While it was framed as an immigration reform law, McCarran-Walter actually built on a series of national security policies clamping down on leftwing political activity in the preceding years. There was the 1940 Alien Registration Act, which required immigrants to register with federal authorities and criminalized any movement or organization deemed to be advocating the “overthrow” of the government. A decade later came the Internal Security Act of 1950, which established a Subversive Activities Control Board to surveil and suppress leftist organizations and gave the President emergency powers to detain those suspected of espionage or sabotage.
McCarran-Walter also maintained draconian immigration restrictions that had sharply limited migration from Eastern and Southern Europe, while imposing political strictures targeting the left. In turn, foreign-born Americans, even naturalized citizens, who had been involved with labor and political activism since the Popular Front mobilizations of the 1930s, became more vulnerable to being investigated, detained, and removed from the country on political grounds. Some immigrants were surveilled and put into deportation proceedings based on evidence of “subversive activity” that dated back decades.
According to a survey by the National Lawyers Guild published in 1955 of more than 200 people arrested for deportation on political grounds between 1944 and 1952, nearly all had resided in the United States for at least twenty-one years; two out of three had lived in the United States for more than thirty-one years. A large majority were also more than sixty-five years old. Nearly half hailed from Eastern Europe or the Balkans. Nearly half had applied for citizenship at least once, and a similar portion were parents of children who were U.S. citizens. About one in ten had been officers of trade unions, underscoring how being a visible labor activist could expose one to political persecution via immigration enforcement.
James Matles, the Romanian-born director of organization for the leftwing United Electrical Workers Union (UE), faced denaturalization based on allegations that he had been a communist prior to becoming a citizen. A pamphlet issued by UE described Matles as a victim of both the state and the corporations he had challenged as an organizer, like Westinghouse and General Electric, noting that the Justice Department had previously attempted to indict him under the anti-communist provisions of the conservative Taft-Hartley labor law. “If the corporations succeed in taking away his citizenship because of his effectiveness as a labor leader,” the pamphlet read, “Matles and his American-born wife and child won’t be the only ones hurt in the process . . . . Foreign-born workers, whether non-citizens, naturalized, or first-generation, would see this as a threat to their own [status] if they stand up to rate-cuts, speed up, and seniority violations. It would disorganize electrical and machine workers.” (Matles ultimately took his fight to retain his citizenship to the Supreme Court, which threw out the case in 1958.)