At a 1919 meeting to address Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman's upcoming deportation, held in Detroit, Michigan, at the hall of Local 127 of the United Automobile, Aircraft, and Vehicle Workers of America, speaker I. Paul Taylor proclaimed, “And they can, I suppose, deport us to this place or that place but if they cannot crush a man's spirit with stone walls and bars of iron, how in the world do they expect to crush it by sending them across a little strip of water.”Footnote ¹ In doing so, he drew attention to one of the most pressing subjects for radicals of the era: the government's escalating effort to suppress political dissent by expelling the foreign born. While Taylor warned that such efforts were futile against the fortitude of the immigrant revolutionary, the American government devoted its full energies to the project. Throughout the First Red Scare, immigrants were among the most central, and most visible, victims of the zealous crusade to squash the perceived growth of radicalism across the United States. In the process, hundreds of immigrants were deported from the country, hundreds more were detained for long periods before ultimately being released, and thousands more were subjected to raids and investigation by local and federal authorities.

In his classic 1955 book, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, Robert Murray established the overarching framework through which historians have come to understand the period of intensified antiradicalism in the years following World War I.Footnote ² Murray, alongside other scholars of radicalism and historians of immigration, argued that the “First Red Scare” had been a moment of popular panic, generated by genuine mass concern with the perceived “Bolshevik” menace during a period of labor uprisings, racial strife, and societal tension. Immigrants, Murray explained, were particularly vulnerable to this intensified hostility, both because of their precarious legal status as removable “aliens,” but also due to lingering wartime demands for “Americanism,” loyalty, and patriotism, which had left foreign-born communities under increased scrutiny. To trace the impact of the Red Scare on immigrant populations in the United States, Murray, like most scholars, focused on the post-entry deportations of foreign-born individuals suspected of radicalism.Footnote ³ In particular, such scholarship has emphasized the spectacular nature of the so-called Palmer Raids, a series of nationally coordinated raids in late 1919 and early 1920 that targeted suspected and known radical organizations around the country. These raids, which yielded mixed results, have left an ineffaceable mark in the national memory of repressive episodes. As Christopher Finan explains, in spite of the relatively low number of successful immigrant removals, “the government raids did achieve something important. They raised the issue of what freedoms are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”Footnote ⁴ Just as pertinently, however, the raids also raised the issue of what protections would be extended to the foreign-born residents of the nation. In the midst of postwar turmoil, and “under the influence of rising hysteria,” Murray wrote, “general sentiment demanded that the nation be purged of all alien agitators and the wholesale deportations be started immediately.”Footnote ⁵

But the impact was more than just the result of a swing in popular sentiment regarding immigrants. The Red Scare also brought the immigrant subject into the public eye in new and revealing ways. “Under such conditions, the public and the press shouted even more loudly for the deportation of all alien radicals,” Murray explained, “Why, they wanted to know, had so many Red dynamiters and bombers been allowed into the country, but so few let out?”Footnote ⁶ The demand for exiling outsiders in the midst of a perceived national crisis was a telling, if not unprecedented or even particularly exceptional, phenomenon. The Red Scare would hardly be the first, or the last, moment in which the public would call for the “letting out” of the foreign born as the solution for social ills. Nor would radicalism be the only “threat” invoked to instigate such calls—crime waves, overcrowding of welfare institutions, public health scares, and shifts in racial demographics would all act as effective catalysts to popular demands for deportations.

In scholarship on the First Red Scare, the targeting and deportation of immigrants is often depicted as an instrumentalist tactic of the broader antiradical campaign. In such accounts, foreign-born radicals were particularly vulnerable scapegoats in a striking, but brief, episode of repression. For the history of deportation, however, as this essay will argue, the Red Scare marks a critical point in a much longer saga. The First Red Scare generated and was representative of a moment when deportation became a larger and more public facet of American life, when the immigration bureaucracy was expanded and transformed, and when anti-immigrant sentiment built and broadened in the years just preceding the quota acts of the 1920s. As such, it is critical to consider Red Scare deportees (and attempted deportees) as indicative of far more than a short-lived burst of antiradical anxiety. Instead, they were part of a large and growing number of immigrants caught in the expanding deportation machinery of the state. Because their accounts, as sensational tales of violated civil liberties, have so heavily overshadowed the more pedestrian accounts of the thousands of other deportees removed in the same years, it has been easy to overlook their location within a larger trajectory of deportation.

At the same time as the federal capacity to target suspected radicals expanded, the federal immigration control capacity was burgeoning, both in the new categories of excludable immigrants it added, but also in the numbers of postentry removals it was able to conduct. The Red Scare both coincided with an existing and growing regime of immigrant removals and fueled its further acceleration. Perhaps one of the most long-lasting ramifications was the familiarization of the public with the idea that “letting out” immigrants could be a useful safety valve for a variety of mounting social pressures. Furthermore, this expansion of the immigration control regime did not occur in isolation, but alongside heightened antiradical repression in Europe, a restrictionary turn in Australia, and parallel and sometimes overlapping developments in Canada. The First Red Scare, while in some ways an intensely national phenomenon, was not merely that. Instead, it was part of a broader global trend of expanding efforts by nation-states to police their borders and track and control the mobility of foreign-born individuals.

In fact, since the 1880s, Congress had been steadily adding deportable offenses to American immigration law, and the Immigration Act of 1918, which enabled a more vigorous crusade against suspected radicals, was only the latest in a series of oppressive anti-immigrant measures. M. J. Heale notes that it was the pervasiveness of the association between immigration and radicalism that gave nativism such a “particular potency.” Heale explains that “foreigners had been accused of introducing radicalism as early as the 1790s, and the charge had been revived after the arrival of the German Forty-Eighters and during the urban and coalfield riots and railroad strikes of the 1870s.”Footnote ⁷ To grapple more fully with the impact of the Red Scare on immigrants in America, therefore, requires moving beyond a framework that situates the Scare as an anomalous or episodic phenomenon. This shift requires not only a more capacious timeline of antiradical nativism, but also a deeper understanding of its place within the broader development of immigration control policy and practice.

