In May
2025, the Asian American Foundation published its fifth annual
Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the U.S., or STAATUS, Index. The index,
which was launched by the foundation in 2021 in the wake of spiking anti-Asian
hate crimes during the Covid-19 pandemic and the Atlanta Massacre, compiles surveys on stereotypes and attitudes of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and
Pacific Islanders as reflected in the media and public opinion.
While the
data in each report highlights different forms of ongoing discrimination facing
Asian Americans, this year’s report included two startling discoveries. Based
on a survey of 4,909 U.S. adults ages 16 and above, this year’s
report announced that
“40 percent of Americans believe that Asian Americans are more loyal to their
countries of origin than to the U.S., doubling since 2021.” Within the same
survey, 27 percent of respondents stated that Chinese Americans are a threat to
U.S. national security.
The report
touched on the growing rise of xenophobia within the United States during the
presidency of Donald Trump, whose policies—most notably his mass deportation schemes and his second
trade war with China—have polarized Americans and other nations alike.
Among the
policies that have divided the U.S. and the world is Trump’s tariff policy. Tariffs,
along with Trump’s push to deport immigrants from the United States, serve as part of an
ultranationalist agenda to attack anything ‘foreign.’ Even though international trade or immigrant workers remain an integral part of
the American economy, Trump has transformed them into targets for launching his
xenophobic campaigns and blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, for whatever ongoing
economic turmoil erupts as a result.
While
tariffs may not be intuitively xenophobic—Joe Biden levied tariffs on Chinese imports in September
2024—under the Trump administration, they factor into an overt campaign of xenophobia
along with his mass deportation policies.
Historically,
discussions of tariffs have not always been directly tied to xenophobia, but the
debates surrounding each have grown intertwined over the course of the past
century. In the history of American economic policy, the tariff has served a
variety of uses. In the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century—before
the existence of the income tax—the majority of federal revenue was gathered
through tariffs and excise taxes on goods such as alcohol and tobacco.
Yet since
the early twentieth century, tariffs have more often coincided with xenophobic
policies such as immigration policies that have been implemented under the guise of
protecting American citizens from unfair competition. When I asked Douglas
Irwin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College and an expert on the history
of U.S. tariff policy, whether trade protectionism has often coincided with
xenophobia, he noted an important moment in the early twentieth century:
“If we look back at history, the trade protectionism of the 1920s and 1930s was
co-joined with a policy of isolationism and nativism. So protectionism and
nativism are subspecies of xenophobia, and both seem to be making a
reappearance today.”
Protectionism has
also led Americans to police themselves into demonstrating their loyalty by
“buying American.” Historian Dana Frank, the author of Buy American: The
Untold Story of Economic Nationalism and more recently What Can We Learn
From the Great Depression? notes
that “buy American” campaigns can be traced as far as the colonial period, when
patriot groups like the Sons of Liberty dumped tea in Boston Harbor in December
1773 in defiance of the British Crown. During the twentieth century, Frank notes,
protectionist tariffs during economic downturns, such as the Great Depression
of the 1930s and the economic turmoil of the late 1970s and early ’80s, often
corresponded with intense nationalism and xenophobia.
For
example, in June 1930, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Initially
crafted by Republicans to win over farmers by cutting down on agricultural
imports, the measure eventually expanded to incorporate manufacturing tariffs
as well. Although the final bill raised tariffs from 38 to 45 percent,
according to Douglas Irwin’s study Trade Policy
Disaster, the final result was an immediate decline in dutiable imports by
15 percent and a 5 percent cut in all imports. Canada, Mexico, and Europe all
responded with counter tariffs, which in turn led to a deepening of the Great
Depression.
As the
Smoot-Hawley Act failed to relieve the U.S. of its economic distress, the
Hoover administration began to blame immigrants for the nation’s economic woes.
Starting in 1930 and ending in 1935, thousands of Mexican immigrants and their
American children were blamed for the economic demise of the country. While
Wall Street bankers faced few consequences for their actions, Hoover’s
Secretary of Labor William Doak used the newly formed Border Patrol, along with
local law enforcement, to forcibly repatriate half a million Mexican Americans
in the Southwestern U.S. to Mexico.
According
to Frank, “Doak announced that the solution to unemployment in the United
States was the deportation of illegal immigrants, and his office initiated a
sweep of potentially alien seamen. On an even greater and more disastrous
scale …Doak supervised the deportation and repatriation of half a million
Mexican and Mexican Americans.”
