'Chinese investigations': Immigration policy enforcement in Cold War New York Chinatown, 1946--1965

A 1957 Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators' manual entitled "Chinese Investigations" gives the transnational security investigation examined herein its name. This dissertation focuses on federal immigration policy enforcement including criminal immigration violations, ideological deportations under McCarthyism, and also the prosecution of a Chinese-language daily newspaper under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Chinese paternity blood testing was affirmed. Some New York Chinese immigration brokers were convicted between 1956 and 1961 for conspiracy to violate immigration laws and for false statements on passport applications.In 1942, the federal government removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast and, believing individual loyalty determinations, interned them all in inland concentration camps. Through partisan politics anticommunism increasingly infused U.S. elections and governance after World War Two. After the 1949 Chinese Revolution and during the Korean War, U.S. government agencies feared Chinese Americans might be either loyal to or subject to the influence of Chinese communism. They however escaped en masse imprisonment even though the U.S. national security state's formal law by then allowed it.Chinese Americans experienced a variant of "McCarthyism" from the mid-1950s in New York City that constituted a domestic application of the Cold War U.S. foreign policy strategy of containment. This dissertation names it as domestic containment. Chinese Americans all over the country cooperated with a federal interagency investigation that, in effect, made the individual loyalty determinations that Japanese Americans did not receive. Any Chinese "subversive aliens" exposed under it could be deported.This dissertation thus adds: (1) to the history of racism in U.S. law (2) to Chinese American history and (3), a missing link to the modern American history of political repression. During the 1950s and 1960s, peace and civil rights activists opposing national and state policy often came under federal and local political surveillance. Federal agents targeted various social movements from the 1950s well into the 1970s. By the 1960s, some agencies systematically disrupted U.S. political dissenters' activities through covert action. Enhancing our understanding of the domestic Cold War, or McCarthyism, this dissertation breaks further ground in post-war American civil liberties, immigration, constitutional, civil rights, and legal history.