EXPELLING THE FOREIGN-BORN MENACE: IMMIGRANT DISSENT, THE EARLY DEPORTATION STATE, AND THE FIRST AMERICAN RED SCARE

Abstract

This essay explores the impact of the First Red Scare on immigrant populations, focusing on the function that detentions, deportations, and attempted deportations occupied within the broader antiradical politics of the period. I assert that deportations were far more than an instrumentalist tactic of the Red Scare, but instead, were part of a much longer trajectory of expanding anti-immigrant enforcement and the postentry social control of foreign-born residents. Antiradical raids during the era have held a prominent place in the scholarly imagination, which has remained overly constrained by the exceptionalist and episodic narratives put forth by its earliest historians. I trace the evolution of scholarship on the Red Scare's temporal boundaries, the motivations for targeting immigrants, and the debates over how radical a rupture this period represented from earlier practices of antiradicalism and anti-immigrant politics. In doing so, I argue that Red Scare deportations must be understood in relationship to the broader deportation practices of the period and the rapid (and more consistent) growth of removals instigated because of racialized criteria of poverty, crime, health, or violations of an ever-stricter border regime.