From “Aliens and Alien-Baiters,” which appeared in the November 1936 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 175-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.
Ellis Island used to be one of the liveliest, most colorful places in the world. In 1910, seventy thousand immigrants passed through it each month, and Americans proudly spoke of their country as a melting pot. But thanks to the postwar anti-alien hysteria and the deportation laws enacted during and soon after the First World War, the island’s business has become the expulsion of foreigners.
The alien himself is no menace to anything sound in the land. There are elements connected with the alien problem, however, that constitute an extremely ugly mess, which is perilous to America. This peril is due to the fact that Americans, by and large, including many legislators, are misinformed about the alien question, while professional patriots exploit it to their strange ends. In this, the patriots are aided by racketeers who trade in patriotism; by bombastic, narrow-minded labor-union lobbyists; by obscurantist newspaper and magazine publishers and editors; by hack journalists eager to put their names to anything that sells; by would-be politicians promoting their personal aspirations; and by a few members of Congress seeking national publicity.
Together, these individuals bedevil lawmakers with their flag-waving and their exaggerations about the alien problem. They impede the intelligent efforts of experienced public servants whose job it is to address it, and they obstruct those working for sensible legislation needed to cope with it. They do what they can to spread alien hatred and, through it, the mutual distrust of American citizens of diverse racial and national strains; they seek to induce the government to violate America’s traditions of fairness, decency, humanity, and tolerance, thereby increasing the complexity of her social, cultural, and spiritual condition in the near and distant future, lessening her ability to deal with it democratically, and threatening to inflict upon her certain characteristics of fascist European states. In a nutshell: it is these people who are the menace, not the alien.
During the last half of the Hoover regime, the Department of Labor, which includes the Immigration and Naturalization Service, might well have been called the Department of Immigration and Deportation. Infected by the anti-alien virus, the labor secretary, William N. Doak, drew a strange satisfaction out of hounding immigrants; raiding homes, wedding parties, and other gatherings where it was suspected that a foreigner illegally in the country might be present; arresting aliens and others without warrant and requiring them to prove they were here legally; keeping people in detention or under heavy bail for months and subjecting them to cross-examination; tearing husbands from wives and fathers from children who were either American citizens or legal residents and deporting them.
In many cases, the deportations were marked by a cruel disregard for human values that, one may assume, few members of Congress had intended when they enacted the expulsion laws. Doak and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been sharply criticized, especially by social workers who came into contact with families left destitute because their breadwinners had been deported, often for technical irregularities that were not their fault but the government’s.
The alien-baiting of fifteen years ago was an aftermath of the war madness, a symptom of general postwar uneasiness and disorientation. The current xenophobia is a product of the socioeconomic crisis of this decade, and of the fear, among the dominant economic and cultural groups, of mass unrest or even revolution. This fear leads them to think and act in ways wholly out of line with traditional Americanism. In such a situation, scapegoats are needed, and the alien is the ideal one. The alien problem lends itself readily to fascistic “patriotic” exploitation, in which “facts” and “ideas” are used to obscure bigger issues. Such exploitation becomes the starting point of movements whose aims and effects may ultimately be disastrous for America as a whole.