The Bracero Program was a bilateral guest worker arrangement between the United States and Mexico that brought more than four million Mexican men into the country on temporary contracts for farm and railroad work between 1942 and 1964.1Library of Congress. Bracero Program It began as a wartime response to labor shortages, outlasted World War II by two decades, and remains the largest guest worker program in American history. Congress let its authorizing statute expire at the end of 1964, and no program since has replicated its scale.
What the Program Was
Braceros were Mexican citizens admitted for seasonal work under written contracts negotiated between the two governments. The program was agricultural at its core, but a 1943 side agreement, the United States-Mexico Non-Agricultural Workers Agreement, opened positions on American railroads as well. Roughly 69,000 braceros worked for thirty-five railroads at the 1945 peak, and by the time the program ended about 26 percent of all bracero contracts had gone to railroad and other non-agricultural jobs.
Admissions ran between 300,000 and 445,000 per year during the peak years of the late 1950s. Workers came without their families, on short contracts, and were expected to return home when the contract ended.
The Legal Framework
The program launched in August 1942 through an executive agreement between the U.S. State Department and Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, commonly called the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement.2Government Publishing Office. Agreement Between the United States of America and Mexico Respecting the Temporary Migration of Mexican Agricultural Workers Because an executive agreement does not carry the domestic force of a statute, Congress passed Public Law 45 in 1943 to authorize federal spending on recruiting and transporting workers. The terms themselves still rested on diplomatic negotiation.
Statutory footing came in 1951 with Public Law 78, which amended the Agricultural Act of 1949. It gave the Secretary of Labor authority to recruit workers in Mexico, run border reception centers, arrange transportation, provide emergency medical care, and help negotiate contracts. Before foreign workers could be placed in any region, the Secretary had to certify that no qualified domestic workers were available and that hiring braceros would not depress wages or working conditions for American farmworkers.3GovInfo. Public Law 82-78 – An Act to Amend the Agricultural Act of 1949 Public Law 78 required periodic congressional renewal, which is what ultimately gave Congress its chance to end the program.
Mexico entered negotiations with real leverage and used it. The 1942 agreement included a non-discrimination clause tied to Executive Order 8802, barred the use of braceros in military service, and prohibited employers from using them to displace domestic workers or cut existing pay rates.2Government Publishing Office. Agreement Between the United States of America and Mexico Respecting the Temporary Migration of Mexican Agricultural Workers Contracts had to be written in Spanish. Mexico initially insisted on functioning as the sole recruiter, which kept American employers from hiring directly in Mexican towns, though that arrangement loosened over time.
Who Could Become a Bracero
Eligibility was narrow. The program recruited only men, and only Mexican citizens. Selection favored candidates with documented agricultural experience who could handle commercial farm work without training.
Every candidate underwent a medical examination at processing centers in Mexico. Doctors used chest X-rays to screen for tuberculosis and checked for hernias, venereal disease, and other conditions that would interfere with heavy manual labor. Men who failed were turned away. At INS reception centers on the U.S. side of the border, workers went through further processing that included fumigation with DDT.
How Workers Were Recruited and Placed
Candidates gathered at Mexican facilities called centros de contratación, often traveling long distances at their own expense to wait for labor officials to select them. Those chosen moved to reception centers at the border for fingerprinting and identity verification, and the Department of Labor then assigned them to specific agricultural associations or individual farming operations that had requested labor. Employers or the government paid for transportation from the border to the work site.
Not every state received braceros. Mexico blacklisted Texas from the program during the 1940s because of widespread discrimination against Mexican workers there. Texas growers were notorious for the worst abuses, and the Mexican government refused to send workers into that environment until the blacklist was eventually lifted.
Contract Terms and Wages
Each bracero worked under an individual written contract with a fixed start and end date. The most distinctive protection was the 75 percent work guarantee: employers had to provide work for at least three-quarters of the contract period, and if they could not, they owed the worker what he would have earned during the idle time. Employers had to provide free, sanitary housing meeting federal health standards. Meals could be charged for, but the daily rate was capped.
Wage protection was the centerpiece and the weakest link. Braceros were supposed to receive the prevailing wage for their region, matching what domestic workers earned for the same tasks; the 1942 agreement set a floor of thirty cents per hour. In theory, the Department of Labor determined prevailing wages independently. In practice, an Employment Service agent often attended a growers’ meeting, listened to what farmers said they were willing to pay, and reported that figure as the prevailing wage. Domestic workers either competed at those depressed rates or left agriculture. On paper the protections were strong; in daily reality braceros routinely faced surcharges for room and board, deducted pay, and exposure to harmful chemicals.1Library of Congress. Bracero Program
The 10 Percent Savings Fund
Under the 1942 agreement, 10 percent of each worker’s wages was withheld and deposited into a savings fund the worker was supposed to receive on returning to Mexico. Employers withheld the money, which was deposited at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco for the account of the Bank of Mexico. The Mexican Agricultural Credit Bank was then supposed to distribute the funds when workers returned home. The deductions stopped on January 1, 1946, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture instructed employers to cease withholding.4U.S. Department of State. Bracero Savings Fund
By May 1946, the Mexican Agricultural Credit Bank had received about $16 million in farm worker savings, and the National Savings Bank had received roughly $18 million for railroad workers. Mexican government records from that period showed 69 percent of the farm workers’ savings had been disbursed and 95 percent of the railroad workers’. Millions of dollars remained in limbo, and many former braceros never received their money.
Decades later, former braceros sued the United States, Mexico, and Wells Fargo. In a consolidated case in the Northern District of California, the court dismissed the claims against the Mexican defendants and Wells Fargo entirely. Claims against the United States were largely barred by the six-year statute of limitations.5Casemine. Cruz v. U.S.A., (N.D.Cal. 2002)
Why the Program Ended in 1964
Public Law 78 required periodic congressional renewal, and in 1964 Congress chose not to extend it. The program expired on December 31 of that year, after twenty-two years of managed labor migration.
Several forces converged. Labor organizations, led by Cesar Chavez and the emerging farmworker movement, argued for years that the program created an oversupply of cheap labor that depressed domestic wages. The evidence supported them: the prevailing wage system had never worked as intended, and domestic farmworkers had been steadily pushed out of the industry. Agricultural mechanization reduced the need for hand labor, and the development of the mechanical tomato harvester, spurred partly by anticipation of the program’s end, showed that technology could replace some bracero work. Broader shifts in American attitudes toward civil rights and labor protections also made a program built on disposable foreign labor harder to defend politically.
What Happened After It Ended
Ending the program did not end demand for Mexican labor or the willingness of Mexican workers to supply it. What it ended was the legal channel. INS apprehensions of deportable aliens rose from roughly 87,000 in 1964 to nearly 876,000 by 1976, an increase of more than 1,000 percent. An internal INS report found that apprehensions of adult male Mexican agricultural workers alone jumped 600 percent between 1965 and 1970.
The H-2A temporary agricultural visa eventually emerged as the nominal replacement, but it never came close to filling the gap. In 2003, fewer than 30,000 H-2A visas were issued, compared with the 300,000 to 445,000 annual bracero admissions during the late 1950s. Federal labor officials themselves described the H-2A program as cumbersome and litigation-prone, too complex for the average grower to navigate without a lawyer.
The migration networks the program built between specific Mexican communities and specific American agricultural regions outlasted the legal framework by generations. Families, villages, and regional economies on both sides of the border had organized around seasonal migration, and every major immigration debate since 1964 has, in some form, been an argument about whether and how to rebuild what the Bracero Program once provided.