While the field of scholarship on immigrants and the Red Scare has evolved significantly in recent decades, it retains the indelible mark of some of its earliest figures, including Murray, John Higham, and William Preston Jr. As such, I will trace their roles in establishing the conceptualization of a number of aspects of the First Red Scare, including the boundaries of its timeline, the immigrant composition of the Left in the United States, the interplay of nativism and antiradicalism in the public sentiment and roundups, and the question of how radical a departure this period was from the general trajectory of American history. While Murray insists that the Red Scare did not fundamentally divert “the stream of American experience from its traditional channels,” and concludes that “its significance was more peripheral than basic,” historians have pushed back against this depiction.Footnote ⁸ John Higham's classic 1955 Strangers in the Land critically traced a longer trajectory of nativism throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the recurring emergence of antiradical strains, although he too asserted that the Red Scare period marked a significant rupture from the preceding decades. “During the early twentieth century, anti-radicalism … languished everywhere in the United States. Except for a flurry at the time of McKinley's assassination, the anti-radical tradition was dormant through the whole decade of the 1900s,” he explained.Footnote ⁹ Higham argued that it was only in the 1910s that antiradicalism “reawakened,”Footnote ¹⁰ and only after the war started that “nativism displayed symptoms of hysteria and violence that had been rare or nonexistent since the 1890s.”Footnote ¹¹

Other historians have argued more assertively for understanding “red scare” tactics within a broader genealogy of repressing political dissent. William Preston's 1963 Aliens and Dissenters, which drew heavily on Immigration Service files from the early twentieth century, was critical in reframing the trajectory of antiradical nativism. By looking at how naturalization law had evolved to suppress dissent ahead of deportation law, the failed antiradical initiatives in Congress even before the onset of World War I, and the long efforts to target the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Preston demonstrates that the events of 1919 not only had longer roots, but also reflected a concerted effort to create an administrative apparatus capable of carrying out such a crusade.Footnote ¹² More recently, Regin Schmidt, who focuses on the role of the FBI in the First Red Scare, has argued that evidence from the Bureau suggests their “activities during the Red Scare were not a sudden break or aberration from normal policies but rather the logical consequence of growing federal social control.”Footnote ¹³ While the reexamination of the trajectory of antiradicalism is useful in a number of ways, it is particularly crucial for examining the immigrant communities for whom the Red Scare was only one facet of the growing demand to control the foreign-born “threat.” Throughout the war, coordinated efforts to target and surveil foreign-born residents had been growing, and in the immediate aftermath, calls for removals gained significant traction. For the growing postentry immigration control apparatus, the “Red Scare” moment might better be characterized as a “Red opportunity.”

Unlike previous drives against radicalism and, in particular, immigrant radicals, which had been primarily been conducted at the local, state, or private level, the era of the Red Scare was marked by a significant degree of national coordination. As Heale explains, the “Big Red Scare had for the first time brought the authority of the federal government into the anticommunist cause.” “The excesses over which A. Mitchell Palmer presided,” Heale insists, were made possible in part because since the war, “federal agents were liaising with employers, as well as with patriotic societies and local police officials.”Footnote ¹⁴ This coincided with the expansion of immigration control infrastructure, allowing for a rapid escalation of the use of deportation as a form of what Daniel Kanstroom calls “post-entry social control.”Footnote ¹⁵ While deportation had existed in its modern iteration since the late nineteenth century, it gained new prominence in both numeric impact and visibility during this period. As Higham explains:

Although federal deportations had existed for roughly four decades by the start of the Red Scare, it is undeniable that bureaucratic removal procedures gained new prominence, particularly in the public eye, during this period.

As attention turned to immigrant removal, the public was forced to grapple, often for the first time, with the difference between “alien” and “deportable alien.” This was particularly true in light of the low number of actual deportations following the Palmer Raids, in which far larger numbers had been rounded up than could be deported under law.Footnote ¹⁷ As Kenyon Zimmer notes, “sensational as the ‘Palmer raids’ may have been, they were incredibly inefficient. Of the 1,182 suspects seized nationwide on November 7, only 439 were held for a deportation hearing, and less than half of those resulted in removal.”Footnote ¹⁸ While many voices called for widespread removals, there were significant restrictions on which immigrants could be removed through administrative procedure, such as length of residence, naturalization status, and adherence to immigration law. As post-entry deportations became part of the public discourse in new ways, federal officials were forced to reckon with the nuances of immigration status, watching in disappointment as the Immigration Service failed to enact mass removals. Higham highlights this bureaucratic conundrum in his statement that the government “possessed only one legal instrument for stamping on the propaganda activities which the postwar radicals conducted. It could deport the foreigners who supposedly were causing all the trouble; or, rather, it could deport those who had not acquired citizenship.”Footnote ¹⁹

Ironically, given their role in facilitating removals, in many of the accounts of the Red Scare, it is the Immigration Service, and particularly Louis F. Post, assistant secretary of the Department of Labor, who emerge as the triumphant heroes, effectively beating back the tyrannical practices of the Department of Justice and the nascent Bureau of Investigation and restoring respect for civil liberties. Murray himself stated that while many hoped to continue “immediate and wholesale deportations,” it was “a few officials in the Labor Department who … stemmed the tide of injudicious actions.”Footnote ²⁰ Its officials, Murray explains, were already seen as suspect before the start of the raids. The Commissioner of Immigration Frederic Howe at Ellis Island “was branded a radical because of his lenient attitude toward immigrants and deportees,” Secretary of Labor William Wilson was “considered in many conservative quarters as being tinged with radicalism because he was a union man,” and Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post “was regarded with suspicion.”Footnote ²¹ In fact, Murray further states, these men not only failed to “see eye to eye on deportation matters” with the Justice Department, but they demonstrated a “completely hostile attitude toward the attorney general's Red-hunting procedures.”Footnote ²²

While it is true that Post, alongside other Immigration Service officials, played a critical role in decelerating the surge of antiradical deportations in the aftermath of raids of November 1919 and January 1920, to treat the Immigration Service's role as entirely benevolent seems remarkably shortsighted. As sensationalistic accounts of raids on radicals dominated media coverage in the immediate aftermath of World War I, the immigration bureaucracy quietly expanded its reach and capacity. In his Annual Report to Congress, the commissioner general of immigration wrote in 1920, “During the past year the deportation work of the bureau has been systematized and coordinated by the organization of a deportation and transportation section … resulting in a marked degree of efficiency and economy.”Footnote ²³ Furthermore, he explained, the new system both facilitated cross-country transport of apprehended deportees and streamlined the process of obtaining information and international travel documents to enable removals to move forward. “Though a new service,” he concluded, “it has already proved of great value and bids fair, as experience is gained, to produce practically a perfect system for the carrying out of the purposes for which it was established.”Footnote ²⁴

Over the subsequent decade, his words proved prescient, as the number of annual postentry deportations grew from a height of 4,610 in the prewar years in 1914, to 3,068 in the immediate postwar in 1919, to 12,908 by the end of the decade in 1929, and a new height of 16,631 by 1930.Footnote ²⁵ For the growing deportation apparatus of the state, the Red Scare acted as a critical slingshot, quickly restoring its reach and soon surpassing the prewar growth it had begun. After the Red Scare “hysteria” receded, what was left was an increasingly efficient apparatus for removal and a public sufficiently familiar with the concept of removing immigrant “threats” to accede fairly readily to such a massive expansion of deportation capacity. Before, during, and after the First Red Scare, public and governmental pressure for immigrant removals remained high, and it was not merely suspected radicalism that troubled observers. Throughout the era, scares about immigrant “danger” or “undesirability” were constructed across numerous lines of race, health, religion, poverty, and more.Footnote ²⁶ Deportations of immigrants deemed “likely to become a public charge” constituted a major percentage of deportations in the post-World War I period, joined by significant numbers of removals for crime, insanity or mental defect, entry without inspection, and, after 1921, entry in violation of national quota.Footnote ²⁷ By the mid-1920s, headlines proclaimed there were as many as 200,000 deportable immigrants residing in the country. In part, this was motivated by racial anxieties about changing demographics, crime, and public health, but it was also materially driven by fears of immigrants becoming economic burdens as well as changing labor needs. In the years following the Palmer Raids, as government and the press turned their attention to these supposed “threats,” the concept of mass deportation, while never yet enacted on that scale, had at least been made legible to much of the public by the events of the Red Scare.

