Here’s an incomplete list of the kinds of immigrants that, at some time or the other, the U.S. government has said should not be coming to this country: Syrians, convicted criminals, Chinese, anarchists, Libyans, people who are illiterate, Eastern European Jews, polygamists, Italians, beggars, all Asians, people too poor or too disabled to “take care of themselves,” Yemenis, prostitutes, Somalis, the “insane,” Sudanese, people who already have a job offer in the U.S., Iranians, members of totalitarian organizations, people suffering from contagious diseases, Iraqis, revolutionaries, communists, drug addicts, Nazis, habitual drunkards, and alimony shirkers.

A special shout-out goes to the 2024 Republican Party platform, which adds a few more specific populations to the list: “foreign Christian-hating communists, Marxists, and Socialists,” as well as “jihadists and jihadist sympathizers.”

We now recognize that the exclusion of some of these categories of people, such as Italians or poor people, stemmed from racism or ignorant prejudice. Other people, such as ISIS members or Nazis, most of us still want to keep out of the country. But each time the American state tangled with these groups of people (and their lawyers and advocates) for the past 200 years, the U.S. further clarified its values and its identity. It was in the legal and extrajudicial struggles against “undesirables” that the United States of America found out exactly how committed it was to its stated ideals of liberty, human dignity, the right to due process, and solidarity with free men and women everywhere.

This is the point that historian Michael Willrich makes in his 2023 book, “American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.” The federal government, he argues, has used its monopoly on immigration enforcement to shape Americans’ understanding not just of which foreigners were a threat to them, but also which Americans were so dangerous that their voices had to be suppressed and their bodies controlled.

“It’s during the early 20th century period when you have the formation of the modern FBI and the use by the Justice Department of immigration laws in order to contest radicalism,” Willrich told me in a recent interview. “The federal government didn’t have the same extent of criminal law authority that state and local governments did. So they used immigration laws, the power to police the borders, as a way of also policing domestic dissent onshore.”

In the 1910s, Willrich writes, many of the anarchists who were getting American law enforcement all worked up were immigrants (Jews and Italians in particular, with Emma Goldman the most famous name among them). The reverse was not true, as most immigrants were not anarchists. Then, as now, however, ethnic categories (“Italians,” “Jews”) and ideological categories (“anarchists,” “socialists,” “terrorists,” “criminals”) greatly overlapped in the minds of Americans. Law enforcement targeted immigrant communities suspected of being innately “anti-American” — that is, socialist, communist or anarchist.

But, for all their putative “foreignness,” the anarchists were of a distinctly American character. The arguments they made in the courts, when threatened with imprisonment and deportation, were centered on the guarantees offered by the U.S. Constitution. In the process, they brought those guarantees to life.

“This was a time when those Bill of Rights protections that we now see as the cornerstone of modern civil liberties were not taken particularly seriously by the courts,” Willrich told me. “The First Amendment was all but a dead letter in the early 20th century. It was folks like Goldman and their lawyers in these civil liberties cases who really argued for a First Amendment freedom that was absolute. And you can consider whether or not she was being cynical using the language of American constitutionalism. [But] I think that she was actually not wholly just speaking cynically. She, in fact, recognized this as a way of making a broader claim to a broader public to get people to see the injustices that working-class immigrants faced in the United States.”

In a way, Willrich’s argument about the centrality of the immigration struggle in American history mirrors the argument that Nikole Hannah-Jones et co. made in the “1619 Project,” the controversial series of essays published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019: that America’s efforts to control Black bodies (slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration), as well as the resistance they engendered, are central to American history. In other words, there’s no better barometer of American democracy than the country’s ongoing response to Black Americans’ demand for freedom and equality of opportunity.

“Despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed,” Hannah-Jones wrote in the opening essay of the “1619 Project.” “Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.”

For the next four years, if the promised “mass deportation” materializes, complete with shameless disregard for the American laws that guarantee due process to all, American institutions and the American people will have yet another unwanted chance to clarify for themselves just how committed they are to democratic ideals.

Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration.