Bracero Program Begins 22-Year Guest Worker Exploitation System

The United States and Mexico sign the Mexican Farm Labor Program agreement, launching the Bracero Program to import temporary agricultural workers during World War II labor shortages. The program, which operates from 1942 to 1964, becomes the largest guest worker program in U.S. history with 4.6 million contracts signed across 24 states. The agreement promises braceros minimum wage protections, insurance, safe housing, and employment only in areas of certified labor shortage with prohibitions against using them as strikebreakers. In practice, agricultural employers systematically violate these protections while government agencies provide minimal oversight or enforcement.

Farm owners routinely ignore contractual requirements, providing substandard housing, paying below minimum wage, and using braceros to undermine unionization efforts. Between the 1940s and mid-1950s, farm wages decline sharply as a percentage of manufacturing wages—a result directly attributable to the program’s creation of a captive workforce lacking full legal rights. The program’s exploitative structure proves so severe that Mexico bans participation by its citizens in Texas during the mid-1940s after documented discrimination and maltreatment including lynchings along the border. Despite these abuses, the U.S. government expands the program beyond agriculture to railroad construction and forestry with equally minimal worker protections.

The Bracero Program establishes a template for modern guest worker exploitation that persists decades after its termination. By creating a legal framework for importing workers who lack full civil rights and face deportation if they complain about conditions, the program enables systematic wage suppression and union-busting. When the program finally ends in 1964 due to pressure from labor and civil rights reformers, farm wages jump 40% as demonstrated by the United Farm Workers’ first table grape contract in 1966. The program demonstrates how corporate interests can capture immigration policy to create legally-sanctioned labor exploitation systems, a pattern that recurs in subsequent guest worker programs despite the Bracero Program’s documented failures and abuses.