In the 1920s, the foreign-born population of the U.S., as a percentage, was more or less the same as today. A valuable look at the anti-immigrant playbook of the capitalist class from Engdahl, including a summary of the various post-WWI laws and their meaning.

‘The Capitalist Offensive Against the Foreign-Born Worker’ by J. Louis Engdahl from Workers Monthly. Vol. 5 No. 6. April, 1926.

AMERICAN capitalism never rests in its efforts to create and magnify divisions in the ranks of its subject working class. The carefully studied attacks on foreign-born workers resident within the United States, for instance, that congress in its present session is being asked to legalize thru enactment into law, are, therefore, not of recent origin. They constitute part of the tremendous effort, stretching over nearly ten years, thru which the employing class in this country hopes to meet and overcome the new labor problems arising out of changed conditions resulting from the world war and the victorious revolution and rise to power of the Russian workers and peasants. Here its policy is again to divide and conquer.

The Offensive of Capital Against Labor.

The war brought its new ruling class weapons for fighting the workers in the open field of struggle. Where labor has gone on strike and attempted to display its strength on the picket line, it has been faced with the tear gas, the armored tanks and even airplanes brought into action in defense of the employers’ swollen profits.

These are the treasured heirlooms plucked from the world’s slaughter house of 1914-1918. They were reserved and burnished for the special persecution of the workers at home, the United States being no different than other countries under the rule of great business.

The Legal Offensive Against the Workers.

Similarly in the field of legislation, in all the branches of the employers’ government. So-called sedition laws, special deportation decrees and restriction of immigration measures become new methods of oppression quite unfamiliar to American labor before the Wall Street dollar joined the British pound sterling, the French franc and the Italian lire in the holy crusade “to make the world safe for democracy.” Gradually also the way is paved for the passage of federal (national) laws providing for the registration, finger-printing, photographing (“mugging”) and classification of foreign-born workers. Numerous proposals are before this congress, as was the case with the two congresses that preceded it.

The Attack on the Foreign-Born Workers.

Injunctions, the Sherman anti-trust law, anti-picketing statutes, contempt of court orders, laws permitting child slavery and the long workday for women, to cite only a small part of the mass of anti-labor legislation, constitute effective weapons against the whole working class, native as well as foreign-born. It was to be expected, however, that America’s resourceful industrial kaisers, who have schemed energetically and quite successfully to create cleavages in the ranks of labor thru exploiting racial, religious and national differences, should also invoke special legislation dividing workers into categories according to the country of their birth and their political beliefs. This is coming; the next step.

It matters not that America was peopled from the beginning with the foreign-born. It matters not that for centuries America was heralded over the world as the land of opportunity for all newcomers and an asylum for the oppressed everywhere. Conditions change to suit the new times in which we live. The capitalists say the times demand that every worker be cast in the mould of 100 per cent American jingoism with all the class hopes of labor under its ban. They will tolerate no dissenters.

America, the Land of Immigration.

Before the Revolutionary War every separate colony was settled by its different kind of European exile. During the first half of the 19th century the discontented of Europe were welcomed to these shores and, like Carl Schurz, the “48’er” from Germany, rose to prominent places in the government of the Civil War period. When the series of outbreaks, that shook various sections of Europe in the period punctuated by the year 1848 crumpled up in failure, the United States extended its arms to the defeated and Karl Marx even moved the headquarters of the First International (the International Workingmen’s Association) to these shores.

Then came the period of rapid capitalist development following the victory of the north in the Civil War and the abolition of chattel slavery. By 1880, the arriving immigrants reached a total for the year of 457,257 and the next year far surpassed the half million mark. History had never previously recorded such a movement of peoples over the earth as took place in the years following, with the shores of the United States as its destination. America’s exploiters, seeking cheap labor, sent their agents thru Europe to stimulate the flood of new arrivals, first into the northern countries, the British Isles, Germany and the Scandinavian lands and then into Southern Europe and across to Asia.

The year of greatest immigration was 1907 when 1,285,000 arrived in spite of the money panic that set in during this period. If the war had not broken out in 1914, this year would have established a new record. At that the total reached was 1,218,480.

But all this huge immigration, even in the later years, was not lured across the Atlantic by the pot of gold that was supposed to be found at the mythical rainbow’s end that rested on the tip of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor. There were the masses who came newly escaped from the clutches of the now overthrown Russian czarism. There were Russians, Russian Jews, Poles, Finns, Letts, Lithuanians, Esthonians and Ukrainians. These nationalities provided the backbone of the American revolutionary movement, supplanting the earlier German immigrants who laid the first foundations for the organization of American labor on a class basis.

