HARRY BRIDGES: THE 20-YEAR CRUSADE TO DEPORT AN IMMIGRANT ACTIVIST

TONIGHT, we will speak in San Francisco about the US government’s infamous attempt to deport Harry Bridges. Bridges was a labor leader who in the 1930s led the strike that resulted in longshoremen up and down the West Coast being unionized. As a result, the United States spent the next two decades trying to deport him. After four separate trials, and two Supreme Court opinions, they failed, and Bridges eventually became a naturalized citizen.

I am joining Peter Afrasiab, who authored  Burning Bridges: America’s 20-Year Crusade to Deport Labor Leader Harry Bridges, for this exciting discussion. The panel will be moderated by famed Constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky. Pre-registration is required.

Moderator
Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean of Berkeley Law and Scholar of Constitutional Law

Panelists
 Peter Afrasiabi, Esq.
Partner at One LLP, Newport Beach, California
Author of Burning Bridges: America’s 20-Year Crusade to Deport Labor Leader Harry Bridges

Chip Gibbons, Esq.
Journalist and First-Amendment lawyer;
Policy and legislative counsel for
Defending Rights & Dissent, Washington, D.C.

This event is free and open to the general public!
To reserve a space, you must register online.
Tickets will not be available at the door.

The Bridges saga has wide ranging implications:

The Bridges deportation case was never just about Harry Bridges. First and foremost, it was about smashing a successful labor union by decapitating its leadership. Following the successful 1934 strike, the ILWU grew into one of the country’s most powerful, most militant trade unions. For anti-radical ideologues, this could only be the work of outside forces.

Since the inception of the labor movement, immigrants had been blamed for bringing “foreign” radicalism to the US and injecting discord into otherwise harmonious capital-labor relationships. Labor organizing was viewed as tantamount to disloyalty, and immigrants were suspected of working to remake the US in the image of their “un-American” ideas. All that was needed to make America great again, and roll back working-class victories, was to remove them from the country.

The Bridges case was also a stand-in for a larger anti-immigration politics. When asked about one of the many efforts to deport the ILWU leader, Senator Robert R. Reynolds (D-NC) told the media, “Bridges should not be permitted to make the trip out of the country alone. There are thousands of others who ought to be deported or put into concentration camps until we can get rid of them.”

Camps, mass deportations – these are the tools of those who want to “make America great again.” A xenophobic streak is unquestionably at the root of this. But make no mistake: in Bridges’ time and in our own, reactionaries’ ultimate vision of policing – and expelling – political heresy from the body politic extends far beyond the foreign-born.