National-origin immigration bars were replaced by ideological loyalty tests

Evidence

The use of national origin to determine who was fit to immigrate, however, was replaced with an individual’s commitment to American democracy and rejection of Communism. The 1940 Alien Registration Act, also known as the Smith Act, granted the US attorney general authority to deport non-citizens suspected of subversive activities, resulting in the conviction of eleven leaders of the Communist Party. A decade later when the Korean War began, the 1950 McCarran Act, also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act, authorized denaturalizations and deportations of thousands of US citizens suspected of supporting the world Communist movement. It was no coincidence that Jews and Asians—long suspected of disloyalty— were among those targeted by political witch-hunts that came to be known as McCarthyism, named for the staunch anti-Communist US senator Joseph McCarthy. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 471

Categorization

• XREF: The substitution of race-based with ideology-based exclusion directly parallels how the War on Terror would later replace Communist suspicion with religious-racial suspicion — this is the chapter’s central through-line. — connects to: Deportation expanded from enforcing immigration rules to an ideological loyalty test — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1316
• SEED: An essay angle: how America’s changing definition of the ‘unfit person’ — from race to ideology to religion — reveals the stable scaffolding of exclusion.