Historians of the political left of state repression, and of immigration have engaged in extensive debate over the relationship between antiradicalism and nativism during the post-World War I period. Murray's landmark study, which provided only a relatively limited perspective on this question was soon joined by the works of Higham and Preston, who more thoroughly dissected the unique positioning of immigrants within the events and rhetoric of the First Red Scare. The historiography on immigrants and the Red Scare might perhaps be best characterized by the tension between three (often overlapping) claims. First, scholars suggest that while the motivations and methods were irrational, the logic of targeting of immigrants was basically sound, since most members in anarchist and communist organizations in the United States during this period were, in fact, foreign born. Second, scholars have claimed that the targeting of immigrants was a calculated strategy in light of the fact that constitutional protections prevented the targeting of most native-born Americans but deportation law allowed for the removal of foreign-born political dissenters. And third, scholars have claimed that the Red Scare raids, detentions, and deportations were just as much a facet of mounting nativism as they were of genuine concern about political threats to the nation.

The assertion that the emphasis of officials on foreign-born radicals derived from their very real presence within left organizations can be traced back as far as Murray himself. The communist movement in the United States, he explains, had reached a membership of around 70,000 in 1919. This was the aggregate of the more heavily native-born Communist Labor Party, which numbered around 10,000, and the Communist Party, which had a membership of roughly 60,000, and according to Murray, was “nine-tenths alien in its composition.”Footnote ²⁸ Nor were these high rates of foreign-born membership limited exclusively to any single organization, or to explicitly communist organizations. Both the IWW and the anarchist movements in the United States had deep roots among foreign-born populations. While it is difficult to track the immigrant demographics of the IWW with certainty, Nick Fischer notes that during the World War I era, a significant portion of the organization was foreign born in many places, and “the union made a concerted effort to organize immigrant workers.”Footnote ²⁹

The impact of European thinkers, immigrant activists, and domestic conditions upon the development of the IWW has been extensively contended within scholarship on the organization. In particular. Melvyn Dubofsky, in We Shall Be All, argued that the United States formed a specific “setting for radicalism” in which the economic instability, rapidity of growth, particular forms of industrial development, and working conditions contributed to the emergence of a uniquely American workers’ movement. In the American West, in particular, he asserted, “the very rapidity of economic growth brought greater unrest, conflict, violence, and radicalism.”Footnote ³⁰ Salvatore Salerno's Red November, Black November argues for a more nuanced understanding of the organization's influences, insisting that “the I.W.W. cannot be considered simply as a foreign import or conspiracy nor understood as a spontaneous response to class struggle.” Instead he states, we must acknowledge the role of immigrant activists and how the movement drew upon “the experiences of European syndicalists in developing the principles and clarifying the goals of the form of industrial unionism that the I.W.W. came to represent.”Footnote ³¹

Radicalism of many strains had been long intertwined with immigrant communities in the United States by the onset of the First Red Scare, both in reality and in public perception. Italian anarchist groups first emerged in the 1880s, Paul Avrich explains, and spread rapidly around the country.Footnote ³² In Chicago, James Green notes, German immigrants dominated within the anarchist circles during the same period.Footnote ³³ It was in Chicago that the labor turmoil of the era led into one of the earliest major antiradical episodes in American history: the Haymarket Tragedy of 1886. Heale argues, in fact, that “the Chicago anarchists were the victims of America's first major red scare.”Footnote ³⁴ Green explains that the ramifications of the repression that ensued were especially severe for immigrants. “At a time when immigrants seemed to be overwhelming cities like Chicago,” Green argues, “the Haymarket events provoked a new kind of paranoia among millions of native born Americans” and “created a long-lasting popular impression of the immigrant as a dangerous figure, somehow more menacing than even the most violent American.”Footnote ³⁵

In his work on foreign-born anarchists, Kenyon Zimmer traces the prevalence of immigrants within anarchist movements in the United States and concludes that “the vast majority of these radicals were immigrants.”Footnote ³⁶ However, he notes, this correlation should not be taken at face value. In fact, “only a small handful of avowed anarchist exiles and labor migrants carried these doctrines with them from Europe. The majority of foreign-born anarchists were not yet anarchists when they arrived in America.”Footnote ³⁷ Perhaps even more crucially, he reminds us that “anarchists’ status as immigrants does not indicate that they were peripheral to American labor and political history,” especially in a moment when immigrants composed a massive portion of the American workforce.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, Salerno notes, within the American left, while “immigrant anarchists played an important role in the diffusion of syndicalist ideas … the spread of European syndicalism, however, was not limited to immigrant anarchist groups, which underscores the ubiquitous nature of these influences in the American labor and political communities at the turn of the twentieth century.”Footnote ³⁹

In addition to reassessing the influences of actual immigrant radicalism on the development of the Red Scare focus on the foreign born, historians have increasingly asserted that the overemphasis on deportation during the First Red Scare was actually just as much (or more) about the constitutional constraints on persecuting citizens as it was about actual hostility to the foreign born. As Heale notes, the Immigration Act of 1918 “Reflected not only the old assumption that subversion was invariably foreign inspired … but also the limited nature of the police power that the federal government possessed over its own citizens.” In fact, he explains, the legal limitations and “the offensive against anarchists of all stripes had all but compelled the authorities to identify radicalism as a foreign import.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Because Congress never successfully passed a peacetime sedition act following the war, historians as early as Higham have argued that rabid antiradical leaders had no choice but to resort to the flexible administrative procedure waiting at hand: postentry deportation of immigrants.

“In the absence of new legislation,” Julian Jaffe explains, “the deportation provisions of the Immigration Acts were pressed into service … . This explains why the Palmer raids often appeared to be more of an attempt to rid the country of undesirable foreigners than to deal with those who were actually supporting revolution.”Footnote ⁴¹ This relationship between immigration status and targeting for radicalism was a cyclical one, as Alex Goodall notes: “The legal mechanism even influenced the selection of targets, since the immigration law made it pointless to arrest radicals who were citizens and therefore could not be deported … the implementation of laws that selectively targeted foreigners helped to cement the xenophobic presumptions that had underpinned their creation in the first place.”Footnote ⁴² More recently, Fischer has explained that “of the methods federal authorities used to suppress undesirable beliefs and persons, deportation was regarded as the most effective … . The ‘full fury of repression’ therefore was directed into ‘the one remaining channel of deportation.”Footnote ⁴³

Although fundamentally true, these claims have led scholars to underemphasize how critical the expansion of the deportation apparatus was in this era. Instead, they have tended to dismiss the anti-immigrant policing of the Red Scare period as a “political sideshow intended to furnish authorities with token scapegoats for industrial and political disturbance.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While it is undoubtedly accurate that most of the immigrants deported were indeed “scapegoats,” their wholesale targeting was no less striking for their general innocence. The emphasis on going after immigrants was more than simply an instrumentalist effort to put the most resources toward the most easily punished subjects. As Preston reminds us, though there were practical considerations in the aftermath of the war, “deportation, always the first love of those who desired to rid the country of ‘isms,’ was not forgotten,” and the eager return to this strategy should not be minimized.Footnote ⁴⁵ Deportation reflected deeply held beliefs about the dangers of foreign peoples in American society, and engendered new ways of thinking about their permanent vulnerability as noncitizens. As a result, Red Scare deportations should not and cannot be divorced from a context of escalating deportations along a number of other matrices of immigrant “danger”: crime, likelihood to become a public charge, mental illness, and more.

