[Edward64]

Originally Posted by miami_fan

I am going to add these links here as other online resources. There are tons of them out there as recent immigration debates have brought this program back to the forefront. I would encourage you to look them up.

The Bracero Program: Cheap Labor for U.S. Farms

The Largest Mass Deportation in American History | HISTORY

Between 1942 and 1964, 4.5M entered legally though the Bracero program.

In your first link, it shows that the majority of Braceros were not legal but illegal. See highlighted quote below.

From 1942 to 1947, only about 260,000 Mexican braceros were hired, amounting to less than 10 percent of the total number of workers hired in the U.S. over the period. However, American growers became increasingly dependent on Mexican workers and found it easier to go around the Bracero Program’s complicated contract process by hiring undocumented immigrants.

In addition, the Mexican government’s inability to process the unexpectedly large number of program applicants prompted many Mexican citizens to enter the U.S. without documentation. By the time the program ended in 1964, the number of undocumented Mexican workers who had entered the U.S. surpassed the nearly 5 million braceros.

However in your second link, I did see the quote below.

An estimated 4.6 million Mexicans entered the country legally through the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964, and states like California soon became dependent on bracero workers. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers crossed the border without permission and found jobs on the farms of employers willing to flout the law.

To break the tie, I went to wiki

Bracero Program - Wikipedia

To address the overwhelming amount of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched Operation Wetback in June 1954, as a way to repatriate illegal laborers back to Mexico. The illegal workers who came over to the states at the initial start of the program were not the only ones affected by this operation, there were also massive groups of workers who felt the need to extend their stay in the U.S. well after their labor contracts were terminated.[9]

So in conclusion, I surmise that not all the 4.5M entered legally through the Bracero program. I doubt the stats are available as some may have come in legally but then per the wiki quote, overstayed and became illegal.