ALT II.III. THE FIRST RED SCARE In the 20th century, during the First Red Scare, the United States government began to use deportations to crack down on political dissent. At the time, the American state had limited experience with deportations. “The federal government had authorised the deportation of aliens only in 1891, and then only within 1 year of an alien’s arrival—and it did not appropriate dedicated funding for this purpose until 1917” (Zimmer 2023, 134). After President William McKinley was assassinated by avowed anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, Congress passed the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903. While Czolgosz was born in the United States, the Anarchist Exclusion Act targeted immigrant anarchists. The Anarchist Exclusion Act “barred the entry of foreign-born anarchists and authorised their deportation within 3 years of their arrival” (ibid., 134). Illustrating how crises enable expansions of government power (Higgs 1987), government officials drastically expanded the scope of

ALT III. CRITICAL EPISODES IN THE GROWTH OF IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONISM III.I. THE ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom to petition the government, and freedom of religion. This protects space for dissent, for political association, and for the contestation that is the lifeblood of the liberal democratic open society. However, even in the early days of the republic, political leaders realized that they could undermine this principle by appealing to national security and sovereignty. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were passed as “a series of ‘emergency’ statutes for the internal security of the country” (Smelser 1954, 322). The Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four separate laws. The first three, the Alien Acts —the Naturalization Act, the Alien

ALT Immigration enforcement and border security efforts have also undermined American values around free expression and free assembly in another way. Coercive tools cultivated for border security are increasingly used to police and surveil protestors and political activists. For example, the Border Patrol has a substantial number of unmanned

ALT aerial vehicles, or drones, which they use to surveil the borders. But the Border Patrol also lends these drones to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. In the three weeks after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, Border Patrol drones were used to surveil protests in fifteen cities. They have also lent drones to surveil protestors and activists who opposed the construction of fossil fuel pipelines. This includes surveilling protests, pipeline routes, and even activists’ homes. It’s easy to see how this surveillance could have a chilling effect on activities protected by the First Amendment. Similar problems arise with the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), the Border Patrol’s top SWAT team. During the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder, BORTAC was on the streets of Portland, where they grabbed suspected protesters and pulled them into unmarked vans (Goodman 2024a; Jones 2023). This type of aggressive, secretive, militarized policing of protests