In November 1919 and again in January 1920, America's greatest one-two punch of paranoia -- Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and just-hired sidekick J. Edgar Hoover -- led two raids in cities across the country that netted 16,000 arrests of suspected Bolsheviks. People were held without trial for months. No evidence was found that they were fomenting revolution. Almost all of them were released. But the "Red Scare" is one of those stains on the nation's history, when government failed to differentiate between caution and outright repression.

The government's ongoing round-up and deportation of thousands of Arabs, Muslims and other people of allegedly suspicious descent isn't quite the Palmer raids. It's more subtle than that, at least in most cases (the Justice Department did round up and hold about 800 individuals a-la-Palmer in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, releasing most of them after netting zero evidence of terrorist ties).

Between December and April, the Department of Homeland Security asked most Arab and Muslim immigrants 16 and older to register with the government. About 82,000 did, including several thousands who were either here illegally or whose legal papers had lapsed. Those registering thought they were doing their part to help the government. At least 13,000 of those have been ordered deported in what may prove to be the biggest forced exodus in the country's history.

The deportation numbers don't account for a larger number of illegal immigrants who are leaving the country voluntarily for fear of being arrested and forcibly deported. The Pakistani Embassy in Washington told The New York Times that in the last two years more than 15,000 Pakistanis have left. The exodus is shaking up traditionally tight-knit communities of new immigrants and dislocating families, as many of the targeted individuals are parents, children or siblings of people who hold American citizenship, Green Cards or immigration papers in good order.

The forced exodus is also a racist application of the nation's immigration laws.

No one is arguing that the government doesn't have the right to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. But this round-up doesn't have much to do with that. The biggest illegal immigration problem for the United States is south of the border. About 300,000 Mexicans enter the nation illegally every year. The Census Bureau estimates that 8.7 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, 44 percent of them originally from Mexico -- 68 percent of them, or 5.9 million, originally from a Central or South American country. None have been asked to register with the government. Nor have the 1.1 million illegal immigrants from Europe. In fact, the number of illegal immigrants from Britain alone, 123,000, exceeds the number of illegal immigrants from the entire Middle East (115,000, including 24,000 from Israel). Britons, of course, are not being rounded up, jailed and deported.

The order to register went out exclusively to 25 Arab and Muslim countries, those located in a geographic band stretching from North Africa to Pakistan. Yes, that's the geographic region that produces most terrorists these days, although by no means all. But of the 82,000 people who reported to government offices for registration, 11 turned out to have circumstantial links to terrorism. None have been charged. The round-up is not an effective way of ferreting out danger, and it is no substitute for good intelligence gathering. It is, however, an effective way of breaking up families and hurting the local economy of communities heavily dependent on immigrants. Put it this way: If California's mostly-Hispanic illegal immigrants were to be rounded up and shipped off tomorrow, the nation's produce industry would collapse and supermarket parking lots would be thronged with shoppers protesting empty shelves. No government would risk such a backlash. Arabs and Muslims are a much smaller target. But it is a racially motivated target nonetheless.

In the end, the Palmer Raids of 1919-20 produced only 247 individuals to deport. That's barely a day's work for John Ashcroft's Justice Department and Tom Ridge's Department of Homeland Security. A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover might have been proud of their heirs' paranoia. Americans should be ashamed.

© 2003 News-Journal Corporation

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