Talk:Anarchist Exclusion Act

Preventive effects
The introduction of the article now ends thus:
 * The following year, of 7,994 people denied entry into the U.S., one was denied admission for being an anarchist,

with a reference I cannot access. I do not dispute this; i do not dispute the relevance of this. However, I also think that it would be relevant to include an estimate of the number of known anarchists who abstained from travelling to the U.S. for the reason that they knew that they in all probability would be stopped by the immigration officers. Does anyone with access to the sources know any such estimate? JoergenB (talk) 13:06, 9 February 2010 (UTC)


 * On the one hand, your question is unanswerable. How many anarchists were there in the world? How many of them might have emigrated to the U.S. in a given year? There's no census for this sort of thing.


 * On the other hand, the answer is right in front of us. The point of the statistic "1 out of 7994" is that the U.S. did not actually manage to exclude anarchists under this law. There was no effective way to do that. Passports don't say "political affiliation=anarchist." Immigration added a question to its forms: are you an anarchist? or something similar. Apparently one person checked the Yes box and got excluded. Anyone who was alert enough to answer No got in. The real impact of the law comes in deporting anarchists.


 * Bmclaughlin9 (talk) 14:24, 9 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Of course, I know that no exact answer is possible. I wondered if anybody knew about any estimates having been made.
 * If what you say is correct, I think it should be made clearer in the article. Also, some anarchists could be known to the authorities by other means than by their self declaration. Do you know that the one who was stopped hadn't been in the US before, and there had become known to the authorities for "antiauctoritorial behavior", or whatever they would call the "offence"? Do you know that the US police at this time didn't have contact with the police in some European states, getting information about some "dangerous persons"? If you have "reliable sources" for this, it would also be of intereste in the article, IMHO! That should mean that it took some time for the US authorities to get to the "efficiency level" they had later (e.g., in the McCarthy era), which would be of encyclopaedial interest. JoergenB (talk) 17:16, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

I meant to suggest that not even an estimate is possible.

There was no international police cooperation in this period to speak of. See Mathieu Deflem, "Bureaucratization and Social Control: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation," Law and Society Review, vol 34 (2000), 739ff.

Meanwhile, you may not realize that the source for the 1/7994 statement is a well-known advocate of immigration "reform" -- basically one of the most prominent American racists of the first two decades of the 20th century. Hall was secretary, i.e., chief spokesman, for the Immigration Restriction League, an entry I hope to expand soon.

I've changed the entry so that the point is made properly and, though Hall's data is correct, uses original sources and documents both sides of the law's impact: limiting immigration and expelling. Someday I hope to create a proper entry of the 1918 Act, which did much unrelated to the definition of "anarchist."

Bmclaughlin9 (talk) 20:10, 10 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, IMHO, the article is better now, but will probably be further improved, if and when you could add some reference to the lack of international police cooperation as one reason for the inefficiency of the 1901 act.
 * The sources also improve it. However, clearly the advocates of a drastically more efficient anti-anarchist legislation would have an interest in playing down the effects of the older act. Therefore, it would have been contrary to their interests to stress the potential existence of a preventive effect. However, I guess that there are few or no accounts from reliable and reasonably neutral observers. JoergenB (talk) 00:43, 11 February 2010 (UTC)