Why Donald Trump鈥檚 'ideological screening' wouldn鈥檛 be a first for the US
In a speech at Youngstown State University in Ohio on Monday night, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for 鈥渋deological warfare鈥� as a means of defeating the Islamic State and said that a Trump administration would institute 鈥渁 new screening test for the threats we face today.鈥�
鈥淚n the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to for the threats we face today,鈥� he said, according to a transcript of his remarks.
Under current US law, as the Washington Post notes, immigration officials to refuse visas to incomers whom they deem disposed toward committing crimes. Naturalization requirements include a 鈥渨illingness to be .鈥� And experts say a host of ideological restrictions on entering or remaining in the United States are already on the books. In 2013, for instance, 聽according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data.
The cold war-era laws to which Mr. Trump may have meant to refer include the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which allowed officials to bar entry and deport non-citizens suspected of being Communists. But given Trump's own frequent evocation of terrorism 鈥撀燼nd the indiscriminate way in which he often connects it to immigration 鈥撀燼 closer historical parallel to what he is proposing may be the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act and its subsequent amendments, which barred foreign-born anarchists from entry and made them deportable.
The 1903 law passed two years after Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-American man said to be a follower of prominent anarchist Emma Goldman, assassinated US president William McKinley.
鈥淭here was a kind of anti-anarchist panic, and the years between 1880 and 1920 were years of anarchist terrorism, with some anarchists explicitly advocating violence,鈥� says Donna Gabaccia, a historian of international migration and professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.
Terrorist bombings by anarchists excited a wave of xenophobia 鈥� and measures that, like the 1903 law, implicitly blamed foreigners for the violence, even though anarchism in the United States tended to be the province of second-generation sons and daughters.
鈥淭here is also now a growing scholarly literature based on European police records that most immigrant anarchists in the USA became anarchists after immigration,鈥� Dr. Gabaccia tells 海角大神. 鈥淭hey did not arrive in the country already radicalized.鈥�
On Monday, Trump did not reprise his December suggestion that the United States bar Muslims from entering the country, though many of the features of his latest plan align with it: a temporary suspension of immigration from regions with 鈥渁 history of exporting terrorism鈥� would be enacted, he said; as an example of immigration flows 鈥渢oo large to perform adequate screening,鈥� he cited a figure for incoming immigrants from Middle Eastern countries.
鈥淚n addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles 鈥� or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law,鈥� said Trump.
鈥淎s soon as I take office, I will ask the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to identify a list of regions where adequate screening cannot take place. We will stop processing visas from those areas until such time as it is deemed safe to resume based on new circumstances or new procedures.鈥�
Sweeping regional bars to entry might do little to make Trump's version of "extreme vetting" tests much more workable, however.
Even at the height of fears over Communism and anarchism, few immigrants were actually excluded from the United States because of ideological screening, says Kenyon Zimmer, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas-Arlington who specializes in migration and political radicalism.
Such measures, he tells the Monitor, proved difficult to enforce. 鈥淗ow would you do it? Someone is arriving through a checkpoint and you say, 鈥楢re you an anarchist?鈥� and they say, 鈥楴o.鈥� How would you know otherwise?"聽
鈥淲ith history as a guide,鈥� he says, 鈥渋t doesn鈥檛 seem like ideological exclusion would be particularly useful or effective, let alone the huge abrogation of freedom of speech鈥� such screening could imply.聽
