U.S. History of Arresting Dangerous Immigrants

America entered World War I on April 6, 1917. Un-naturalized Germans and even first and second generation naturalized German immigrants were widely seen as the “enemy within”.

Surveillance operations, conducted by such government agencies as the Alien Enemy Bureau, led to over 10,000 arrests.  Some 8,500 arrests were conducted under presidential warrants. Most of those arrested were released after a brief period of investigation.  Almost twenty five per cent of those detained, however, were found to be “dangerous enemy aliens” and interned in two camps set up by the War Department.  In the spring of 1918, the government began interning female enemy aliens suspected of aiding the enemy.  Scores of women were arrested, but only fifteen were held indefinitely

German-speaking communities were largely erased by the war and the anti-German feeling it created.  This was done through aggressive assimilation by hitherto self-identifying German-speaking communities.

American Domestic Propaganda in World War I

A brief look at the changing historical views (1920 to the present) on the uses and abuses of American domestic propaganda during World War I. Was this a necessary evil or a gross infringement of civil liberties? How, when, and why has opinion changed?

U.S. Has History of Banning Dangerous Immigrants

     In the early part of the 20^th century an increasing number of Americans grew concerned about violent immigrants from Eastern Europe who harbored messianic beliefs about anarchism and communism.  This fear was inflamed when an anarchist (Leon Frank Czolgosz, a home grown terrorist whose parents had immigrated to Ohio) assassinated President William McKinley in 1901.

     After World War I, with a devastated Europe suffering economic and social upheaval, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe headed for America.  It is said that there were over 150,000 anarchists and communists in the United States by 1919 (which represented only 0.1% of the overall population, a small but dangerous minority).

     A series of bomb explosions in 1919, including a failed attempt to blow up the Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, lead to a vigorous campaign against the communists. On New Year’s Day, 1920, over 6,000 people were arrested and put in prison.  In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 which severely restricted immigration (new immigrants admitted fell from 805,000 in 1920 to 309,000 in 1921-22).  The 1921 act was made even tougher by the Immigration Act of 1924.  The purpose of this act was “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity,” and, among other things, outright banned the immigration of Arabs.

     These tough immigration acts lasted until 1965 when they were replaced during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Secrets of American History

A brief look at the often overlooked stories of American history from colonial times to modern times, stories such as, the original Emancipation Proclamations, the plot to kill Martha Washington, terrorism in the Civil War, America’s plan to invade Canada in 1930, a planned coup against the president, and many others hidden tales.

Eight Hours for What We Will by Roy Rosenzweig

The values of nineteenth century America were largely white Anglo-Saxon values that stressed Protestant self-reliance and Victorian respectability. Men worked and subdued the frontier (both literally and figuratively), while the woman’s domain was religion (moral uplift) and the home. Education, self-cultivation and upward mobility were the hallmarks of Anglo Saxon values. The central theme of this value system was Progress (expressed in terms of material progress) versus primitivism.

According to Larry May in his book Screening Out the Past, immigrants presented a disorganizing element into American society because they brought with them other (less restrictive) value systems. In the view of the white Anglo-Saxon majority, immigrants needed to be Americanized in order to, “make no trouble for the right minded” (May, 15). The workplace was one area in which the immigrant must be bent to (industrial) discipline. The other area was leisure. The middle class wanted to control immigrant leisure, and as Roy Rosenzweig points out in Eight Hours for What We Will leisure became a battleground between groups with different value systems. 

For immigrants, amusements constituted an important counterweight to the rigors of industrial discipline. Movies were particularly appealing to multi-lingual immigrants. Because movies were silent, they were universally available as an outlet for romance and adventure and formed the ground pattern of social life for the young (May, 38). The movies provided immigrants with a form of acculturation into American life. Although the middle class frowned on the low themes of the earliest movies, in general movies were much less of a threat to industrial discipline than were other amusements such as drinking in saloons. Immigrants carved out leisure (and especially movies) as a public space apart from work where they could indulge hopes, dreams and aspirations. In embracing the culture of the movies (and its concomitant consumerism) so enthusiastically, the immigrant movie go-er accelerated the breakdown of old ethnic norms and the development of a more homogeneous society based on mass culture and consumerism. Consumerism offered the image of a homogenous population pursuing the same goals of living well and accumulating goods. The emergence of consumerism served to mask the transformation of the immigrant from person to commodity and tempered resistance to labor discipline.

The development of the movie industry itself was a tremendous social safety valve. The movie industry, in which immigrants were heavily represented, demonstrated that success could be had without a long laborious submission to the Anglo Saxon value system (May, 196). Success was democratized in the persona of the movie star who by talent and imagination could become an overnight success (May, 233).

In Eight Hours for What We Will, Roy Rosenzweig talks about alternative ethnic worker cultures as opposed to oppositional cultures. Rather than directly challenging the economic elite, the alternative culture passively resists. Initially immigrants found strength to passively resist industrial discipline within the traditions and norms of their ethnic communities, to paraphrase Rosenzweig’s book, “they found a different way to live and wished to be left alone with it” (Rozenzweig, 64). Mass culture appears to have taken the place of the immigrant neighborhood. The modern American citizen passively resists labor discipline by immersing in consumerism and the products of mass culture. Meaning is found in conspicuous consumption.

