His reply was to me. and it is in the RECORD if any of my colleagues wish to check it out. and this was in August of 1965. his reply was. "We are going to place every nation on the same footing." I interjected. interrupted him and said. "Do you mean you want to place Iceland on the same level as Mexico?" He said. "Precisely." Mr. Speaker. with that one cannot argue. There is no way one can argue with that abysmal lack of knowledge of our own history in the Southwest and particularly the fact that we had had since World War II the question of immigrants that under certain conditions we accepted evoking an outlawed practice of the 1870s when cheap European labor was imported from Middle Europe to work in the mines of Pennsylvania and other hardcore labor jobs. They were contract laborers. in fact the Congress some 10 years later just simply passed a law to abolish that practice. So for the first time we reverted to that during the pressure of World War II but then subsequent to the wars end the insistence on the part mostly of our growers in the Southwest and Far West and California on having this type of cheap labor. they did not have to worry about families. ostensibly. and they very blithely forgot the basic elements of human existence. and not realizing that that very fact alone would produce social conditions in our country that we would have to be paying for. Then. of course. the socalled Bracero Program. which my first year in the Congress I was given credit. rightfully. or blamed. according to some for the termination of that program. even though President Johnson favored it.
Keywords matched
contract laborers immigrants