THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Everett F. Drumright, the American consul-general in Hong Kong, believed that the United States was confronting a grave threat to its national security.

-  —Michael Luo

It was 1955, and the consular officers were being besieged by Chinese people seeking to flee the mainland and immigrate to the U.S., claiming that they were American citizens through a parent. According to Drumright, virtually all of them were relying on fictitious documents. He issued an eighty-nine-page report, laden with racist insinuations and filled with alarm about the infiltration of the country by “Chinese Communist agents,” in which he warned that China was poised to exploit America’s immigration system “to the service of her purposes alone.”

Soon after Drumright submitted his report, federal prosecutors embarked on a wide-ranging probe of the Chinese community. In New York, prosecutors announced that they had uncovered a vast criminal scheme that had smuggled into the U.S. thousands of immigrants, including Communist agents with “concealed skills,” planted, as one newspaper put it, by the “Red Chinese government.” Prosecutors ultimately brought cases against nearly sixty defendants—laundrymen, dishwashers, and others—on assorted immigration-fraud charges. Yet the findings revealed nothing like the elaborate espionage operation that Drumright had laid out.