In Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States, Julia Rose Kraut reveals how the United States has a long history of barring or expelling foreign noncitizens based on their political expressions and associations to suppress dissent throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the War on Anarchy to the Cold War to the War on Terror–-a history which includes Emma Goldman, Ernest Mandel, Carlos Fuentes, Charlie Chaplin, and John Lennon. Robert L. Tsai has called Threat of Dissent “A must-read for those who care about immigration or the First Amendment.” To celebrate the publication of the paperback edition, here is a brief excerpt from the book.
The Return of McCarranism
IN SEPTEMBER 1969, a forty-six-year-old Belgian Marxist economist named Ernest Mandel applied for a visa to visit the United States. Students at Stanford University had invited Mandel to attend a conference on “Technology and the Third World” in October and to participate in a debate with renowned Canadian-born Keynesian economist and Harvard University Professor John Kenneth Galbraith. While Mandel awaited his visa, other colleges and universities invited him to speak on their campuses, including Amherst College, Princeton University, Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mandel accepted these invitations. Yet, Mandel would never receive a visa to attend the Stanford conference and debate Galbraith, or to speak at those universities and colleges. Under the Nixon administration, Mandel was ideologically excluded and barred from entry to the United States.
The presidency of Richard M. Nixon, who rose to prominence in the McCarthy era, marked the return of McCarranism and the use of ideological exclusion to suppress the threat of dissent. The motivations behind the Nixon administration’s decisions and use of ultimate discretion to exclude or deport, including in the case of Ernest Mandel, were political and self-interested. These exclusions and deportations were part of the Nixon administration’s abuse of power and use of retaliation to stifle critics, punish perceived enemies, win supporters, and secure Nixon’s reelection in 1972.
The return of McCarranism under the Nixon administration did not go unnoticed. It revived past arguments against ideological exclusion as a form of censorship, infringing on First Amendment rights, undermining values of free speech and democracy, and depicting the United States as a fearful, insecure nation. The Supreme Court once again confronted the question of whether to evaluate the constitutionality of explicit ideological restrictions under immigration or First Amendment legal precedent. While Mandel was not the only one who faced exclusion under the Nixon administration, his case resulted in the most important and influential legal strategies and constitutional challenges to ideological exclusion in the United States.