With support from the University of Richmond

New perspectives on how history is made

In Trump’s plan, an unsettling echo from US past

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for mass deportation of millions of immigrants living in the United States illegally, as well as their American-born children, bears similarities to a large-scale removal that many Mexican-American families faced 85 years ago.

During the Great Depression, counties and cities in the American Southwest and Midwest forced Mexican immigrants and their families to leave over concerns they were taking jobs away from whites despite their legal right to stay.

The result: Around 500,000 to 1 million Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans were pushed out of the country during the 1930s repatriation, as the removal is sometimes called.

Read entire article at AP