Radical Defence: The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born and the Movement for Deportation Resistance and Immigrants’ Rights

Abstract

The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born was a Communist-affiliated legal advocacy organisation that operated from the 1930s through to the 1970s, that witnessed several periods of ideological and social change in immigration policy and politics. As a radical campaign group, it developed as an outgrowth of the twentieth-century American left, and created a distinct platform devoted explicitly to defending the rights of immigrants. Using the courts, popular protest, policy advocacy and other innovative campaign strategies, the group and its regional affiliates, along with allied leftist organisations, pioneered a framework of constitutional rights and legal protections for the immigrants who were persecuted and threatened with deportation due to their links to the labour left. During the early Cold War, their work defending foreign-born radicals against deportation gradually expanded to include other immigrant communities, and to broach broader issues of civil and human rights.