scholarly journals More anthrax letters and cases in the United States

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (47) ◽  
Author(s):  
R Harling

A fourth letter containing anthrax spores was discovered on 16 November in the United States (US) by investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Postal Service (1). They had been sifting through unopened US government mail that was quarantined after a previous anthrax laced letter was discovered on 15 October in the office of Senator Tom Daschle. In order to preserve forensic evidence, the letter has not yet been opened, but preliminary field tests have been positive for B. anthracis, and the envelope is believed to contain billions of spores.

Author(s):  
Elliott Young

The United States locks up more than half a million non-citizens every year for immigration-related offenses; on any given day, more than 50,000 immigrants are held in detention in hundreds of ICE detention facilities spread across the country. This book provides an explanation of how, where, and why non-citizens were put behind bars in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through select granular experiences of detention over the course of more than 140 years, this book explains how America built the world’s largest system for imprisoning immigrants. From the late nineteenth century, when the US government held hundreds of Chinese in federal prisons pending deportation, to the early twentieth century, when it caged hundreds of thousands of immigrants in insane asylums, to World Wars I and II, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declared tens of thousands of foreigners “enemy aliens” and locked them up in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) camps in Texas and New Mexico, and through the 1980s detention of over 125,000 Cuban and almost 23,000 Haitian refugees, the incarceration of foreigners nationally has ebbed and flowed. In the last three decades, tough-on-crime laws intersected with harsh immigration policies to make millions of immigrants vulnerable to deportation based on criminal acts, even minor ones, that had been committed years or decades earlier. Although far more immigrants are being held in prison today than at any other time in US history, earlier moments of immigrant incarceration echo present-day patterns.


2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip W. Bennett

Soon after his arrival in the United States from Oslo, radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich became the subject of intensive inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Part of what motivated the FBI's case against Reich was an anonymous claim that he had been a member of the Norwegian Communist Party. The initial investigation led to Reich's arrest and detention for nearly a month after the United States declared war on Germany in December, 1941. Some years later, after Reich became a naturalized citizen of the United States, a more extensive investigation occurred, this time by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS looked to strip Reich of his citizenship, and central to their efforts was the very same anonymous claim about his membership in the Norwegian Communist Party. In this essay, relying upon US government documents, Reich's reported membership is examined and its veracity assessed.


Author(s):  
Ana Elizabeth Rosas

In the 1940s, curbing undocumented Mexican immigrant entry into the United States became a US government priority because of an alleged immigration surge, which was blamed for the unemployment of an estimated 252,000 US domestic agricultural laborers. Publicly committed to asserting its control of undocumented Mexican immigrant entry, the US government used Operation Wetback, a binational INS border-enforcement operation, to strike a delicate balance between satisfying US growers’ unending demands for surplus Mexican immigrant labor and responding to the jobs lost by US domestic agricultural laborers. Yet Operation Wetback would also unintentionally and unexpectedly fuel a distinctly transnational pathway to legalization, marriage, and extended family formation for some Mexican immigrants.On July 12, 1951, US president Harry S. Truman’s signing of Public Law 78 initiated such a pathway for an estimated 125,000 undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers throughout the United States. This law was an extension the Bracero Program, a labor agreement between the Mexican and US governments that authorized the temporary contracting of braceros (male Mexican contract laborers) for labor in agricultural production and railroad maintenance. It was formative to undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers’ transnational pursuit of decisively personal goals in both Mexico and the United States.Section 501 of this law, which allowed employers to sponsor certain undocumented laborers, became a transnational pathway toward formalizing extended family relationships between braceros and Mexican American women. This article seeks to begin a discussion on how Operation Wetback unwittingly inspired a distinctly transnational approach to personal extended family relationships in Mexico and the United States among individuals of Mexican descent and varying legal statuses, a social matrix that remains relatively unexplored.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Israa Daas ◽  

Abstract The Palestine-Israel conflict is probably one of the most pressing problems in the Middle East. Moreover, the United States has been involved in this conflict since the 1970s. Therefore, the present research aims to learn more about the American perception of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was conducted using a survey that addressed Americans from different backgrounds, focusing on four variables: the American government’s position, solutions, the Israeli settlements, and Jerusalem. The research suggests a correlation between political party and the American perception of the conflict. It appears that Republicans seem to be against the withdrawal of the Israeli settlements, and they believe that the US government is not biased toward Israel. Nevertheless, Democrats tend to believe that the US government is biased in favor of Israel, and they support withdrawing the Israeli settlements. Moreover, there might be another correlation between the American perception and the source of information they use to learn about the conflict. Most of the surveyed Americans, whatever their resource of information that they use to learn about the conflict is, tend to believe that the US is biased in favor of Israel. It is crucial to know about the American perception when approaching to a solution to the conflict as the US is a mediator in this conflict, and a powerful country in the world. Especially because it has a permanent membership in the UN council. KEYWORDS: American Perception, Palestine-Israel Conflict, Jerusalem, Israeli settlements


