In the postwar period, calls for out-migration persisted. In 1945, a report by the House Committee on Insular Affairs recommended the expulsion of one million Puerto Ricans—half of the population—so there would be an “increase in the island’s living standards, unemployment would end, and the United States taxpayers would be relieved” (quoted in Meléndez 2017, 46). These appeals finally came to full fruition when colonial administrators were not the only ones who saw removal as a “solution.” In the 1940s, the modernizing Puerto Rican elites themselves more widely expressed support for population control and expulsion policies in order to assert their political authority and more quickly achieve industrialization, an outcome viewed as fundamental to building a “civilized” and prosperous society. In the succinct words of writer Salvador Tió (1949, 20), gobernar es despoblar (“to govern is to depopulate”).