Post War Conditions and Change of Policies.

One of the early storm signals, however, heralding the terror that arrogant American capitalism was planning to invoke against the foreign-born, on whose shoulders it had reared itself to become a world power, was clearly evident in the bitter fight that had to be made in 1907 to prevent Jan Puren, M. Rudovitz and others from being deported to Russia and to death under the czar’s bloody regime.

The year 1917, however, the year of the American entry into the world war, when the number of immigrants arriving here had dwindled to a mere 296,403, opens the era of the new oppression, when the torch was extinguished in the hand of the Statue of Liberty and new policies were proclaimed against the foreign-born based on their suddenly discovered undesirability.

The New Immigration Act.

It was in this year that a new immigration act was adopted as an aid to strike-breaking. This act retained the clause covering the importation of laborers under contract, a respectable form of slavery, but allowing skilled labor to be brought in “if the same type of labor cannot be found unemployed in this country.” This was the beginning of selective immigration, guaranteeing to the employer the amount and kind of wage slaves his needs demanded. The law was also made to include a literacy test, the deportation of persons affiliated with an organization advocating anarchy or the destruction of property, and the deportation of persons convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude, that is, incurring the penalty of imprisonment for one year or more.

It was under this revised law that 161 members of the Industrial Workers of the World were arrested under the jurisdiction of the Commissioner of Immigration at Seattle, Wash., mainly during December, 1917, and January, 1918. These arrests did not grow out of political beliefs, but out of economic activities, along the waterfront and the railroads and in the lumber camps, that hurt the bosses of the Pacific Northwest. Some of those arrested had been in the country for 30 years while others were actually native born. The law, however, vested in the immigration inspector the right to conclusively decide questions of birth, of guilt or innocence of his prospective victims. When Chinese workers in New York City’s chop suey restaurants organized a union and went on strike New Year’s Eve, 1918-1919, the leaders were immediately arrested and held for deportation. The deportation laws are being used, therefore, as an effective weapon, to combat organization on the part of the workers. They abolish, forever, the myth of an American political asylum for all dissenters. Congress definitely rejected a clause permitting entry to the United States to political refugees.

The Development of the Campaign.

These facts are cited to show the gradual developments leading up to the present campaign against the foreign-born. The drive continued to gather force. Thus new amendments (in effect Oct. 16, 1918) provided that BELIEF in the overthrow of government without an act of advocacy is sufficient in itself for deportation. The phraseology was strengthened by an act of June 5, 1920. Thus the capitalist government examines into the brain of the worker to find whether he is qualified to enter and remain in this country. It is claimed that to punish people for harboring beliefs in the privacy of their own minds is “unconstitutional.” But the immigration authorities are supposed to be beyond the constitution.

Palmer’s “Red Raids.”

It was with this legal equipment that the notorious attorney general, J. Mitchell Palmer, in the cabinet of the war president, Woodrow Wilson, democrat, launched his vicious “red raids” in January, 1920, when about 5,000 warrants for arrest were issued by the department of labor. Early the next year Attorney Genera! Palmer was forced to appear in his own behalf before a senate committee. He was cross-examined by Senator Walsh and forced to admit that the arrests and seizures made during the “red raids” were without warrant and without law. This attack found most of its victims among the foreign-born. It was their baptismal fire for the persecution that was to come.

All this had happened under the Wilson democratic administration. The republicans, in their national convention that nominated Warren G. Harding, adopted a plank in their platform condemning the malpractices of the democratic departments of justice and labor. But it is the republicans, under the regimes of Harding and Cal Coolidge, who have developed the most bitter war against the foreign-born. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, with his Detective “Bill” Burns, fittingly succeeded Palmer, inaugurating the most vicious anti-labor regime the “department of justice” had yet known. Restricted Immigration Made Permanent.

It was the Harding republican administration that put restricted immigration into effect as a permanent policy. After four years of carefully sifting the kind of workers permitted to enter the United States, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, in his report to congress for the year ended June 30, 1925, declares:

“That the United States has settled upon restricted immigration as a permanent policy is evident from the terms of the immigration act of 1924, which provides for the future determination of quotas.

