We often assume that the history of Mexican migration to the United States is a simple story of a “sending state” eager to export its unemployed and a “receiving state” struggling to hold back the tide. But 1970s history reveals a different, more tragic reality: a moment when Mexico proposed a bilateral economic solution to keep its people at home, only to be met with American indifference and a retreat into unilateral policing.
The migration Mexico tried to address in the 1970s was largely of American making. During World War II, the United States came to Mexico requesting farm and railroad workers. Mexico agreed, but with conditions: guaranteed wages, housing, and protections against discrimination. The resulting Bracero Program brought millions of Mexicans to the U.S. as guest workers beginning in 1942. When the war ended and Mexico wanted to wind it down, the U.S. repeatedly insisted on extensions; American growers had become dependent on the labor.
By the early 1960s, domestic American opposition to the Bracero Program was mounting. Labor organizers argued the program undercut American farmworkers. And a series of tragedies—most notoriously the 1963 Chualar crash, which killed 32 braceros traveling in an unsafe converted truck—exposed how disposable these workers were to American employers.
Congress ended the Bracero Program in 1964 unilaterally, with little consultation with Mexico and nary a transition plan. Predictably, the migratory pipelines Washington built kept flowing—now simply reclassified as “illegal.”
Mexico and Mexicans were left to contend with a migration system the U.S. had built and abandoned. Without legal status, Mexican workers had no formal standing, reliable recourse, or pronounced political voice. That invisibility invited abuse from all sides: bosses who knew workers couldn’t complain and immigration officers who faced little accountability.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s northern border cities absorbed tens of thousands of deportees each year, straining under what officials called an “excess labor” problem. Idle workers pooled, as the region contended not just with deportees, but migrants unable to make a clean exit to the U.S.
As these crises grew, the Mexican state proposed a new doctrine: “Export products, not people” to the United States. Mexico was asking the United States to become a partner in managing a migration that American policy had set in motion. The economic logic was straightforward. If the United States lowered tariffs on Mexican products, Americans would buy more Mexican goods. Mexican factories and farms would need more workers to meet the newfound demand, creating jobs that would keep potential migrants home.