If you fill out a US immigration form for citizenship or a green card, you will be asked whether you have ever been a member of or affiliated with the Nazi party or other fascist, communist or totalitarian party, either domestic or foreign.
This week, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, doubling down on his proposed get-tough approach to "Radical Islamic Terrorism", expanded on his temporary ban on Muslim immigrants and an end to US visas from "the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism" with a plan to introduce a values test for people looking to live in the country.
To those immigration forms, Trump effectively wants to add another category barring applicants from US naturalisation: radical Islamism. Without providing details, which is Trump’s form, it is hard to say how far his tests will go.
"We should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people," he said in a scripted speech in Ohio on Monday. "In the cold war, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today. I call it extreme vetting. I call it extreme vetting." Interestingly, the repeated "extreme vetting" line was ad-libbed.
Outright ban
The latest proposals revise his original outright temporary ban on Muslim immigrants.
From an Irish perspective, Trump's plans within his wider immigration manifesto to increase wage levels within the H-1B visa programme and to end the J-1 summer visa programme will have a much bigger impact on shorter-term legal immigration, although who is to say with Trump? Ireland may fall into the "volatile regions" category.
Blocking entry to the US on the basis of ideological or political views, as Trump says, is nothing new but even predates the cold war. In 1798 the US congress passed the Alien Enemies Act to "apprehend, restrain, secure and remove alien enemies residing in the United States during times of hostility with their native country"
After the assassination of US president William McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist, the Immigration Act 1903 was passed allowing for the exclusion or deportation on ideological grounds of anyone who believes or wants to "overthrow by force of violence the government of the United States". The Immigration Act 1917 virtually barred immigration from Asia and went further excluding: "All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons . . . persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism, paupers, professional beggars," etc, etc.
In 1952, during the Joseph McCarthy era and the “Red Scare”, the US congress overhauled immigration law with the McCarran-Walter Act which barred “aliens deemed likely to engage in subversive activities once here”.
The cold war immigration restrictions included a ban on homosexuals. The bars were lifted in revisions to the immigration laws between 1986 and 1990 where exclusions were based on a person’s past activity rather than beliefs.
"Immigration vetting is as American as apple pie," wrote George Borjas, professor of economics and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, in an article published on Politico this week, rejecting the view of a liberal opinion writer in the Washington Post that Trump's plan for ideological screening was crazier than crazy.
Anti-immigrant platform
The Republican nominee may certainly be revisiting old ground with campaign rhetoric that has parallels with the Nativity Party’s – the Know- Nothings – anti-immigrant platform against Irish Catholics of the 1850s, but Trump is unique in this political era.
Trump's anti-immigrant stance is rooted in polling but it is largely among his own supporters: older, white, less-educated, blue-collar voters whom he believes he can get to the polls in sufficient numbers, particularly in the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, to beat Clinton.
Pew Research this week found that almost two-thirds of voters (64 per cent) say Muslims living in the US should not be subject to greater scrutiny solely because of their religion. Another Pew poll in April found that only about a third of the public favour a wall along the US-Mexico border.
Yet, within Trump’s own base, about two-thirds of supporters cite immigration (66 per cent) ahead of terrorism (65 per cent) as “very big” problems, while 57 per cent favour scrutinising Muslims more than other religious groups, according to this week’s poll.
In other words, Trump is preaching loudly to the converted with his increasingly severe immigration policies but it will not win him new supporters.