“The problem of the government toward the alien is three-fold—to admit only desirable aliens as permanent residents, to insure that applicants for citizenship have the proper training, and to rid the country of those who are determined to be in the country to the detriment of our best national interests.”

In an article in the Feb. 27, 1926, issue of the “open shop” Saturday Evening Post, Secretary of Labor calls it “guarding the gates.” He adds:

“The United States today stands before the world with the announcement that America is first of all for her citizens, and that the kind of guests she will receive and the number who in the future may be permitted to come in from without are going to be determined by the interests of those already here. She has announced that she intends to preserve her national institutions, that she does not intend to make the mistake of certain nations of the past; she is willing to absorb, but not to be absorbed.”

That is, of course, the hypocritical plane on which the whole war against the foreign-born is based. Secretary of Labor Davis, the Pittsburgh multi-millionaire, who thinks in terms of profits in steel and coal, knows only of “citizens” and “non-citizens” as terms with which to divide the workers. If Davis wishes to view the success of the handiwork of his own capitalist class, he has but to turn to the bitterly struggling masses of disorganized coal miners and steel workers of his own Western Pennsylvania.

Davis is correct when he says he wishes to preserve the national institutions of the United States. The only institution he and his associates know is the institution of private property, the right to plunder America’s working masses, both native and alien.

The Motive Behind the Alien Legislation.

The dominating motive in all alien legislation, as in every other statute that gets on the law books, is the protection of profits. These profits were seriously challenged in the first nation-wide strike of steel workers in 1919; in the repeated struggles since the war of both the hard and soft coal miners; in the courageous national struggle of the shopworkers on the railroads, and in lesser industrial struggles. These took on greater proportions and manifested a more determined spirit of militancy than anything hitherto displayed by the working class in this country.

American great business fears this growing militancy. This is revealed in the eagerness and persistency with which it approaches the aristocracy of the American organized labor movement with its class-collaboration schemes. The employers cater to the skilled native-born workers at the expense of the unskilled masses of the foreign-born. The Watson-Parker Railroad bill now passing thru congress is an approach by the worst open shoppers, like President Atterbury, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, toward the aristocratic railroad brotherhoods at the expense of the poorer paid shopmen.

Thru erecting its “restricted immigration wall” around the whole nation, the employing class hopes to exclude “undesirable foreigners”—prospective agitators in the ranks of labor. Thru its registration proposals its hopes to weed out those already here who refuse to adjust themselves satisfactorily to the demands of the profit-making machine. Out of its huge profits the employing class is even willing to give slight wage increases to the upper strata which it deems mostly native, of the labor movement, which it even permits to maintain its organizations. It might even collaborate, as it already has done to some extent, to slightly raise the standard of living of some workers according to the latest wage theory of the American Federation of Labor promulgated at the last American Federation of Labor convention. But these are only measures to divide and crush the whole working class.

The raid on the Communist Party convention in Michigan in 1922 was hailed as the first step to exterminate all Communists and militants from the trade unions. Both the Gompers and the Green administrations have desperately cooperated in this campaign. Yet the Communists are still in the trade unions forming an effective part of the growing wing. This leads only to more desperate measures by the ruling class.

The proposed registration, finger-printing and photographing of foreign-born workers is only another method by which the anti-labor ruling class hopes to further bulwark its present favorable position. It seeks to hide its real motives behind a smoke screen of misleading propaganda. Thus President Coolidge in his message presented in this congress declared:

“If investigation reveals that any considerable number are coming here in defiance of our immigration restrictions, it will undoubtedly create the necessity for the registration of all aliens.”

The fact that a few immigrants may seep thru the carefully guarded national borders is therefore to be used as an excuse for imposing a czarist police system upon millions of American workers. It has even been suggested that this police system be extended to include native-born as well, thus spreading it over the whole population.

The flood of the anti-alien legislation in this congress duplicates similar measures previously proposed. They carry their own warning to the working class.

The Aswell Registration Bill.

Representative James B. Aswell, the school superintendent lackey of backward Louisiana’s anti-union employers, is positive that congress will approve his vile measure now before it. Aswell is a democrat from the “solid south.” This did not prevent him going on a joint junket with Secretary of Labor Davis, republican, thru 16 European countries gathering data to attack foreign-born workers in this country. Aswell proposes an annual registration. Every year the foreign-born worker is forced to render an accounting of himself to his class enemy—the capitalist state. If this proposed law means anything, and it has the support of the republican Coolidge administration, then it means a police registration, a house-to-house canvass by the only agency of the state organized to do this work. The percentage who will register voluntarily will not be large. The police canvass will be the only effective method, and in order to accomplish its purpose, it must include the native as well as the foreign-born. The spying eye of the profiteers’ law will thus be turned on every household.