Author(s):  
Earl H. Fry

This article examines the ebb and flow of the Quebec government’s economic and commercial relations with the United States in the period 1994–2017. The topic demonstrates the impact of three major forces on Quebec’s economic and commercial ties with the US: (1) the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which became operational in 1994 and was fully implemented over a 15-year period; (2) the onerous security policies put in place by the US government in the decade following the horrific events of 11 September 2001; and (3) changing economic circumstances in the United States ranging from robust growth to the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The article also indicates that the Quebec government continues to sponsor a wide range of activities in the United States, often more elaborate and extensive than comparable activities pursued by many nation-states with representation in the US. 1 1 Stéphane Paquin, ‘Quebec-U.S. Relations: The Big Picture’, American Review of Canadian Studies 46, no. 2 (2016): 149–61.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (20) ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Veronica A. Wilson

For personal or political reasons undocumented and controversial to this day, Greenwich Village lesbian photographer Angela Calomiris joined forces with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Second World War to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). As Calomiris rose through CPUSA ranks in New York City, espionage efforts resulted in the Attorney General's office declaring the avant-garde Film and Photo League to be a subversive communist organisation in 1947, and the conviction of communist leaders during the Smith Act trial two years later. Interestingly, despite J. Edgar Hoover's indeterminate sexuality and well-documented harassment of gays and lesbians in public life, what mattered to him was not whether Calomiris adhered to heteronormativity, but that her ultimate sense of duty lay with the US government. This article demonstrates how this distinction helped Calomiris find personal satisfaction in defiance of patriarchal conservative expectations and heteronormative cold war gender roles. This article, which utilises FBI files, press coverage, some of Calomiris's papers and her memoir, concludes with a brief discussion of Calomiris's later life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she continued to craft her identity as a left-liberal feminist, with no mention of the service to the FBI or her role in fomenting the second Red Scare.


2020 ◽  
pp. 211-232
Author(s):  
Robert Sutter

This chapter reviews Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Republic of China (PRC) interactions with the United States since the 1940s, and it reveals a general pattern of the United States at the very top of China’s foreign priorities. Among those few instances where China seemed to give less attention to the United States was the post-2010 period, which saw an ever more powerful China advancing at US expense. However, China’s rapid advance in economic, military, and diplomatic power has progressively alarmed the US government, which now sees China as its main international danger. Looking forward into the future, deteriorating US-China relations have enormous consequences for both countries, the Asia-Pacific region, and the world.


Author(s):  
Selfa A. Chew

The lives of Latin American Japanese were disrupted during World War II, when their civil and human rights were suspended. National security and continental defense were the main reasons given by the American countries consenting to their uprooting. More than 2,000 ethnic Japanese from Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Nicaragua were transferred as “illegal aliens” to internment camps in the United States. Initially, US and Latin American agencies arrested and deported male ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. During the second stage, women and children joined their relatives in the United States. Most forced migration originated in Peru. Brazil and Mexico established similar displacement programs, ordering the population of Japanese descent to leave the coastal zones, and in the case of Mexico the border areas. In both countries, ethnic Japanese were under strict monitoring and lost property, employment, and family and friend relationships, losses that affected their health and the opportunity to support themselves in many cases. Latin American Japanese in the United States remained in camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the army for the duration of the war and were among the last internees leaving the detention facilities, in 1946. At the conclusion of World War II, the Latin American countries that had agreed to the expulsion of ethnic Japanese limited greatly their return. Some 800 internees were deported to Japan from the United States by the closure of the camps. Those who remained in North America were allowed to leave the camps to work in a fresh produce farm in Seabrook, New Jersey, without residency or citizenship rights. In 1952, immigration restrictions for former Latin American internees were lifted. Latin American governments have not apologized for the uprooting of the ethnic Japanese, while the US government has recognized it as a mistake. In 1988, the United States offered a symbolic compensation to all surviving victims of the internment camps in the amount of $20,000. In contrast, in 1991, Latin American Japanese survivors were granted only $5,000.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document