On the
West Coast, political leaders took on campaigns that targeted both Asian
immigrants and their descendants, as well as goods manufactured in Asia. As
with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, white labor leaders supported the
Immigration Act of 1924 to block immigration from Asia and impose quotas on new
European immigrants. At the same time, newspaper editors described economic
competition with Japanese manufacturers as “cut-throat.” In the lead-up to the
mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, politicians
regularly blamed Japanese Americans for competing with white farmers. One Salinas
farm owner, Ralph Edwin Myers, told Representative John Anderson in February
1942 to remove Japanese Americans from the state and “give the white farmer a
chance.”
Dr. Karen
Umemoto, the director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, has found
disturbing parallels between Trump’s rhetoric toward immigrants and the
anti-Japanese racism prevalent in 1942: “When a top political leader blames
another country for its woes, Americans often scapegoat those around them who ‘look
like the enemy.’ We saw this during World War II against Japanese Americans as
the U.S. fought against the Axis nations, including Japan. But why are Asians
often scapegoated when, in the case of World War II, Germans and Italians were not?”
Even when
Japanese Americans were imprisoned in camps, they were still seen as economic
competition. For example, in September 1942, a group of Japanese Americans
incarcerated at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming petitioned the government to
establish a pottery plant to teach pottery lessons and produce plates for the
inmates.
When word got out that a kiln had been purchased by the federal government for the camp, several
pottery guilds in Ohio complained that the inmates would produce poor-quality
Japanese pottery at cheaper prices. An Ohio congressman, Representative Earl
Lewis, made a speech before Congress arguing that the
kiln should be cut because these Americans would “return to Japan and add their
skill and knowledge of American methods to the already existing Japanese
pottery industry … further adding to our troubles in the post-war period by
the skills and training which they have acquired while prisoners in an American
internment camp.” As a result, the kiln project was canceled.
Anti-Japanese
sentiment tied to economics returned famously in the late ’70s, when pundits
labeled sales of Japanese cars in the U.S. an attack on the American
automobile industry. Attacks became more intense as the U.S. entered a
recession in 1980. Headlines like the one on Ira Allen’s March 30, 1980, article for United
Press International described the importation of Japanese cars in
militaristic terms: “Auto Firms Seek Protection from Japanese Invasion.”
Others,
like one in the San Francisco Examiner from April 27, 1982, complained
that “Japanese scoff at U.S. complaints of unfair trade practices,” arguing
that Japan was unjustly taking advantage of Americans.
Talk of a
trade war with Japan fueled anti-Asian racism at home. On the night of June 19,
1982, two white men in Detroit—Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler plant supervisor, and
his stepson Michael Nitz—violently murdered Chinese American Vincent Chin.
Chin, a Detroit draftsman, was celebrating his bachelor party at a local strip club. A dancer at the club later testified
that Ebens shouted at Chin, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers we’re out
of work.” Nitz, who was recently laid off from his job as an autoworker, pinned
down Chin while Ebens beat him with a baseball bat. Chin died from his injuries
at Henry Ford Hospital four days later.
When Ebens
and Nitz were tried for Chin’s murder, Wayne County Judge Charles Kaufman refused to
sentence the two to prison, instead sentencing them to three years’ probation
and a $3,000 fine each. During sentencing, Kaufman said Ebens and Nitz were not “the kind of men you send to jail.” The murder and the subsequent
trial became a turning point for the Asian American movement, mobilizing
thousands to protest the unjust ruling. (A year ago in June, the Detroit
Free Press reported that the FBI quietly released its entire file on the
Vincent Chin case. You can read more about it here.)
The
full-blown xenophobia promoted by the Trump administration is nevertheless unique and
unprecedented in American history. Back in 2018, Tobita Chow wrote for In These Times that the first Trump administration had already begun tying xenophobia to the first trade war: “Trump
already started down this road by proposing restrictions on visas for people
from China as part of his ‘trade’ fight, while Chris Wray, Trump’s FBI Director,
recently all but admitted that he is racially profiling Chinese-Americans and
Chinese immigrants.” Similarly, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that while it was possible to be “tough
on China” back in 2010, when the U.S. rate of unemployment was at 9 percent, the
2018 trade war with China offered nothing but theatrics and economic
instability.
