Bracero Program Ends After 22 Years - Farm Wages Immediately Jump 40%

The Bracero Program officially ends on December 31, 1964, after labor and civil rights reformers successfully pressure Congress to terminate the 22-year guest worker system. The program’s conclusion comes as mechanization increases in agriculture and mounting evidence exposes systematic employer abuses including wage theft, substandard housing, below-minimum-wage pay, and use of braceros to break strikes and suppress union organizing. During its operation, the program issued contracts to 5 million Mexican workers, with an average of 200,000 braceros per year from 1948 to 1964, creating a captive workforce that agricultural employers exploited to avoid paying market wages to domestic workers.

The program’s wage suppression effects become immediately apparent after termination. In 1966, the United Farm Workers union wins its first table grape contract securing a 40% wage increase for farmworkers—a jump that demonstrates how artificially depressed agricultural wages had become under the bracero system. Between the 1940s and mid-1950s, farm wages had fallen sharply as a percentage of manufacturing wages, a decline directly attributable to growers’ access to braceros and undocumented workers who lacked full rights in American society. The program’s costs, employer abuses, and officials’ corrupt practices—including the disappearance of millions in withheld wages—had driven many Mexicans to seek work illegally outside the program’s structure, creating an undocumented population that employers also exploited.

The Bracero Program’s legacy extends far beyond its 1964 termination date. Critics of modern guest worker programs cite the bracero system as a precedent for “legalized slavery,” pointing to the fundamental power imbalance when workers face deportation for complaining about conditions. The program set the stage for decades of labor disputes and established a dynamic of migrant agricultural labor that persists into the 21st century. The rise of the United Farm Workers in the 1960s and 1970s, composed largely of Mexican and Mexican-American workers, continues fighting many of the same inequalities that braceros faced. The program demonstrates how temporary worker programs enable corporate interests to suppress wages and prevent unionization, with effects that persist long after the formal programs end through the creation of undocumented labor pools and employer expectations of access to exploitable workers.