Scholars have increasingly attended to the ways in which antiradicalism intersected with, reflected, magnified, and created strains of nativism in American society. In analyzing those strains, scholars almost invariably resort back to Higham's Strangers in the Land, which set out a framework through which to read the First Red Scare as a noteworthy and significant episode in a broader history of repressive nativism throughout modern American history. The immigrant, he explained, was more than just a convenient scapegoat, he was a psychologically and socially effective enemy. “In every guise,” Higham proclaims, “the nativist stood always as a nationalist in a defensive posture. He chose a foreign adversary, and defined him, in terms of a conception of the nation's most precious and precarious attributes.”Footnote ⁴⁶ One of the central manifestations of this nationalism, Higham explains, was the antiradical nativism that reached a new intensity during the war, when dissenting viewpoints began to clash with “the solidarity that nationalists were demanding.”Footnote ⁴⁷

While diverse forms of nativist thought have existed since the earliest moments of the American republic, it is undoubtedly true that the antiradicalism of the early twentieth century represented one of the most striking iterations. Nor was this transformation without concrete political value. Julian Jaffe notes that the hostility toward immigrants was heightened due to the “stereotype of the immigrant as an economic radical,” which gained credence during the period of “new immigration” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Nick Fischer explains, increasingly, the media “sought to divide the working classes between law-abiding, respectable Americans and slothful, treacherous, insincere foreigners.” This shift, Fischer argues, was facilitated by the “patriotic,” America-first attitude inculcated during the war, and in its aftermath, the “bogey of the Hun” soon gave way to the “Bolshevik bogey,” which acted as an “even more frightening and useful image” for conservative political figures.Footnote ⁴⁹ Christopher Capozzola notes that during the war, this “patriotic” attitude did not remain in the discursive realm, but instead generated active participation by average citizens who saw themselves as vigilante defenders of the nation. In addition to numerous incidents of violence, leading to over seventy deaths, Capozzola highlights the “less brutal but similarly coercive” accounts in which “Americans reported their neighbors as draft dodgers, food hoarders, or subversive ‘pro-Germans.’”Footnote ⁵⁰ The collaboration between private citizens, voluntary associations, and the federal government that Capozzola brings to light was a critical precedent for the events of the First Red Scare.

While the interplay between nativism and antiradicalism is well-tread territory in scholarship, historians have been somewhat slower to recognize the extent to which the Red Scare also reflected broader shifts in the infrastructure of migration control in the United States. No text has taken up the relationship between Red Scare targeting of foreign-born suspected radicals and the expansion of the immigration bureaucracy as fully as William Preston Jr.’s 1963 Aliens and Dissenters. Footnote ⁵¹ In understanding the “nation's controversy with its political and economic heretics,” Preston explains, there is “no better place to begin than with the government's treatment of aliens,” for “had it dealt with them as human beings, it might have handled the radicals in the same way.”Footnote ⁵²

Preston not only casts a longer trajectory for the escalating hostility toward immigrant radicals, he reclaims disregarded elements of the immigration bureaucracy as essential to understanding the escalation of antiradical deportations. To understand the long scope of policing immigrants, Preston declares, one must also seriously consider not only repression of the foreign born at the point of debarment or deportation, but also examine naturalization policy as a site of critical immigrant encounters with the state. In the early twentieth century, he contends, “The United States had repudiated a long tradition in immigration history when it shifted responsibility to the alien alone for what the country had made him.”Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, he explains, the laws of naturalization were at some moments even stricter in demarcating certain political actors as “anarchists.” Therefore, the refusal of naturalized citizenship to foreign-born IWW members, in particular, ensured that the government “would maintain an alien reservoir of deportable radicals and drive others out of the organization.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Arguably, however, one of the most critical and underexplored elements of the intersection of political repression and migration control is one which goes almost entirely unmentioned in many studies of the Red Scare: that scholars cannot be certain how many immigrants were drawn into deportation proceedings because they were suspected of radicalism but were officially removed without the use of the “anarchist” or “communist” provisions of immigration law. While we have access to statistics on the number of individuals officially deported or detained under the political provisions of the immigration law, we cannot be certain how many deportations political orientation or activity was actually a factor in. Preston names this clearly in his claim that “besides applying the 1917 antiradical law in extreme and exaggerated ways and making full use of its broad and indefinite terms, the Immigration Bureau also sought to deport radicals under immigration legislation that had not been designed for their apprehension.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Instead, as the political climate changed and some of the public increasingly recoiled at the civil liberties violations inherent within political deportation cases, the Immigration Service demonstrated its flexibility in finding less controversial criteria with a lower burden of proof. Preston stresses that one of the most “valuable weapon[s]” to this end was the designation of “likely to become a public charge.” “This vague complaint,” he explains, “had been in steady service for deporting the chronically ill, paupers, and the mentally disturbed. The burden of proving that he had not been liable to become a public charge at the time of entry was the alien's all but impossible task.”Footnote ⁵⁶ While it was perhaps the most “valuable weapon,” it was far from the only one that was used to apprehend radical immigrants under pretenses other than their radicalism.

The case of Giuseppe Caruso, an Italian immigrant arrested during a 1926 deportation drive in Chicago, provides a useful example of how radical immigrants could be ensnared without ever utilizing the political criteria in immigration law. Caruso was arrested in the midst of a series of raids ostensibly conducted against suspected Italian-born mobsters, designed to clean up Chicago's reputation as a hotbed of organized crime. Newspaper accounts mentioned nothing more of his political associations than a brief reference to his being an “anarchist,” instead grouping him as a potential “gangster criminal.” An interview with Caruso following his arrest, however, tells a different story, explaining that he was working in the local offices of the Socialist Party at the time of his arrest, when police entered looking for a man by another name, but arrested Caruso and two others and detained him for over two weeks.Footnote ⁵⁷

