In 1956, "Ike" ran Operation Wetback to round up and deport hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants.
WWII had forced American women into factories and our farm boys into uniforms. So, in came the Mexicans.
Operation Wetback was industrial-scale deportation and another iteration of the 1919-20 "Red Scare" Palmer Raids (which like today's ICE also produced two martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti) or the interment of thousands and thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans from 1942-45.
White European refugees came here after WWII to work American farms and factories.
The US and Canada specifically took them from DP and refugee camps in Germany and Austria ran by the newly-created UNRWA.
To make room for white labor, the Mexicans were sacrificed.
Fighting the Third Reich, Eisenhower had learned from the Nazis the efficiency of moving millions of people by rail. www.tamucc.edu
And for many of those new anti-communist white refugees from Europe, they voted for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 simply because of name recognition. "Why, that's General Eisenhower, the man that beat Hitler. Who is Adlai Stevenson?" And hence a new generation of white Republicans was incubated.
Those white refugees settling into Kansas, Missouri, or Texas farms and ranches may not have known or cared about the mass deportations of their brown-skinned predecessors.
Endnote: Across the Atlantic, post-WWII UK imported temporary low-wage labor from the Caribbean, who were then treated poorly by the "cockneys and Colonel Mustards." A British mystery film in the early 1960s told the tale of a murdered Caribbean woman in London and a shameful cover-up. Otherwise, talking about the Windward Islands labor scandal was taboo for many years in the UK.
