McCarthyism redux: The long view of Trump’s immigration plan

Donald Trump may be the only presidential candidate in history to think that the era of the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts is something to emulate. On Monday, he expanded his anti-terror policy — which has included a “total and complete shutdown” of America’s borders to Muslims — by calling for a revival of McCarthyism.

“In the Cold War we had an ideological screening test ... The time is overdue for a new test. I call it extreme vetting,” he said in his speech.

But it’s not just McCarthy that Trump is channelling. Sadly, America has a long history of reactionary anti-immigrant attitudes, and if Trump were to be successful, he would revive some of the worst policies in our country’s history.

The founding fathers saw the value in opening America’s borders. Among the litany of complaints against King George III in the Declaration of Independence, one grievance was that the king had “endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalisation of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.”

Alexander Hamilton — an immigrant himself — was eager to “open every possible [avenue to] emigration from abroad”, seeing only the benefit for labour and manufacturing. His rival Thomas Jefferson wasn’t so sure. While Jefferson noted that migrants who came of their own accord should be “entitled to all the rights of citizenship”, he cautioned the US to be wary of too much immigration.

Jefferson feared that many immigrants, coming from countries ruled by “absolute monarchies”, wouldn’t be able to adjust to democracy, and he worried such people would have the effect of turning his home state of Virginia into “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass”.

Sound familiar? Well, let’s not brand Trump a Jeffersonian quite yet. After all, it was also Jefferson who called for a “wall of separation between church & state”, and who was a student of the Quran. His friend James Madison, an architect of the US constitution, similarly argued: “Freedom arises from [a] multiplicity of sects, which pervades America... For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.” As it turned out, immigration wasn’t much of a political factor in the first decades of America’s history as only a few thousand people came to America each year. Then, with the famine following the failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845 — along with a series of failed revolutions in Germany, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere in 1848 — America’s immigrant population grew rapidly.

For example, New York’s population was 312,000 in 1840; by 1850, it had become 515,000, nearly half of them foreign-born. Anti-immigrant reaction was swift; the Catholic Irish, in particular, bore the brunt of American bigotry. A major political party, the Know-Nothings or Nativist Party, was formed on an anti-immigrant platform.

By 1856, the Know-Nothings were running former president Millard Fillmore as their candidate, promising that “Americans must rule America”.

Meanwhile, Chinese immigration had accelerated on the west coast, and many Chinese found themselves the objects of cultural, racial and economic enmity. This led, in 1882, to the first and only law the US has ever passed essentially banning a specific nationality: the Chinese Exclusion Act. The original law placed a 10-year moratorium on Chinese immigration and required those in the US to carry the proper papers or risk deportation.

The act wasn’t repealed until 1943, when having China as an ally against Japan was more important than immigration law; however, by that point, the 1924 Naturalisation Act had made it difficult for any foreigners to come to the US. That law, aimed at curbing Italian and eastern European migration, established a quota system that wasn’t abolished until 1965. The start of the Cold War saw Americans focused on a more insidious enemy: communists. Because communism was an ideology, not an easily recognisable ethnicity, Senator McCarthy and the far-right John Birch Society saw potential “reds” everywhere.

Catching a few high-profile spies (such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) only added to the general paranoia — much as attacks like those in San Bernardino and Orlando fuel concerns about domestic terrorism today. McCarthy wasn’t alone. It was Harry Truman that first instituted federal loyalty oaths in 1947, and it was Dwight Eisenhower who had “under God” added to the pledge of allegiance to separate Americans from godless communists.

It is true that there were actual Soviet spies in America, just as there are terrorists there today. They just weren’t lurking around every corner or infiltrating every government office.

It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump. Nearly everything that comes out his mouth is absurd (sorry, “sarcasm”). But when he says: “We must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes toward our country or its principles,” he is not an outlier. Jefferson could easily have said something very similar.

When Trump goes on to note that “to put these new procedures in place, we will have to temporarily suspend immigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world”, he is unfortunately upholding a long American tradition.

This isn’t to say he’s correct: America’s greatest strength is its diversity, and as Hamilton rightly argued, immigrants are the backbone of the country’s economy. Moreover, in the same way the communism was not undermining America at every turn in the 1950s, neither is Islam eating away at the fabric of the country today.

Still, it’s important to recognise that while Trump’s attitudes may be repugnant, they are not, historically speaking, particularly shocking. In the end, that’s probably the most important reason that his policies should never have the chance to be enacted. America has a long history of treating immigrants poorly; now is the time for us to set a better course.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

James Nevius is author of multiple books about New York City history, most recently Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers. He is a freelance contributor to Curbed.com and has had work published in

Monocle and GOOD.