While the
first Trump administration initiated a trade war with China, the current tariff
policies against China build off Trump’s existing anti-Chinese rhetoric from
the Covid-19 era. Umemoto has observed how Trump’s current tariff war now recycles
his same anti-Asian rhetoric used during the Covid-19 pandemic. “The Trump
tariffs come on the heels of the tragic pattern of anti-Asian violence that
swept the country with the outbreak of Covid-19 and anti-immigrant scapegoating
even prior to 2020,” says Umemoto. “The tariff war has hit many nations, but
none more caustically than China. When Covid-19 was coined by Trump as the ‘China virus,’ anti-Asian hate began to spike. And with the tariff
war, we sense resentment rising again.”
The
combined approach of cutting imports, deporting immigrants en masse, and,
more recently, resurrecting Trump’s 2017 travel ban all serve as part of an extreme
nativist agenda. Commentators have already noted that the Trump tariffs are not
driven to incentivize American manufacturing but are based more on a theatrical
display of nationalism. As Jesse Hassenger explained last month in The Guardian, Trump’s 100 percent tariff on foreign-made
movies overlooks not only how American companies often use foreign sets for
film production but the importance of film as an artistic medium for
connecting with other cultures. “It’s a simple-mindedness that many people grow
out of—sometimes with the help of exposure to the arts. No wonder the
president treats all forms of them with such contempt.”
“Buy American”
campaigns work to foster the notion that foreign goods are cheaper and inferior
to American ones and that they do a disservice to the American economy. Likewise,
the Trump tariffs not only force struggling Americans to bear the cost burden
of import goods that are so ingrained in daily American life but also erode
trust in international cooperation with the United States. In this way, Trump’s
tariff policy marks a sea change for American economic policy as well as another
major blow to American diplomacy.
The
current trade war has left many Americans angered and confused about the
economic future of the country. In the past month, public opinion polls have
shown that 60 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s tariffs. The Federal Reserve
just released the June edition of its Summary of Commentary on Current Economic
Conditions by Federal Reserve District, or Beige Book, which evaluates reports from
individual Reserve Banks on the status of the U.S. economy. In summarizing
prospects for the summer, the report concluded that tariffs would have lasting
consequences for the job market and lead to price increases. In describing
future trends regarding employment: “Staffing services contacts said that
employers across many industries delayed hiring because of uncertainty related
to tariffs.” Douglas Irwin recently told The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s current tariff plan “amounts to grossly irresponsible
economic management.”
It is
important to understand that excessive tariffs, mass deportations that flout
the rule of law, and attacks on cultural institutions such as universities are
not separate policies but part of a new white nationalist policy to expunge
anything labeled as foreign and un-American while doing little to nothing to address
the root causes of the growing poverty gap between the majority of Americans
and the 1 percent—such as stagnant wages and limited long-term employment. The
ensuing tariff war, along with the current federal spending bill, will only
result in rising costs for ordinary Americans while enabling corporations to
keep wages stagnant. For working-class Americans, the ability to survive a second Trump administration will depend less on whether a good is
manufactured here than on whether the country can hold elites accountable for the
growing poverty gap in our nation.
And when
such policies fail, Trump will pivot toward theatrics. We are witnessing it firsthand
in Los Angeles, where mass ICE raids in immigrant communities followed by the
unnecessary deployment of the National Guard and Marines are designed to
antagonize rather than to protect. As Trump faces pushback on his tariffs and
his spending bill, going after Los Angeles also is, as Matt Ford rightly noted, a sign of weakness. For a city that Los Angeles
Times columnist Gustavo Arellano describes as “everything he [Trump] loathes: diverse,
immigrant-friendly, progressive and deeply opposed to him and his xenophobic
agenda,” the raids are a calculated attempt to punish and provoke his opponents.
To conduct mass raids in L.A. of this scale should be seen as an injustice and
an act of desperation.
Trump’s
tariffs, like his deportation scheme, may end up being a short-term policy if
the courts continue to block them. And, as Wall Street observers have
noted, Trump may just “chicken out” of levying new tariffs to claim a quick
victory. But for many immigrants and working-class Americans, the scars of the
tariff war will remain long after the policies end.
The post How Trump’s Tariffs Promote Hate at Home appeared first on New Republic.