Aswell suggests the post office as the registration agency. But he is fooling no one but himself if he takes this suggestion seriously. It may sound better to get the law passed. An amendment can be slipped thru later. It is also provided that when a worker moves to some other city he must immediately report to the authorities upon his arrival, answering all questions they might put to him. No more detailed spying and blacklisting system was ever imposed by an autocracy upon any people.

Laws Aimed to Smash Resistance of Workers.

“Have you ever been arrested?” becomes one of the stereotyped questions, that will go echoing thru the land, from coast to coast, from the lakes to the gulf, in the cities and on the land. These are days when American labor is becoming proud of its jail sentences won on the field of class strife. Hundreds if not thousands of workers face police cells regularly, in every strike, due to minor infractions of so-called laws, usually picketing or for no reason at all. The courage of the worker in fighting for his own interests is thus held against him and he becomes an outlaw, subject to deportation, or branded as an “undesirable,” to be blacklisted when he hunts a job.

Secretary of Labor Davis indicates his real attitude toward foreign-born workers in this country when he denies them the right absolutely to discuss the nature of the government under which they must toil. He says the right to criticize the government and to demand its abolition is reserved exclusively to citizens. He does not say that foreign-born workers, if they disagree with the present form of government, are denied citizenship, and that if citizen workers demand a change of government they are arrested for violating any one of the numerous so-called sedition laws that carry long prison penalties. Foreign-born citizens may have their naturalization revoked, also making them subject to deportation.

One of the carefully detailed demands of the Aswell bill is that an alien, whenever his physical appearance shall have changed, must report that fact to the authorities where he is registered. The ugly face of the Aswell bill is hidden behind a mask that its author, and his supporters, try to make appear as attractive as possible. This mask must be torn away to reveal the actual “physical appearance” of this legislation.

The A.F.L. Comes Out Against the Aswell Bill.

So evident are the strike-breaking provisions of the Aswell bill, however, that even the executive council of the American Federation of Labor was forced to declare:

“This highly obnoxious measure which would, if enacted into law, mean the adoption by our government of the spying practices of private detective agents.

“The potential danger of the principle embodied in this bill is very great. It has all the elements of a strike-crushing, union-breaking proposal.”

This becomes most evident as one studies the provision that gives the power to the president, who is commander-in-chief of the army and navy, so that:

“Whenever, in the judgment of the president, the interests of the national defense require, he may, by proclamation, require all or any part of the aliens required to be registered by this act, to report at such times and places as he shall see fit.”

The language here is not much different than that used in foreign countries giving the government the power to conscript workers to take the jobs they have deserted in a strike, thus forcing workers to act as strikebreakers against themselves. The wording, however, is so general that it may be interpreted to cover a multitude of anti-labor actions.

The McClintic Deportation Bill.

Supplementing the Aswell bill, is another bill proposed by Representative J.V. McClintic, of Oklahoma, demanding that all foreign-born be naturalized or deported. There is to be no escape. The case is cited of the coal striker in Pittsburgh who was told by the judge to go pack to work, then he would get his citizenship papers. The worker thus stands between the alternatives of deportation or strikebreaking. McClintic, in effect, tells the workers, “Obey your masters in all that they may order you to do, or the United States will be made a very uncomfortable place for you.” Similar bills have Representative Hayden, of Arizona, and Representative Taylor, of Colorado. The history of both these states is stained red with workers’ blood.

Every effort is being made to force the American people to passively accept if not actually favor this brutal treatment of the foreign-born. Yet it is feared that it has not been made palatable enough; that the wrath of the masses, once it became aroused through a complete understanding of what is being attempted, would overwhelm the friends of the Coolidge administration in the November congressional elections. It is therefore proposed in some quarters that the registration, as a starter, be made voluntary, instead of compulsory with heavy penalties attached.

The Sosnowski Bill.

Thus we have the Sosnowski bill, which is the Aswell bill all dressed up for congressional campaign purposes. Representative John Sosnowski hails from Detroit, Mich., which is 70 per cent foreign-born. His present claim to notoriety is that he outrivals Speaker Nicholas Longworth as “the best dressed man in the house.” It is said that he has 21 suits, 5 overcoats, 11 pairs of shoes, 36 shirts, 3 golf suits, 3 riding habits, 9 hats and 96 neckties. This aside may have no place in an article of this kind, but it may be said that if Sosnowski’s wardrobe is full, so is his head empty, which makes him an excellent “statesman” of the capitalist breed.

