Against the Deportation Terror

Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century

Bibliographic Data

ID4154975
AuthorsMax Paul Friedman (0000-0002-8048-5305, American University, Washington, D.C., corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume105
Issue3
Pages708-709
Publication date2018-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jay364
OpenAlexW2905675972
LanguageEN
Citations received11

This book focuses on the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB), a multiracial organization with an internationalist outlook that emerged from the Popular Front in depression-era New York City. Over the next five decades it would defend immigrants against repression and deportation. With the ACPFB at its center, the immigrant-rights movement became, Rachel Ida Buff shows in this deeply researched and fascinating account, a bridge between the Old Left and the New Left. The group publicized the cases of denaturalized Communists threatened with deportation under the McCarran Act (1950), such as Rose Chernin, prosecuted for allegedly entering the country fraudulently “with plans to become a Communist agent” (p. 219)—when she was twelve years old! A small but vigorous Los Angeles–based chapter of the ACPFB arranged legal representation for Mexican Americans targeted in Operation Wetback (launched in 1954), and persuaded the New York office to take West Coast minority populations as seriously as its traditional focus on the Ellis Island generation. Throughout its work, the ACPFB advanced a critique of imperialism and white supremacy and strove to build transethnic coalitions

Communism · Criminology · Deportation · Human rights · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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