State Sen. Gilbert Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, has introduced a bill to require public junior high and high schools to teach students about the deportation from California of an estimated 400,000 illegal Mexican aliens during the Great Depression.

Cedillo believes that enforcement of U.S. immigration laws are racist and that President Herbert Hoover’s deportation of illegal aliens in 1929 is “an embarrassment to all Americans.” We disagree. California schools do not need another unfunded mandate. Nor do California schoolchildren need indoctrination in the guise of a revisionist history lesson.

Cedillo’s bill follows the State Legislature’s 2005 passage of the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, which officially recognized the “unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of United States citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent” and apologized to residents of California “for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights committed during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration.”

We do not think that California or the U.S. should ever apologize for preserving our sovereignty, or for carrying out U.S. immigration laws.

Foreshadowing today’s events, some one million Mexicans fled poverty and unstable political conditions in their native country by illegally entering the U.S. between 1900 and 1930. The U.S. government allowed the problem to escalate because it assumed that most of these illegal immigrants would eventually return to Mexico. In 1930, 25 percent of all Mexican illegal immigrants living in the U.S. resided in California. However, with U.S. unemployment reaching ruinous levels during the Great Depression, President Hoover redoubled the Border Patrol’s efforts to keep Mexicans from illegally penetrating the border and filling scarce jobs at black market wages. He formed a “Mexican Bureau” within the U.S. Bureau of Immigration. By 1931, Hoover’s policies succeeded and more Mexicans were leaving the U.S. than were entering it. Sixty thousand Mexicans alone left Los Angeles. In 1940, the Mexican population was half of what it had been just ten years prior.

One of the “lessons” Cedillo wants California schoolchildren to be taught is that Hoover’s program also deported U.S. citizens of Mexican lineage. What Cedillo fails to disclose, however, is that virtually all of the U.S. citizens “deported” to Mexico were the dependent minor children of illegal immigrants who became naturalized citizens because they were born in the U.S. Illegal immigrant parents simply took their children home with them. This is a far cry from the U.S.-as-villain history Cedillo would force our schools to teach.

We will count on Gov. Schwarzenegger to veto Cedillo’s bill or successor legislation should it reach his desk.
There is something worse than our schoolchildren learning no history in our public schools. And that is being force-fed false history and political propaganda.