A Brief History of the U.S. Government’s Targeting of Left-Wing Immigrants
On September 8, 1947, federal agents walked into the midtown Manhattan office of the Hotel, Restaurant & Club Employees & Bartenders Union Local 6 and arrested its president for being an “undesirable alien.” Michael J. Obermeier had been organizing hotel workers into a succession of scrappy independent unions since he arrived in New York as a German immigrant around the time of the first World War. By the time of his arrest, he led 27,000 union members in a powerful affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. That same day, attorneys for the CIO’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 were fighting an aggressive move to deport John Santo, the union’s Romanian-born organizing director. Local press asked the Deputy Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, Thomas Shoemaker, if these actions were a part of a crackdown. Shoemaker’s mild response was that the legal actions were “in the normal order of business.” The […]