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At America’s Gates by Erika Lee (Book Review)

Lee’s central argument is that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 set America on the path to becoming a “gate keeping” nation. The Chinese Exclusion act, and its implementation, set the future pattern for the treatment of many other immigrants to America. Immigrant identification papers, border patrols, internal surveillance and harassment, and deportation were all administrative devices created by the Government in response to Chinese immigration (Lee, 42). Lee argues that America’s view of immigrants is ambivalent, and that although we are a nation of immigrants we are also a gate keeping nation. This ambivalent attitude shaped and continues to shape American immigration policy (Lee, 251).


Lee points out that admission and exclusion define national identity (Lee, 22). So then why do nations admit or exclude immigrant populations? One should first look to economic, political and social relationships for the answer. How fast can a nation safely assimilate an immigrant population without causing economic, political or social disorder? The pragmatic power relationships of a given time will determine how far “the gate” is opened to immigrants. The need for cheap labor in the nineteenth century allowed the door to swing open.

The Chinese came to America for economic gain, most with the intention of returning to China. In some ways this resembles a reverse form of economic imperialism. Just as the western powers went to China (and elsewhere) for quick profits and an improved standard of living for the mother country, so did the Chinese “fortune hunters”, come to the “Golden Mountain” (the United States), in search of quick profits. According to Lee, Chinese sojourning in America was, “...a strategy to preserve or increase wealth and to accumulate lands in the homeland....” (Lee, 122).

In an era before the establishment of a minimum wage or social safety nets, American workers rightly feared an influx of cheap foreign labor. Although it is unfair to criticize Lee for the book “she did not write”, a history of immigration would be more informative if it presented a more balanced view of the fears and concerns of those who opposed immigration and how and why these views changed as power relationships and pragmatic imperatives changed (e.g. the triumph of unionism).

As a study in inter-group power relationships Lee’s book is fascinating. The Chinese immigrants had little political power and were racially and culturally stigmatized. Despite these handicaps, as a group the Chinese were very resilient in the face of the organized discrimination of the state and the dominant society. Using a form of passive resistance (e.g. learning the loopholes in the laws, entry via Mexico and Canada) the Chinese continued to evade immigration laws. The tactics of the Chinese community is an interesting example of the “agency” of disempowered groups and the “tools of the weak.”

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Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens & The Making of Modern America by Mae Ngai

Ngai argues that immigration policy is fundamentally about citizenship, who is allowed to become a citizen and who is excluded from citizenship. Citizenship matters because it is citizenship that gives an individual the right to have rights within the State (Ngai, 229). With legal rights the immigrant group can vie for economic and political power within the State.

Once the criteria for citizenship which immigrants must meet (e.g. race, class, occupation, acceptable annual number of immigrants who can be absorbed into the economy) is created, an entire new category of unacceptable immigrants is also created, the excludable, the illegal alien who defies the criteria. Thus while the formal mechanisms of immigration policy stand “triple guard to repel legal immigration”; illegal immigrants swarm in at the back door (e.g. although the number of acceptable legal immigrants to the U.S. in 1953 could be measured in the hundreds of thousands, The New York Times estimated that in 1953 some 1.5 million illegal immigrants entered the United States)(Ngai, 247). The ongoing debate over which immigrants are acceptable and which are excludable is central to the fluctuating power relationships within the country. Ngai traces the transformation of U.S. immigration policy from race superiority to multiculturalism based largely on the shifting power relationships (e.g. the war against Fascism and the need to placate allies, the Cold War and the need to embrace the world role as “leader of the free world”).

Ngai indicates that illegal immigration is the central and singularly intractable problem of immigration policy (Ngai, 265). Ngai intimates why this is so without engaging the issue in sufficient depth. Macro-economic forces create the need for labor. Immigration is encouraged to fill this need. The immigration policy of the State manages the human aspects the importation of cheap labor based on the social norms and needs of the State. (Thus “guest worker” programs or contract labor programs are often acceptable to nativists while legal immigration which implies the ultimate achievement of economic and political rights is not.) Ultimately the entire notion of importing cheap immigrant labor (or for that matter siphoning off the top professionals from emerging economies, the so-called brain drain) supports a pyramid of economic self-interest, what Ngai cites as socio-political selfishness (Ngai, 252). At a micro level, immigration is not about the equitable distribution of the fruits of production, it is about maximizing the economic good of the employer. (Thus the Texas farmer preferred to employ illegal Mexicans rather than legal Mexican “braceros”, because the illegals were cheaper, more docile, and did not require as much “red tape”) (Ngai, 255). At a macro-level immigration policy aims at economic progress to create a “national island of relatively homogenous and comfortable people” (Ngai, 252).

