# Bracero Program **Status: stub.** A bilateral U.S.–Mexico guest-worker agreement running from 1942 to 1964 that brought an estimated 4.6 million contracted Mexican laborers (*braceros*) into U.S. agriculture and railroads over its lifetime. The program institutionalized a structural dependence on Mexican labor while giving workers few protections, and its design simultaneously shaped — and helped illegalize — the migrant labor flows that followed its termination. A foundational episode in the labor-bargaining thread of U.S. immigration history. See also: [[US Immigration Timeline]].