Such examples also demonstrate that while the ambitious goals of local officials to conduct “all-out war”Footnote ⁵⁸ against “radical” immigrants were proclaimed in the most dramatic form during the Red Scare, they were not, in fact, entirely exceptional. In fact, throughout the era, immigration officials as well as politicians repeatedly set removal goals that far outpaced the bureaucratic capacity, physical infrastructure, or budget of the actual deportation force. Scholars like Preston and Schmidt implore us to recognize that in fact “the institutional and bureaucratic factors” were absolutely critical in the development of the Red Scare.Footnote ⁵⁹ While scholars have correctly maintained that deportation acted as the “main weapon”Footnote ⁶⁰ of the government against suspected radicalism in the period immediately following World War I, they have often failed to conceptualize how broadly deportation was coming to be seen as the “main weapon” against a number of social ills, from organized crime in Chicago to hospital overcrowding in New York. Nor were the vast numbers of warrants that were issued but went discarded during the Red Scare inherently anomalous, as scholars have suggested. Instead, throughout the period, as the Immigration Service honed its growing bureaucracy, warrants frequently were issued without leading to successful apprehension or removal. By 1926, the chief of the Warrant Division issued a memorandum to the commissioner general of immigration detailing his findings, noting that there were 2,498 unserved warrants as of March of that year.Footnote ⁶¹

As more recent scholars have demonstrated, despite the exceptionalist language in much of the Red Scare scholarship, this period was in fact the culmination of a much longer evolution, not a phenomenon that began in 1919 and declined by 1921. At the time the Red Scare began, Kanstroom explains, “deportation was by now sufficiently well accepted to be an effective government tool.”Footnote ⁶² That deportation was “by now sufficiently well accepted,” is a critical point. Scholars such as Kanstroom, Nathaniel Hong, and Julia Rose KrautFootnote ⁶³ have joined Preston in exploring the earlier roots of antiradical deportations, focusing largely on the 1903 Immigration Act, which included the first official provision barring anyone who “disbelieved in all organized government, who advocated or taught anarchism, or who associated with anarchists,” and made such violations eligible for deportation within three years of landing in the United States.Footnote ⁶⁴ This act, however, did more than merely add another criteria to a growing catalog of deportable offenses. Instead, as Kenyon Zimmer explains, the act “also produced ‘a new legal and political subject’—the illegal anarchist alien.”Footnote ⁶⁵

In the wake of William McKinley's 1901 assassination by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, legislators began pushing for immigration control based on political ideology. In spite of the fact that Czolgosz was an American-born citizen, Kraut argues, “Not only did they identify anarchism as a ‘foreign’ ideology imported to the United States by immigrants, but they also believed that it could spread across the nation and was as dangerous as a contagious disease … . Thus, as a disease, anarchism had to be prevented, and the infected quarantined and expelled.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The new law was first put to the test in the case of John Turner, an anarchist labor leader from England, who, as Kanstroom explains became an early “cause célèbre” among the Left, which rallied around him and denounced his proposed deportation as a “direct assault on the First Amendment.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Rather than an isolated episode, Hong explains, “ideological orthodoxy tests for foreigners seeking to enter and reside in the United States have been a fact of 20th century life.”Footnote ⁶⁸

But the boundaries of common Red Scare periodization have not only been limited by their start date. Demands for anti-communist or anti-anarchist expulsions did not disappear, or even diminish quite as quickly as some scholars have implied. To explain how immigrants had increasingly become the targets of antiradicalism, Murray argued that they had been the unfortunate victims of wartime demands for “absolute loyalty,” which had “converted thousands of otherwise reasonable and sane Americans into super-patriots and self-styled spy-chasers …”Footnote ⁶⁹ While the emergence of vigilante immigration enforcers was absolutely critical to the development of modern deportation practices, it did not abate as quickly as Murray's account would suggest. Throughout the 1920s and beyond, vigilante groups continued to report suspected radical aliens to the Immigration Service, and significant resources were devoted in some cases to pursuing their tips.

In the years that followed the supposed “end” of the Red Scare, the “self-styled spy-chasers” remained busy. Immigration Service records from the era are rife with letters, telegrams, and other appeals from private citizens urging attention to particular immigrant threats in their workplaces, neighborhoods, or towns. Furthermore, these vigilante reporters did not shout into a void. Instead, the service continued to take the reports of such “super-patriots” seriously, devoting considerable time and expense to investigating these tips. By the start of the 1930s, as the Communist Party grew in the wake of the onset of the Great Depression, antiradical raids would once more emerge as a common tactic, often serving, as a decade earlier, more as a form of deterrent terrorizing than as an actual immigration enforcement mechanism.

Many of the same localities that were at the heart of earlier anti-immigrant crusades continued to be central to the project of removing suspected radicals. In 1928, the Seattle Commissioner of Immigration conducted extensive correspondence with Commissioner General of Immigration Hull over the investigation of a “Finnish Colony” of suspected anarchists in the Centralia, Washington region.Footnote ⁷⁰ Centralia held a particularly important place in American antiradical history. With a strong IWW presence, and a history of townspeople resorting repeatedly to vigilante action against that presence, by late 1919, Centralia was home to one of only two surviving IWW halls in the state.Footnote ⁷¹ In what came to be known as the Centralia Massacre, violence broke out on Armistice Day 1919, when townspeople, led by members of the American Legion raided the IWW office, resulting in shooting and multiple deaths. Murray himself described the event as “in a sense, the beginning of a truly hysterical public reaction to domestic radicalism.”Footnote ⁷² Following this, several IWW members were jailed, and one was brutally lynched by local vigilantes.Footnote ⁷³ The events, including roundups of IWW members around Washington state in the aftermath and the ensuing cases of the imprisoned activists, made Centralia a focal point of national attention. Furthermore, it encapsulated the power of local individuals and officials to drive an antiradical agenda based on what they perceived as foreign threats. As Robert Tyler explains, the vigilantes “saw the Wobblies, unrealistically, not as neighbors but as ‘Bolsheviks,’ as the agents of an alien, corrupt, un-American class consciousness.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Nearly a decade later, it was clear that the local residents of Centralia had not gotten the vigilante impulse out of their systems. Their letters reveal that not only did authorities take the tips of local private citizens seriously, they assigned significant labor hours and funds to investigating. A message to the commissioner general of immigration revealed that the service had paid to have an “emergency interpreter” brought to town for the occasion.Footnote ⁷⁵ On the advice of one John Rinta, “a loyal Finn and reputed good Finnish citizen of Winlock,” who reported that the organization was receiving funds from the Soviet Union, the immigrant inspector at Seattle led a search of the organization, including an investigation of their books.Footnote ⁷⁶ While they failed to find evidence “on which we could base a claim connecting them with an anarchist organization,” the inspector reported that he was convinced that “this investigation will do a great deal of good in that it will have the tendency to play a check to a great extent upon the future activity of this organization.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The commissioner of immigration at Seattle echoed this statement, explaining that “the inquiry and investigation … has evidently had a wholesome effect and I am sure that the tendency to circulate propaganda and advocate radical remedies will be much less in the future in this particular community than it has been in the past.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The patriotic societies and vigilante reporters of the immediate postwar period had perhaps fallen away from the public spotlight, but they continued their crusades against foreign-born radicals with ongoing vigor. In the southwest, where extralegal “deportations” like those at Jerome and Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917 had garnered national attention, the local efforts to identify unwelcome foreigners continued well into the next decade.Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps no group embodies this more powerfully than the Arizona Peace Officers’ Association. Their president, J. G. Crowley was a town marshal who had been involved in suppressing the IWW presence in Jerome as early as 1918, and devoted himself to fighting foreign-born labor activists with zeal.Footnote ⁸⁰ The APOA carried out a multiyear campaign that targeted the secretary of labor, congressmen, and even President Hoover in their efforts to raise awareness about the “definite menace to the peace and tranquility of our industrial and political life” posed by immigrant radicals.Footnote ⁸¹ Through a sympathetic legislator, they claimed in 1928 that “Communists have been particularly active in Arizona” and the Immigration Service had been altogether too lenient.Footnote ⁸² “The fact remains,” they argued, “that the high officials of the Department of Labor quite obviously choose to pursue an entirely opposite course of action—or perhaps, inaction, as it might more properly be termed, and make no apparent effort to curb the growth of communist sentiment in this country.” In fact, they insisted, the government was not only too lax in addressing “the alien communist, the law-violator, the bootlegger or gangster,” but too aggressive in deporting “large numbers of harmless peasants and peons.”Footnote ⁸³

