To efficiently export hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to serve as cheap labor, the island’s government founded or interconnected a range of physical, legal, and institutional infrastructures. These included a new airport in the metropolitan area, commercial air carriers willing to operate in Puerto Rico at an accessible cost and various offices created by Puerto Rico’s Migration Law, such as the Bureau of Employment and Migration, the Migration Office in New York, and other elements (Meléndez 2017). During this period, the state likewise supported mass sterilization and birth control testing on women without their consent, including the 1955 trials leading to the oral contraceptive known as “the pill”. These combined policies resulted in the exodus of 500,000 people between 1946 and 1964—over a million by 1981—a decline in births and the sterilization of one third of women of reproductive age (Cabán 2018; Lugo-Ortiz 1999, 208–226).