The severity of the Depression brought the American public to acts of self-preservation that would not only expel persons of Mexican descent, but domestically born Mexican Americans as well. According to research conducted by Francisco Balderrama, author of Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, at least 60% of those removed from the United States during the repatriation were legal citizens (22). Prior to the Repatriation Program, the Mexican community had already been identified as an inherent threat to the prosperity of the Euro-American working class. “Nativist rhetoric again transcended economic concerns to imply that Mexicans could not be assimilated and that nationality was determined not only by birthplace but also by …show more content…
“Thousands of Mexican nationals were either force-fully deported or chose to leave ‘voluntarily’, though even such repatriations were often the result of employers’ active intimidation or discriminatory treatment”(116). Accused of holding jobs needed by white laborers, these so-called “voluntary” removals were often the response to intimidation and coercion by local authorities. In communities where they had once been desired and needed as laborers, they were now being expelled- as their citizenship was no longer convenient to the white majority. The Mexican community was deliberately made to feel unwelcome and interim, rendering them incapable of establishing roots: property, land, or credit; which permit them to serve as actors within the national system. A Mexican-American individual was deemed desirable as a laborer, but undesirable as a citizen. Disenfranchisement, classism, and ethnocentricity were all consequences of Immigration Act of 1924 and Mexican Repatriation, however, perhaps the most impactful was the pattern of expulsion that it set into motion within our immigration