The scarlet scare: adulterous foreigners and immigration to the United States, 1950–1975

This article explores the history of the concept of adultery in the United States through the role it played in immigration cases in New York and California from 1952 to 1975. It traces how cultural understandings of adultery evolved, reflecting the changes in American sexual mores and attitudes to divorce over a pivotal quarter-century. The article uses as its main primary sources court records from immigration trials in New York and California from 1953 to 1975, congressional debates and resulting immigration laws from 1952, and a representative sample of newspaper articles from New York and California to identify shifts in public opinion. It concludes by arguing that, as society moved away from considering adultery as a threat to national stability, moral expectations for immigrants eased so that an immigrant’s history of adultery became irrelevant to naturalisation and deportation cases by the mid-1970s.