Despite their aggressive critique of governmental inaction, however, various branches of the government continued to correspond with them, and in some cases, dispatched staff to investigate their claims throughout the southwest. Notably, in an era of heavy Mexican migration to the southwest, Crowley positioned the APOA as an intervening force between Mexican laborers and communist instigators. As Katherine Benton-Cohen explains, in Arizona towns like Bisbee, “Mexican workers were segregated economically by their lower pay … to most non-Mexican residents of Bisbee, Mexicans were peon workers or potential public charges.”Footnote ⁸⁴ While states along the Mexican border became increasingly prominent as the site of battles over immigrant labor unrest and IWW activism, business interests continued to press for open immigration for Mexican laborers, even as they argued against their full inclusion within the nation. Organizations like the Arizona Cotton Growers’ Association emphasized not only the low costs, but also Mexican workers’ perceived “docility,” particularly in the face of organizing led by European immigrants.Footnote ⁸⁵ For local leaders like Crowley, therefore, the deportation of European-born radicals appealed as a strategy for preserving both the racial and economic order in the region. In another 1930 letter to Secretary of Labor Davis, Crowley explained the APOA position: “At the present time many of our Mexicans are engaged in both agricultural and mining work in Arizona. We feel that they are given a living wage, particularly those who are employed by the mining companies, and we do not feel that they should be bothered by outside communists.”Footnote ⁸⁶

It was not only local private citizens, but also local and regional immigration officials who continued to lobby the central administration of the Immigration Service for a more robust continuation of antiradical deportations. “While I do not think that there should be a repetition here of the ‘Red Raids’ which received so much publicity,” wrote the commissioner of immigration of Seattle in 1922, “I do think that a policy of proceeding against the alien leaders of these anti-American and anti-governmental organizations should be adopted, with the purpose in view of ridding this country of their unwelcomed presence.” Indeed, he explained, their threat was extensive, stating they were “perniciously active in fomenting trouble and endeavoring to discredit our form of government in the minds of people.”Footnote ⁸⁷

While these efforts never disappeared, only waned in visibility as other forms of deportation grew in their stead, they reemerged as a particularly prominent force after the onset of the Great Depression, when radical organizations increasingly dominated public discourse. A September 1930 letter from “Miss Ethel Strauss” was indicative of much of the correspondence. Writing from Oakland, California, she explained her interest: “Having always been a hater of the Communist Party, I now offer my services to wipe them out.” She went on to state, “I am 18 years old and would like to join against these foreign invaders … . I would appreciate hearing from you anything on this matter in destroying these parasites. Do not think me bold, because my hatred has been so aroused that I would like to see them deported wholesale.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Across the country, James J. Hanlon wrote to the secretary of labor in 1932 on the situation in Pennsylvania, explaining that there was a group of “radicals” in Kupmont “who are getting very obnoxious.” Indeed, Hanlon explained, “I am certain that they are ‘Reds’… you should take immediate action and have those people silenced or deported.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Such accounts remind us that it is critical to understand the Red Scare as more continual and less episodic, more central and less abnormal. “The Red Scare did not sputter out,” Nick Fischer insists, but instead evolved and continued throughout the interwar period and into the Cold War.Footnote ⁹⁰ And yet, scholarship continues to be influenced by the strict temporal constraints of Murray's Red Scare, which posits a sharp, abrupt, and final conclusion to the First Red Scare. During the year of 1920, he asserted, “anti-Red hysteria subsided almost as quickly as it had developed and, although the scars of the Scare remained, the nation rather rapidly regained its composure.”Footnote ⁹¹ Murray attributes the wind-down to a variety of factors, including the increasing realization that there had been no real Bolshevik threat, growing concern about the excesses of government repression, and the self-moderation of domestic radicals, who, in his words “lapsed into a sort of pinkishness which made them less conspicuous to a Red-conscious public.”Footnote ⁹² However, he states, of “even greater importance was the fact that at last the temper of war was giving way to the temper of peace. The aftermath of war with its irritability and restlessness was passing and the nation was again learning how to amuse itself and relax.”Footnote ⁹³

For immigrant communities, however, there was to be little opportunity to “relax” in the Red Scare's wake. Instead, the immigration system almost immediately underwent its most serious overhaul in decades during this period, as Congress was finally able to pass the wholesale national origins quotas they had been debating for years. In fact, as Goodall notes, “the association of immigrants and radicalism had within a matter of years strengthened opposition to immigration altogether. By 1920 even many reformist Americans were conceding that some form of control over America's borders was inevitable.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Murray claims the Red Scare declined due to the “indifference” of the American people, who “had at last clearly demonstrated that they wished to be less concerned with the weighty and compelling foreign and domestic problems and more with radios, sports contents, Mah Jong, and homemade gin recipes.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Perhaps, for some, this was true. But for proponents and opponents of the quota acts being debated, the mood was anything but “indifference,” and the focus remained on immigration, perhaps the clearest melding of the “foreign and domestic problems” that Murray asserts the nation moved so rapidly away from.

Despite these shortcomings, Murray does slip in a brief and critical mention of the long-term impact of the Red Scare deportation frenzy. “This problem of immigration legislation and the public attitude toward aliens in general,” he wrote, “reflected the most obvious effect of the continuing patriotic crusade.” In light of how fundamentally the immigration legislation that followed altered American society, such a statement seems undeniable, if insufficient. However, he goes on to note that through the Red Scare, “the belief was perpetuated that most aliens were susceptible to radical philosophies and therefore represented an element which particularly endangered the nation.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Such a statement not only reflects a lack of recognition of how much that “belief” predated the Red Scare, but also a much too narrow view of the ways that immigrants were increasingly seen as having “endangered the nation.”