Newspapers’ Campaign Against Foreign-Born.

Perhaps the most insidious propaganda being used to translate this proposed legislation into actual law is to be found in the capitalist newspaper campaign seeking to connect the foreign-born with the wars between wealthy bootleggers and the crime waves that continually lasi their way thru the large cities. This method is used to stamp the stigma of criminal upon the foreign-born. Chicago leads in this respect. Yet it is Chicago that also gives the lie to this pernicious web of falsehood. Chicago has revealed to the world that if some foreign-born gunman cracks his gun at a rival bootlegger, some native-born politician usually stands at his back. No high-class foreign-born criminal in Chicago, cut down by enemy guns, has been carried to his grave without the presence of numerous judges, congressmen, state legislators, city aldermen and other municipal officials, with priests and professional politicians to bid him tearful farewell.

It is difficult to understand, of course, what this has to do with the vast masses of foreign-born labor in the basic industries, struggling endlessly for the mere pittance of a  livelihood. Nothing at all, except as they become the innocent butt of the capitalist political game.

In Illinois, for instance, the world court issue has been raised effectively against U.S. Senator William McKinley, who faces re-election this fall. McKinley voted for the world court. Frank L. Smith, supported by the Crowe-Barrett, republican machine in Chicago, seeks his place. Smith effectively attacks McKinley on the court issue. McKinley, the traction magnate from downstate, the upholder of “law and order,” must have some comeback. He must invent some smoke screen. So he charges that his political opponents are in league with the alien criminal elements and the “open shop” Better Government Association demands an investigation by the United States senate. The senate, safely viewing the situation from the clear vision permitted by the summit of capitol hill in Washington, rejects the request. Such an investigation might reveal the alliance between the criminal world and all phases of capitalist politics, with which foreign-born labor has as little to do as native-born labor, if not less, if that is possible.

Thus even United States District Attorney Edwin A. Olson, in Chicago, is forced to declare that the barrage laid down against foreign-born workers was “designed to cover up shortcomings in local law enforcement.” He issues this challenge:

“How can you hope to eliminate crime by deporting the alien when by far the greater majority of our criminals are born and reared in this country?”

Yet these facts indicate the wide ramifications of the campaign of prejudice being instituted against the foreign-born. This ever simmering prejudice, sometimes raised to boiling, will be used when required against those foreign-born workers who rise to places of prominence and responsibility in the organized labor movement.

A bitter mistake being made by liberal elements, and even by some radical sections of the working class, is that the persecution of militant elements lessens as the war days recede into the past. These hopefuls, hail the rapid return of the glorious days of “democracy” that were supposed to have existed before the war.

The official position of the American Federation of Labor is typical. When Eugene V. Debs was released from the Atlanta prison, the A.F. of L. declared its timid “amnesty” campaign at an end. The last A.F. of L. convention, held at Atlantic City, did not recognize the existence of class war prisoners in the United States.

This attitude translates itself into a criminal inactivity in attacking the present legislation before congress demanding the registration, finger-printing and photographing of the foreign-born. Aswell actually declares that the late Gompers visited him in his office and declared that he personally had no reason for hostility to this legislation, but that the A.F. of L. must put up the appearance of opposition. Whether this is true or not, the legislative agents of the A.F. of L., who haunt the lobbies of congress, actually pay little attention to these measures.

Councils for Protection of Foreign-Born.

In fact, there is no organized resistance to their passage outside that being rallied under the direction of the Councils for the Protection of the Foreign-Born. These councils are springing up over the nation in all the large industrial centers. They provide the necessary centers for the mobilization of all elements anxious to blast this plot of America’s employing class to divide and conquer American labor. This mobilization must include all who toil, both foreign and native born, under the lash of capitalist industry within the confines of the United States. The whole working class must fight as a unit. The reply to the attack on the foreign-born must be to develop this solidarity.

The Workers Monthly began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Party publication. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and the Communist Party began publishing The Communist as its theoretical magazine. Editors included Earl Browder and Max Bedacht as the magazine continued the Liberator’s use of graphics and art.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/wm/1926/v5n06-apr-1926-1B-WM.pdf