labor in the Hoover administration, William N. Doak
(Hoovervilles) scapegoated "illegal immigrants"
(migrant workers) as taking jobs from Americans. While not specifying Mexicans, the
practice targeted for removal anyone who even vaguely looked Mexican. In 1931, the
National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, the Wickersham
Commission found the methods employed by Doak's underlings to be unconstitutional.
The Policy continued into the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 'Decade of Betrayal', social history professor Raymond Rodriguez documented that
history of the Mexican Repatriation, a social history of the 1930s focusing on an
estimated 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans unjustly deported or scared into
leaving their homes in the United States by federal and local officials seeking remedies
for the Great Depression. Rodriguez and co-author Francisco Balderrama wrote the
1995 book, which sparked legislative hearings and formal apologies from the state of
California and Los Angeles County officials.
In carrying out these policies, local welfare and profitable charitable agencies along with
the police intensified the targeting of the Chicanos. According to Hoffman, "from 1931
on, cities and counties across the country intensified and embarked upon repatriation
programs, conducted under the auspices of either local welfare bureaus or private
charitable agencies". The Los Angeles chairman of the board of supervisors' charities
and public welfare committee, (and later LA Mayor) Frank L. Shaw had researched
about the legality of deportation but was advised by legal counsel that only the federal
government was legally allowed to engage in deportation proceedings. As a result, the
L.A. County supervisors decided that their campaign would be called "repatriation",
which Balderrama asserts was a euphemism for deportation.
C.P. Visel, the spokesman for Los Angeles Citizens Committee for Coordination of
Unemployment Relief began his "unemployment relief measure" that would create a
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