The limitations within Red Scare scholarship on immigration have not only been temporal, but also geographic. While the Red Scare in the United States has been debated for well over half a century by historians, they have been slow to recognize its parallels in other nations, and particularly in other settler colonial states.Footnote ⁹⁷ As such, they have not always attended to how the blurring between antiradical and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States was part of a broader shift in the global policing of migration. As Nick Fischer explains in his study of the Australian and American right in the interwar era, Australia also underwent a period of intensified efforts to remove foreign-born individuals who were deemed to be a political threat to the state.Footnote ⁹⁸ While the government did not succeed in outlawing the Communist Party of Australia, it did succeed in making foreign-born communists deportable under law, joining other nations in establishing a policy of repression through removal. But perhaps no country experienced such a similar rise in antiradical targeting of immigrants as Canada. Daniel Francis explains in his 2010 Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918–1919, “although the American Red Scare was more violent and more repressive, many parallels can be drawn between it and the Scare in Canada.”Footnote ⁹⁹ There, as in the United States, Francis writes, “in the popular imagination the Reds were usually foreigners,”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and more particularly “ignorant ‘bohunks’ and other undesirables from the teeming slums of Europe.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ As Barbara Roberts explains, the anti-immigrant movement in post-World War I Canada emerged from a “convenient” desire by “employers and the government” to see a variety of social ills as the “expression of the influence of dangerous aliens, rather than as a response of Canadians to Canadian conditions.”Footnote ¹⁰²

In Canada, Roberts explains, antiradical sentiment also grew in the aftermath of World War I, and by 1918, the government's campaign was underway, focusing heavily on IWW members and labor activism.Footnote ¹⁰³ Those similarities, Roberts explains, were not only visible in retrospect, but were proudly noted by officials at the time. She writes that “on the whole, Canadian officials … seem to have been satisfied with their own efforts in comparison to the U.S.,” and explains that in the aftermath of the “fiasco at Ellis Island” in which the U.S. authorities had apprehended but were unable to remove immigrants, “the American officials had become a laughingstock.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In many cases after the raids of 1919, U.S.-based radical immigrants were able, with the assistance of counsel, to successfully evade removal. This left government officials scrambling to change the procedural rules about access to counsel during detention.

These developments around the world were more than mere parallels, however. “Canada was following a path well tread by the United States,” in repressing immigrants, Roberts explains, and “this was not the result of coincidence, or even of the two countries choosing comparable responses to similar problems; rather, it was a co-ordinated effort. Canadian officials were in touch with their American counterparts and each warned the other of radical incursions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In Canada, Roberts states, the Scare also began with an emphasis on the IWW, which was a transborder organization, often leading to the policing of the same activists in both the United States and Canada. Such work provides an important corrective to the unidirectional tendency in American deportation history through its reminder that sometimes, the immigrant radicals being forced out of other nations were, in fact, U.S. citizens.

In fact, radicals themselves recognized and decried the fact that American citizens were also being removed back to the United States. In the 1919 speech mentioned at the start of this essay, Taylor highlighted the broader growth of a global deportation regime. “You know one of the peculiar things about this situation of deporting people,” he explained, “is this, the other day we were having a meeting and somebody in the back of the hall got up and said, ‘They deported me from England to the United States.’” “We keep shoving these people back and forth, we deported them from England, from Scotland … . We deport them from the United States over to Europe and they deport them from this place to that place,” Taylor went on, “and I suppose some day that these people are going to wake up and realize that this movement is not an United States movement or an English movement, or a French movement, but it is a world wide movement.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In drawing attention to immigration control and administrative expulsion as globally expanding tools for attacking dissent, Taylor emphasized a facet of the Red Scare that historians have been slow to grasp.

Views of the Red Scare and its impact on immigrants have also been limited by their neglect of the more pragmatic global considerations of the modern deportation regime. While scholars have acknowledged that Post and his associates at the Bureau of Immigration released numerous immigrants on the basis of insufficient evidence, they have provided less coverage of those who could not be deported because of practical limitations in international diplomacy. An examination of Immigration Service records from the era reflect that few considerations were more pertinent to the bureau. In particular, the inability to deport individuals to the Soviet Union because of the lack of diplomatic relations repeatedly thwarted the efforts of deportation officials. As such, any exploration of state repression through deportation must take seriously the global complications of immigration control. Torrie Hester explains these dynamics in her 2017 Deportation, the most comprehensive examination of the international logistics of early deportation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Because the modern deportation regime was one which operated on a bilateral basis, Hester maintains, the United States struggled with Soviet deportees.

But that did not stop the government from trying to find alternative strategies for removal. During the first year of the Red Scare, Hester notes, “The Bureau of Immigration, with the help of U.S. State Department officials, found ways to carry out hundreds of deportations through negotiations with third-party countries.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These attempts met their most notable success with the famed Red Ark, which sailed from New York at the very end of 1919, carrying 249 deportees, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. In this instance, the State Department-led initiative initially attempted to negotiate a deal with Latvia to deliver the deportees into the Soviet territory, promising flour and canned goods in return. Once at sea, however, they discovered that plan would not work, and were forced to make last minute arrangements with the Finnish government to transport the deportees to their final location.

The following December, Hester notes, the government attempted to resume deportations again, even as diplomatic relations worsened. They sent a few smaller parties throughout the following year, including one which included the Soviet Ambassador Ludwig Martens, who was permitted to “depart voluntarily,” rather than be officially deported, in order to avoid the international tensions that might arise from the forcible removal of a diplomat. “By 1922, however,” Hester explains, “the Soviet government stopped accepting the irregular deportations from the United States, and U.S. officials were unwilling to formalize relations with the Soviets to carry out more. Not until 1933 would U.S. officials open diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Zimmer notes, therefore, that “although the voyage of the ‘Soviet Ark’ was a public relations triumph for American authorities, it ultimately demonstrated the futility of efforts to solve domestic political unrest through mass deportations.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ As early as 1920, the commissioner general of immigration was already bemoaning the diplomatic obstacles posed. “The bureau has made consistent and persistent efforts,” he wrote, but “the nonrecognition of Soviet Union continues to be the stumbling block to deportation, and, unlike the first effort, no signs of encouragement have been visible.”Footnote ¹¹¹

The strong emphasis on targeting “Bolshevik” organizations and immigrant groups associated with the Soviet revolution was, therefore, a major obstacle to the success of these operations. Immigrants from Russia, perhaps the most vehemently decried by the antiradical public, faced a number of logistical and diplomatic impediments to their removal. In the aftermath of the vast raids of late 1919 and early 1920, authorities increasingly faced a glut of indefinitely detained prisoners with no feasible plans for their removal. These challenges also sparked noteworthy early debates over the international human rights implications of the growing global deportation regime. As Nick Fischer explains, “Deportees’ suffering did not end with expulsion, for the government had difficulty removing them to such countries as Russia, Armenia, Turkey, the Ukraine, and Austria. Yet the Bureau of Immigration persisted in attempting to deport aliens to these countries.”Footnote ¹¹²

