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Abstract
The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born was a Communist-affiliated legal advocacy organisation that operated from the 1930s through to the 1970s, that witnessed several periods of ideological and social change in immigration policy and politics. As a radical campaign group, it developed as an outgrowth of the twentieth-century American left, and created a distinct platform devoted explicitly to defending the rights of immigrants. Using the courts, popular protest, policy advocacy and other innovative campaign strategies, the group and its regional affiliates, along with allied leftist organisations, pioneered a framework of constitutional rights and legal protections for the immigrants who were persecuted and threatened with deportation due to their links to the labour left. During the early Cold War, their work defending foreign-born radicals against deportation gradually expanded to include other immigrant communities, and to broach broader issues of civil and human rights.

For all her working life, educating young children has been LiAne Flakes's calling.When she started working in the 1990s, practically anyone could get a job teaching preschool. "Now," the Florida-based early childhood teacher said in a recent interview for the Nation, "you're being required to go to school." But while she's proud of how her field has matured, she's disappointed that her wages have lagged. "I think we're just as important as an elementary school teacher," she says, "we're just as important as a high school [teacher] or college professor." There's a bitter subtext: she currently earns $12.50 an hour, or less than two-thirds the pay rate of a typical public highschool teacher.

When America was starting to define itself as a "nation of immigrants," it sought a more perfect union by engineering the masses at its gateway. Ellis Island was not simply the vaunted passage en route to a land of opportunity. The border was a laboratory for the construction of nationhood, where social scientists, medical specialists, and border officials dissected the subjects of a vast social experiment.

When America was starting to define itself as a 'nation of immigrants,' it sought a more perfect union by engineering the masses at its gateway. Ellis Island was not simply the vaunted passage en route to a land of opportunity. The border was a laboratory for the construction of nationhood, where social scientists, medical specialists, and border officials dissected the subjects of a vast social experiment. Adapted from the source document.

As our television screens toggle between pundits squabbling over Obamacare's insurance rules and ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, another health care battle rages in village clinics and corporate boardrooms. Behind the seductive commercials for breakthrough treatments, multinational brands and technocrats are concocting supranational policies to hold poor patients hostage to pharmaceutical markets across the Global South through elaborate intellectual property schemes in international trade. And while the industry sutures the future of medicine to the business of exploiting disease, poor countries serve as an incubator for neoliberal policies that boost the industry's power in Washington, capitalizing on regional inequality to degrade public health on a global scale.

As our television screens toggle between pundits squabbling over Obamacare's insurance rules and ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, another health care battle rages in village clinics and corporate boardrooms. Behind the seductive commercials for breakthrough treatments, multinational brands and technocrats are concocting supranational policies to hold poor patients hostage to pharmaceutical markets across the Global South through elaborate intellectual property schemes in international trade. And while the industry sutures the future of medicine to the business of exploiting disease, poor countries serve as an incubator for neoliberal policies that boost the industry's power in Washington, capitalizing on regional inequality to degrade public health on a global scale. The struggle for access to medicine presents a legal and ethical minefield for rich and poor countries alike -- one that is being fought out as humanitarians challenge corporations over intellectual property rights. A recent landmark decision by the Indian Supreme Court thrust that conflict into popular awareness. The ruling blocked a request by the global pharmaceutical giant Novartis for a patent on a Leukemia drug, Gleevec. The company claimed to be introducing a new formulation of the drug that warranted a fresh patent. But the court determined that the new Gleevec was virtually identical to the old one. This cleared the way for mass production of a much cheaper generic version. While a cancer patient in the United States might spend around $70,000 for Gleevec, India's version could cost as little as $2,500. The defeat of Novartis sent shockwaves across the drug industry. Companies have long structured their profit systems around an obscure set of intellectual property controls, and the ruling represented a growing global pushback against their political and commercial hegemony. The case raised a preeminent question in the struggle for global health equity: when the laws of commerce override the human right to medicine, can society protect public health from unbridled private markets? Adapted from the source document.