Should the U.S apologize for 1930s deportation? calfornia already has.?

USA TODAY

April 4, 2006, n.p.

Copyright © 2006 USA Today. Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services. April 4, 2006. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

U.S. Urged to Apologize for 1930s Deportations

By Wendy Koch

USA TODAY

His father and oldest sister were farming sugar beets in the fields of Hamilton, Mont., and his mother was cooking tortillas when 6-year-old Ignacio Pina saw plainclothes authorities burst into his home.

"They came in with guns and told us to get out," recalls Pina, 81, a retired railroad worker in Bakersfield, Calif., of the 1931 raid. "They didn't let us take anything," not even a trunk that held birth certificates proving that he and his five siblings were U.S.-born citizens.

The family was thrown into a jail for 10 days before being sent by train to Mexico. Pina says he spent 16 years of "pure hell" there before acquiring papers of his Utah birth and returning to the United States.

The deportation of Pina's family tells an almost-forgotten story of a 1930s anti-immigrant campaign. Tens of thousands, and possibly more than 400,000, of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were pressured--through raids and job denials--to leave the United States during the Great Depression, according to a USA TODAY review of documents and interviews with historians and deportees. Many, mostly children, were U.S. citizens.

If their tales seem incredible, a USA TODAY analysis of the history textbooks used most in U.S. middle and high schools may explain why: Little has been written about the "repatriation."

That may soon change. As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on bills that would either help illegal workers become legal residents or boost enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, an effort to reveal deportations that happened 70 years ago has recently gained traction:

On Thursday, Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., plans to introduce a bill in the U.S. House that calls for a commission to study the "deportation and coerced emigration" of U.S. citizens and legal residents. The panel would also recommend remedies that could include reparations. "An apology should be made," she says.

Co-sponsor Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., says history may repeat itself. He says a recently passed House bill, which makes being an illegal immigrant a felony, could prompt a "massive deportation of U.S. citizens," many of them U.S.-born children leaving with their parents.

"We have safeguards to ensure people aren't deported who shouldn't be," says Jeff Lungren, GOP spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee, adding the new House bill retains those safeguards.

In January, California became the first state to enact a bill that apologizes to Latino families for the civil rights violations of the 1930s. It declined to approve the sort of reparations the U.S. Congress provided in 1988 for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

Democratic state Sen. Joe Dunn, a self-described "Irish white guy from Minnesota" who sponsored the state bill, is now pushing a measure to require students be taught about the 1930s emigration. He says as many as 2 million people of Mexican ancestry were coerced to leave, 60 percent of them U.S. citizens.

In October, a group of deportees and their children, known as "los repatriados," will host a conference in Detroit on the topic. Organizer Helen Herrada, whose father was deported, has conducted 100 oral histories and produced a documentary. She says many sent to Mexico felt "humiliated" and didn't want to talk about it. "They just don't want it to happen again."

No precise figures exist on how many of those deported in the 1930s were illegal immigrants. Since many of those harassed left on their own, and their journeys were not officially recorded, there are also no exact figures on the total number who departed.

At least 345,839 people went to Mexico from 1930 to 1935, with 1931 as the peak year, says a 1936 dispatch from the U.S. Consulate General in Mexico City.

"It was a racial removal program," says Mae Ngai, an immigration history expert at the University of Chicago, arguing people of Mexican nationality were targeted.

It is not clear to me if the parents were in the USA illegally or not. If they were here illegally, no we don't owe them anything.

No apology needed. If a child is born to illegals the child goes home with them. Deport them all.

No, and I don't think California should. Why should the people of today apologize for what the people of the past did?

Oh, I'm sorry our elected representatives were jerks back then, and seeing as I'm a completely different person with opposing beliefs, I should have to apologize for them.

Hell no.

You know I wish you would quit printing articles out of the paper,...use your own words if you have a question....you do this all the time.

Only if we can dig up those people that were in charge then.Why does everyone think we should pay for our older generations errors.Maybe we should go back in time to insure that everyone was making minimum wage.77 years ago...Please move on to current topics.I beleive China Ousted us 107 years ago....let's sue em

For the citizens mistakenly deported? Absolutely. I believe that in the 30s they assumed the children should go with their parents, but they should have asked.

The US needs to move on!

California would apologize for anything. let their apology suffice.

I agree with the guy above. I have nothing to do with what my ancestors did. I and nobody else who didn't live that time should have to. Your article is over a year old and I don't think much was ever done about your story.

What a crock.

No deportation of any illegal alien, deserves any apology.

Illegal aliens are criminals, they violate their first US law when they enter the USA illegally, their second when they live in the USA illegally, if they work illegally in the US they are in violation of another US federal law, they continue to violate more and more laws every minute of every day they remain on US soil illegally, because illegal aliens have no respect for any laws, they are all criminals.

All illegal aliens should be deported. No excuses, and who cares what the latino caucus in California does or says, everyone knows they are all a bunch of la raza racists anyway.

The deportations of illegal aliens from the US southwest in the first half of the last century were the best thing that ever happened to the states, and the nation.

Now if only we had a president with enough brains and guts to do the right thing and deport the criminal illegal aliens we are poisened with now.

I apologize. But it means nothing other that Yeah, I empathize.

Find the guys that were behind the idea and sue them. Of course they are most likely all dead, so that won't work. How far do you want to take this??? We can have Mongolia apologize for the brutal exploits of Genghis Khan and I guess Israel owes everybody an apology for at least something. LOL I mean, where's it stop?

TH ATS STUPID. SO I GUESS WE SHOULD NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS ON JAPAN.

OR GERMANY APOLOGIZE FOR ALMOST ANNIHILATING AN ENTIRE RICH CULTURE, RELIGION AND POPULATION???HUM....that's a pretty sad world we live in..where people say.."Hey..I din't do it" "My ancestors did it, not me" "Therefore...you'll never get a apolagy from me!"

Pretty stupid..Apolagizing is never a bad thing, people always throw politics into places where it's plain and simply courtesy. Mexico or not. It was the right thing to do. Otherwise California would have never done it to begin with!

wow, they should introduce this documentary to the entire country. it's important that the truth be told.