Ngai correctly indicates that immigration policy within nation states is not keeping pace with the fluid trans-national movement of capital and labor, “It may be that illegal immigration will persist as long as the world remains divided into sovereign nation-states and as long as there remains an unequal distribution of wealth among them” (Ngai, 269). It is the economic needs of employers that fuels illegal immigration when legal immigration does not satisfy those needs. The employer acts to optimize his economic utility at the expense of the citizen worker, the illegal alien and the broader society.

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The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Labor

By 1870, the Chinese were the largest ethnic component of the foreign-born workforce in California, constituted some nine percent of the state’s total population, and made up fourteen percent of the total work force. The Chinese were viewed as workers who would work for meager wages and would accept any conditions of work no matter how minimal or oppressive they might be.

Most Chinese immigrants were men who had borrowed money to come to the United States and who were barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. They sent money back to China regularly to repay their debts and to support their families.

Chinese immigration did have a negative economic impact on American workers. By 1870, the Chinese were a highly visible segment of the San Francisco labor force (13.2 percent). The immediate consequence of this labor influx was a reduction of wages and the extension of the working day. Of all trades in San Francisco, cigar manufacturing was the most affected by Chinese labor. Ninety one percent of all cigar makers in San Francisco were Chinese. Cigar makers in California, because of cheap Chinese labor, averaged wages ten per cent lower than in twenty other states. Wages for Chinese workers averaged half those of white workers in the shoe and clothing industries. White workers blamed the Chinese for falling wages.

Chinese immigration became a national issue culminating in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which forbade any additional Chinese immigrants for ten years. The law was regularly extended each decade until it was repealed in 1943 when China was given a small annual quota of 105 immigrants which continued in effect until 1965.



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Guarding the Golden Door by Roger Daniels: Review

In Guarding the Golden Door Daniels presents an overview of the development immigration policy in the United States from the founding of the Republic through 2003. America has had a love/hate relationship with its immigrant population, on the one hand reveling in the nation’s immigrant past while, on the other, rejecting the immigrant present (Daniels, 6).

Opposition to immigration has successively centered on exclusion because of religion (e.g. the Irish and German and Catholic menace which gave rise to Protestant nativism in the 1840’s), race (e.g. Chinese exclusion act of 1882) and ethnicity (e.g. Immigration Act of 1924 setting quotas on the basis of national origin). (Daniels, 11).

Underlying these differences are more subtle arguments: (1)Because of religion, race or ethnicity these groups are too “other”, and therefore cannot be assimilated into American culture. The un-assimilated presence of these groups, so the argument runs, will corrupt American values; (2) Immigrant groups, because of innate inferiority or prior cultural disposition, are not capable of self-government and are therefore a danger to our political institutions;(3) An influx of immigrants will result in loss of jobs for native Americans, and will bring about a lower standard of living.

American immigration policy has manifested both liberal and pragmatic impulses, but has predominantly been driven by pragmatic considerations. The founding fathers recognized the need for immigration to provide cheap labor in the building of the new nation. (The introduction of slavery into the South was largely the result of inadequate immigration during colonial times. The lack of sufficient indentured white servants to work plantations resulted in the forced “immigration” of Africans beginning in the late 1600’s). Chinese immigration was encouraged during the period of the building of the trans-continental railroad, when cheap labor was needed, but anti-Chinese agitation increased after the driving of the “golden Spike” in 1869 (Daniel’s, 12). Interestingly, it was Senator Charles Sumner, the great abolitionist, who was the champion of a liberal immigration policy towards the Chinese, calling for a color-blind naturalization statute (Daniels, 119). Sumner recognized that the same liberal impulses that animated abolitionists before the Civil War should be applied to immigration policy. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 represents the triumph of the economic interests which did not want to create unintended social consequences (i.e. the growth of a large unassimilated racial minority) once its economic goals had been realized.

Other examples of the primacy of the economic motive are seen in Immigration Act of 1924, wherein quotas were not extended to most Western Hemisphere nations because many Southwestern and Western legislators insisted their regions needed Mexican laborers (Daniels, 52), in the exemption of Filipinos from immigration restrictions into Hawaii if the Secretary of the Interior thought the importation of more Filipino laborers was advisable (Daniels, 72), and in the push to bring temporary Mexican workers into the U.S. during World War II because, as Herbert Hoover wrote at the time, “…we need every bit of this labor we can get and need it badly.”

U.S. immigration policy underwent a change after World War II. Prior to World War II, America had a tradition of isolationism. After World War II America became a world power. Ideas of Nordic superiority were rejected (Daniels, 116). After having defeated the Nazi ideology of racial superiority the United States could hardly embrace such an ideology as it entered into a global contest for “hearts and minds” with the Soviet Union. Henceforth, foreign policy would take primacy in matters of immigration and America would increasingly embrace multi-culturalism as a national ideal. Economic pragmatism with regard to immigration policy gave way to geo-political pragmatism with regard to immigration policy.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Labor

A brief look at the background of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the relation of race and class in the American labor movement.

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