How a 1970s Proposal to ‘Export Products, Not People’ North of the Border Got Rejected
by Irvin Ibargüen April 6, 2026 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
We often assume that the history of Mexican migration to the United States is a simple story of a “sending state” eager to export its unemployed and a “receiving state” struggling to hold back the tide. But 1970s history reveals a different, more tragic reality: a moment when Mexico proposed a bilateral economic solution to keep its people at home, only to be met with American indifference and a retreat into unilateral policing.
The migration Mexico tried to address in the 1970s was largely of American making. During World War II, the United States came to Mexico requesting farm and railroad workers. Mexico agreed, but with conditions: guaranteed wages, housing, and protections against discrimination. The resulting Bracero Program brought millions of Mexicans to the U.S. as guest workers beginning in 1942. When the war ended and Mexico wanted to wind it down, the U.S. repeatedly insisted on extensions; American growers had become dependent on the labor.
By the early 1960s, domestic American opposition to the Bracero Program was mounting. Labor organizers argued the program undercut American farmworkers. And a series of tragedies—most notoriously the 1963 Chualar crash, which killed 32 braceros traveling in an unsafe converted truck—exposed how disposable these workers were to American employers.
Congress ended the Bracero Program in 1964 unilaterally, with little consultation with Mexico and nary a transition plan. Predictably, the migratory pipelines Washington built kept flowing—now simply reclassified as “illegal.”
Mexico and Mexicans were left to contend with a migration system the U.S. had built and abandoned. Without legal status, Mexican workers had no formal standing, reliable recourse, or pronounced political voice. That invisibility invited abuse from all sides: bosses who knew workers couldn’t complain and immigration officers who faced little accountability.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s northern border cities absorbed tens of thousands of deportees each year, straining under what officials called an “excess labor” problem. Idle workers pooled, as the region contended not just with deportees, but migrants unable to make a clean exit to the U.S.
As these crises grew, the Mexican state proposed a new doctrine: “Export products, not people” to the United States. Mexico was asking the United States to become a partner in managing a migration that American policy had set in motion. The economic logic was straightforward. If the United States lowered tariffs on Mexican products, Americans would buy more Mexican goods. Mexican factories and farms would need more workers to meet the newfound demand, creating jobs that would keep potential migrants home.
In 1972, President Luis Echeverría and President Richard Nixon met for a summit centered on Echeverría’s concerns about the deportation and mistreatment of Mexican nationals in the United States. The two presidents agreed only that each country would establish its own commission to study the labor problem and propose solutions separately.
The Mexican body—the Comisión Intersecretarial—brought together the secretaries of the interior, labor, public education, agrarian matters and colonization, and finance, along with the attorney general, each chosen for the distinct angle their ministry brought to the problem of out-migration. It sampled the records of 10,000 deportees to pinpoint the “critical areas” hemorrhaging people. It zeroed in on specific municipalities in Zacatecas, Michoacán, and Jalisco.
In 1976, before he left office, Echeverría proposed the body’s findings to President Gerald Ford: lower tariffs specifically on goods from these high-migration towns to boost their industries and stem the flow at its source. But Ford dismissed this micro-targeted relief effort, preferring to deter migration through punitive measures.
You Might Also Like
Teaching Deportation History to Meet the Moment
Looking Deportation in the Face
Where Does Deportation Come From?
With no solutions in place to address the migration problem, Echeverría’s successor, President José López Portillo, inherited an escalating crisis. Northern Mexico cities were increasingly strained by the presence of deportees and would-be migrants. Reports reaching Mexico City eventually confirmed Mexicans’ worst fears about migrant abuse. In Arizona, wealthy ranchers tortured three migrants. In Louisiana, a police chief kept workers locked in “tiger cages.” The Border Patrol assassinated border crossers.
López Portillo’s opening moves were the same stopgaps Mexico had cycled through for years: demanding “just and humane” treatment from U.S. authorities and ramping up police operations against human traffickers along the border. These measures addressed the violence migrants suffered without touching the economic conditions that drove them north in the first place.
López Portillo decided to scale up his ask. He lobbied the U.S. for broad tariff reductions to stimulate the entire Mexican economy. In 1977, with a new U.S. president in Jimmy Carter, the two countries signed a modest agreement reducing duties on select Mexican fruits, vegetables, and artisanal products, falling short of Mexico’s vision of comprehensive tariff relief.
López Portillo was optimistic Carter would prove a better partner than Nixon and Ford in managing the migration, given his stated commitment to human rights. So he prodded for more. He sought total exemption from the 10 percent surcharges typically imposed on all U.S. imports. The Mexican ambassador predicted this would create 600,000 jobs within two years, “raising the standard of living and preventing the exodus.” Mexican officials spoke of building a “wall of progress” against migration.
The U.S. rebuffed the broader ask, floating instead a one-time cash infusion of $2 billion to help Mexico create jobs. The proposal never made it through Congress. And in any case, what López Portillo wanted was not a check but a long-term tariff reduction policy that would steadily catalyze Mexican industry, year after year, until staying home made more sense than leaving.
Then, in the late 1970s, Mexico discovered massive oil reserves. López Portillo finally had leverage: the United States, still reeling from the 1973 OPEC crisis, wanted a stable supplier next door. So, López Portillo proposed a package deal—guaranteed oil exports in exchange for tariff relief.
There was a genuine debate within the Carter administration. The State Department and the National Security Council backed the arrangement, arguing that Iranian instability and rising oil prices made a special relationship with Mexico strategically sound. The U.S. would be exchanging tariff and migration concessions to obtain a reliable oil supplier next door. Treasury and Energy overruled them.
Energy Secretary James Schlesinger argued that the United States faced no critical short-term oil shortage, adding that Alaska’s potential domestic production was a better long-term bet than dependency on Mexican reserves. Meanwhile, Treasury officials, negotiating a multilateral trade agreement in Geneva, argued that a unilateral concession to Mexico would undermine American leverage at the table, and invite identical demands from other Latin American governments. Ultimately, Carter refused the package deal.
Mexico, facing mounting debt and currency devaluation, sold the oil to the U.S. anyway. López Portillo decided it was too risky to “pit oil against braceros.” The U.S. got energy security. Mexico obtained payment, but no structural solution to migration.
Mexico’s vision of cooperation crashed against U.S. unwillingness to prioritize migration as an international economic phenomenon. The U.S. instead defaulted to treating migration as an internal security, legal, and cultural problem to be solved punitively: expanding the Border Patrol, building fences, and launching raids that treated Mexican migrants as fugitives rather than jobseekers.
Today, we are living in the wreckage of that failed bilateralism.
Irvin Ibargüen is an assistant professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Caught in the Current: Mexico’s Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940-1980.
Primary editor: Sarah Rothbard | Secondary editor: Jackie Mansky