Louis Post himself expressed an early iteration of this concern in his book following what he called the “Deportations Delirium of Nineteen Twenty,” explaining that in some rare cases, such as that of Mexican-born Enrique Flores Magon, safety was a consideration. “Had I ordered him to be deported to the country from whence he came,” Post wrote, “he would have been promptly shot … . No American-minded official who cherishes one of the noblest of his country's traditions, that it is an asylum for the oppressed of all nations, could lightly deport an alien to such a fate even in the period of delirium.”Footnote ¹¹³ Over a decade later, radical organizations would take up the same claim about the danger of sending Mexican radicals back to their native country. In an unpublished 1933 “Document on Deportation,” produced by the Labor Research Association of New York (research and publishing organization founded in 1927 by a number of communist activists, although the organization was not formally connected to the party),Footnote ¹¹⁴ one author explained that “Scores of leaders of the beet strike are deported to Mexico, where they are known as militant working-class fighters, and where they are either immediately thrown into prison or kept under constant watch.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Throughout the era, lawyers for the detained radicals engaged in extensive correspondence with immigration officials over the potential dangers of their clients' removal. Attorney Jacob Margolis wrote to Post in May of 1920 expressing concern over a rumored plan to send members of the Union or Russian Workers and the Communist Party to various provinces that had been part of Russia at the time of their departure, but were now controlled by Poland or Danzig. Such a plan, he explained was troubling, as “All of these men who are classed as Poles are very much opposed to being sent to Danzig as they are unable in the first place to speak the Polish language … and they are further opposed to being sent to Danzig or Poland because of the attitude of the Polish Government to any person charged with radical tendencies or ideas.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This concern was echoed by attorney Isaac Shore, who wrote to Commissioner Caminetti that if deported to Poland, “they will unquestionably be treated as enemies, not only for the reason that they are Russians, but also for the charge made against them in this country.” Furthermore, he went on, with a thinly veiled warning of international reproach, “I am reliably informed that if these men are sent to Danzig … they would be either executed or put in prison for an indefinite time … . It is no doubt the policy of your Department to do nothing that would jeopardize the lives of any of these men … . It would furthermore cause unpleasant complications with the Russian Government.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ A telegram from attorney Charles Recht to the commissioner general stated this anxiety even more sharply, and reiterated the international ramifications, stating, “The lives of these people would be naturally jeopardized. To send them into this danger is both against spirit and letter of international law.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ While the commissioner general responded promptly, reassuring Recht that these fears were based on erroneously distributed information, the struggle to find some method by which to deport Russian subjects continued.

As late as 1930, the government was still entertaining alternative arrangements to remove deportable immigrants to the Soviet Union, including proposals to go through China. A May 1930 letter from the office of the commissioner of immigration at Seattle to the commissioner general of immigration notified him of correspondence from the Portland office on the matter. Explaining that there had been a “proposed plan by means of which certain aliens of the Russian race might be deported by way of Shanghai,” the letter went on to quote from a cablegram that had been sent by the American Mail Line representative in Shanghai regarding the proposal. It read:

In spite of the rejection of the proposal of using China as a waystation for removal, the Seattle commissioner went on to explain that “the representatives of the American Mail line seem to be diligently endeavoring to work out some suitable route of travel which will not be objectionable to other countries.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The secrecy, confusion, and sensitive international ramifications around the correspondence suggest that the Red Scare-created glut of Russian detainees was one with real global significance.

The specific focus on Russian immigrants in much of Red Scare scholarship, alongside the more general limitations of the Red Scare discourse, have also tended to reify the disproportionate visibility of particular types of white, European-born immigrant activists. Instead, a broader historical trajectory allows us to see the ways in which political repression and removal of foreign-born activists have been applied to leaders of color, from the controversial, but decidedly capitalistic, Marcus Garvey to anti-imperialist activists from China and India, to Mexican communists. As Deirdre Moloney notes, scholars have primarily focused on radical deportations of European communists and anarchists, in both the First and Second Red Scare eras, therefore neglecting a variety of significant cases, such as those of Garvey, Trinidadian Communist Claudia Jones, or Australian-born labor leader Harry Bridges. Indeed, she maintains, this gap “… emanates in part from a narrow definition of political activism and ideology. But by broadening the definition of politics to include social movements that focus on racial equality and labor rights, we can understand that federal authorities were concerned about immigrants beyond communities and anarchists.”Footnote ¹²⁰

In the intersecting dialogue between Red Scare scholars, who often represent the anti-immigrant sentiment deportations of the era as exceptional, and immigration historians, who represent the Red Scare as merely one episode within a longer timeline of expulsions, the years of the First Red Scare can simultaneously loom too large, and not large enough in the historiography. It is precisely because they were part of a much wider expansion of the deportation state that their importance cannot be underestimated or contained to the span of a few short years. And yet, the exceptionalist rhetoric with which they have been depicted has dominated the discourse on deportation in the era to a distortive extent, often entirely missing the relationship between antiradical deportations, and those removals instigated because of poverty, crime, health, or, increasingly, violation of an ever-stricter border regime.

Even as the public, the press, and various political actors from Palmer to Post grappled with the consequences of the expanded deportation state, throughout the period, those from impacted communities and their allies also sought to make sense of this moment. Indeed, it is critical to note the voices of members of radical organizations themselves, as well as of sympathetic progressives and liberals. As one defender of immigration, Emanuel Pollack, wrote in a leaflet entitled “Whose America Is It Anyhow,” political deportation was at the heart of nativism in America. In response, he urged, “When you hear their press clamor for the lives of the ‘troublemakers,’ the ‘reds,’ the ‘damn foreigners,’ that they ought to be driven out of this country—fill your hearts with indignation and yell into their ears: ‘Hands off the foreign-born!’”Footnote ¹²¹ Repeatedly, activists, like Red Scare perpetrators, identified deportation as a newly important weapon. But they, unlike their opponents, saw it as a weapon that would encroach upon the aims of American law, rather than uphold them. As the Workers’ Defense Union put it in discussing the expulsion of an Italian IWW member, “The forces of greed have found in the deportation laws a whip of effectiveness against dissatisfied foreign workers. The prospect of exile is constantly before the men and women who demand a larger share of what they produce.”Footnote ¹²²

The words of progressive reformers and political figures from the era stress that the deportation regime being consolidated during this period violated critical and foundational American norms of governance. Norman Thomas wrote in a January 1920 letter to Eugene Lyons of the Workers’ Defense Union, “In general the deportation policy of the United States government and the methods employed in carrying it out represent the moral and intellectual bankruptcy on the part of government.”Footnote ¹²³ His sentiments were echoed in another statement sent to Lyons by A. J. Muste, who proclaimed, “I firmly believe that the present policy of government with regard to the repression of radical organizations and particularly the wholesale deportation of radicals, is fundamentally un-American in spirit.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Throughout the era, immigrant communities and their defenders continued to contest the purpose and place of deportation in American society. But while such policies may have been “un-American in spirit,” the remarkable durability of antiradical repression through deportation throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first demonstrate that they were, perhaps, quintessentially American in practice.