Unsung America. Prerna Lal
Obama administration asserted that much like John Turner, these immigrants had no First Amendment rights because they had never been admitted to the United States.92
The historical context surrounding the Immigration Act of 1903 and the Turner case demonstrates a pattern in US political history: a tragedy, like the murder of President McKinley, is wrongfully attributed to people of color or immigrants; and the response to that tragedy puts a bull’s-eye on the wrong culprit, triggering the passage of laws and actions that scapegoat immigrants and that have deeply harmful consequences. Perhaps the most significant example of this pattern is the 9/11 terror attack, perpetrated by lawfully present foreigners on American soil, which the US government utilized to round up, detain, and deport fourteen thousand Muslim immigrants who had no ties to the attackers nor to any other terror group.93 As a presidential candidate, Trump was quick to blame “radical Islamic terrorism” for one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida.94 Even as president, Trump continues to invoke terrorism in order to advance his plans to build a wall along the southern border of the United States, despite a total lack of evidence that terrorists are trying to gain entry into the United States disguised as asylum seekers.95
John Turner’s case also set the stage for the 1919 Palmer Raids, during which the US government hunted down, interrogated, detained, and deported many Jewish immigrants and union organizers under the guise of anarchism.96 And the case also formed the basis to exclude and deport alleged socialists, communists, anarchists, leftist labor organizers, and war resisters from the United States for decades to come.
Emma Goldman
Towards the end of World War I, a great period of labor unrest began in the United States. Following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, American politicians started to fear that a foreign revolution might find support and spread to the United States through new immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they particularly began to target Jews, many of whom were working class immigrants. One such immigrant was Emma Goldman, whose notoriety was unparalleled by any other woman at the time, and even to this day.
Born in 1869 in Kovno, Russia (present day Kaunas, Lithuania), Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 at the age of sixteen.97 As a child, her family had been displaced from Kovno to Germany by anti-Semitic violence. Her own migration from Germany to the United States was in response to her father’s belief that Goldman did not need further education as a girl. Together, her experience of anti-Semitic violence and the restrictions placed on her as a woman informed her lifelong advocacy.
An influential feminist and well-known anarchist of her day, Emma Goldman was an early advocate of free speech, reproductive rights, women’s liberation, and workers’ rights. The United States alleged that her speeches led to the assassination of President McKinley, and wanted to deport her, but Goldman had been naturalized through her marriage to a US citizen, and hence the Bureau of Immigration could not deploy the Turner precedent against her for being an anarchist, because US citizens could not be deported for their ideology.
Goldman frequently gave incendiary speeches in support of anarchism and she was often arrested and indicted for them.98
“It is ridiculous to think that society cannot get along without government. We will say to the government: ‘Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don’t give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.’ As long as I live, and am able to explain myself, I will be opposed to government, and as I live and as my brain dictates, will use force against the government.”
—Emma Goldman, excerpt from her speech in 190799
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