Red Scare
My Father, A Foreign Student from India during the McCarthy Era
I’ve been thinking a lot about my father’s experience as a foreign student and new immigrant in the United States during the McCarthy era in light of the war on foreign students and immigrants being carried out now by the Trump administration as part of the government’s attempts to institute state terror. (I use the term “state terror” advisedly after reading Timothy Snyder’s enjoinder here on Substack to be precise with the language we use to describe what the Trump administration is doing.)
My father arrived in the United States from India on a student visa in 1949, just five years after the end of World War II and the release of 120,000 Japanese Americans from detention camps. Racism was legal. Southern states practiced de jure segregation. Interracial love was criminalized with laws against miscegenation. The Ku Klux Klan marched proudly. Many cities and towns in the American West were known as “sundown towns” where a person of color better be far beyond city limits after the sun went down.
Just a few months after my father’s arrival in Boston, Massachusetts in September 1949 to start a college preparatory course at the Chauncy Hall school, a young senator named Joseph McCarthy achieved sudden notoriety by claiming in a February 9, 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia that Communists had infiltrated the United States State Department. They were not there, he warned ominously, to steal military secrets, but, far worse, to slyly shape U.S. policy and culture. So began a witch hunt to rout out “Communists” and their “sympathizers,” and purge them from political, educational and cultural institutions.
In 1952, at the height of red-scare fever, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. (Note the red warning from the current administration about history on government web sites if you view the linked page). The INA, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, was vetoed by President Harry Truman, but Congress overrode the veto and the act was passed into law. The INA has been modified several times since 1952, but one, extremely vague provision survives and has been seized upon by Marco Rubio, currently Secretary of State, to argue for the deportation of foreign nationals, including those legally in the United States, at his discretion alone. The test case is Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was abducted by ICE agents from the foyer of his home in New York City on March 8, 2025 and remains in detention in Louisiana. Here is the INA provision:
An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.
Marco Rubio, in the absence of any evidence of any crime committed by Mahmoud Khalil, argues that his “past, current or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful” constitute, in his eyes, a deportable offense. A court has concurred. An appeal is in the offing.
Think about that: “past, current or expected beliefs” that are lawful, the Trump administration is arguing, can be a deportable offense if the Secretary of State says they are. “Orwellian,” in any of its much abused uses, doesn’t come close to capturing how twisted this is.
But my post is not so much about the terrifying perversities of the Trump administration’s attempts to use mass deportation to establish a state of terror as it is about resonances with my own family’s past that suggest that a lot of the connections being made between the McCarthy era and what the Trump administration is up to are too facile.
I believe that what is happening now is far, far worse.
As a new arrival in America on a rare student visa given to an Indian, my father was aware that his ability during the McCarthy era to remain in the United States depended on him not being suspected of having any sympathies that could be deemed “Communist.” But I remembered him telling me that one of his friends, a fellow student from India, was threatened with deportation on that charge. I asked him about it in an email, and this is what he, now 94 years old, wrote back:
Yes, it was at OSU, my mate advocated openly to seat China and unseat Taiwan at the United Nations. The FBI asked me to assure his India return, so he was not deported.
The FBI basically asked my father to make sure his friend and fellow student at Oregon State University intended to leave the United States of his own accord, that he, in today’s parlance, planned to “self deport.” That was it. There were no masked men dressed in black who refused to identify themselves sent to kidnap my father’s friend from his home or off the street, wrestle him into a black van, and send him to a gulag in Louisiana or El Salvador.
My father added this observation: “They are not so reasonable now. It is dog-eat-dog.” Despite his advanced age, my father reads the news from multiple sources every day and knows perfectly well what is going on. He concluded hopefully, perhaps just to reassure me and to remind me that the pendulum could swing away from current madness: “It too shall pass.” I hope that he is right. But I fear things will get far worse before they may get better.
In 1952, the same year the INA was passed, my father returned to Bombay, India to get his student visa renewed, which it was. A photo of him taken on his arrival at the airport after three years abroad in America shows a well dressed young man, still very young but visibly more mature than the 18-year-old who had left home and family for an unknown country on the other side of the world. He would end up making the United States his home, marry and raise a family, including me, his firstborn. Decades ago, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
What follows is an excerpt from my memoir Motiba’s Tattoos (Public Affairs; Penguin Plume). Despite receiving great reviews, winning the Washington Book Award and being a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection when it came out in 2000, it is now out of print. Twenty-five years later, one of the things I’d like to do here is republish sections of the book that are relevant to what is going on in our world today, in this instance, the experience of foreign students and immigrants from what Trump calls “shithole countries” to America.
Motiba’s Tattoos: Excerpt One.
When my father arrived in America, immigration from Asia was strictly controlled. The Barred Zone Act of 1917 and the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 specifically prohibited Asian Indians from immigrating to the United States. Finally, under heavy lobbying by a small group of Asian Indians in New York, Public Law 483 was passed in 1946, allowing Indians to become naturalized citizens. The law limited the number of Asian Indians allowed into the United States to 100 individuals per year. Until the 1965 Immigration Act did away with these restrictions, very few Indians made their way to America. In 1940, there were the same number of Asian Indians in the United States as in 1910: just 10,000. As recently as 1960, out of a total of 265,398 immigrants to the United States, only 391 came from India.
My father was admitted to Chauncy Hall, a preparatory school for boys founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1828. The idea was that he would go on from prep school to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering. In a way, Chauncy Hall, his first stop in America, was his last stop in the world in which he’d been raised in India: a world of privilege. He did not stay long. Bapuji was facing grave uncertainties with his business in Rangoon, and when rupees were converted into dollars, Chauncy Hall seemed an unaffordable extravagance. At the age of nineteen years, in a big, powerful country where he didn’t know a soul, my father was forced to do something for which no Indian son of his class had ever been prepared: make his own way in the world. There was no network of relatives in America to help him along, to give him a place to stay, provide him with home-cooked Jain vegetarian meals, subsidize his studies, or help him set up a business. He was on his own.
Abandoning Chauncy Hall, my father left Boston for Manhattan — Kansas, that is — where he enrolled in Kansas State University for the summer. Luckily for my father, new, affordable opportunities in higher education were just becoming available to foreign students such as himself. University enrollment in the United States was booming. Record numbers of young people poured into America’s state universities during the immediate postwar years of the late 1940s and on into the 1950s. As the Cold War intensified, “land grant” public universities became important training grounds for the masses of educated, technically skilled workers the country needed to preserve it from the Soviet Union.
To be continued.