Somalis are “garbage,” and “we don’t want them in our country.” Migration from “all Third World countries” should be halted. Any foreign national deemed “noncompatible with Western civilization” must be deported.
Recent days have seen President Donald Trump escalating and amplifying his anti-immigration rhetoric, which in the past has included declarations that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and an infamous 2018 statement that Haiti, El Salvador and African nations are “shithole countries.”
Trump delivers such sentiments with increasing frequency in public appearances and on social media, linking immigration policies to the shooting on Thanksgiving eve of two National Guard members in downtown Washington and a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota in which members of the Somali community have been among the dozens implicated.
The administration has paused immigration applications from 19 countries in response to the National Guard shooting — allegedly carried out by an Afghan national — even as it continues to expandits divisive mass deportation efforts to a widening group of cities.
Those around Trump have joined in the nativist fervor. The president’s comments about Somalis, made during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, had Vice President JD Vance banging the table in approval. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it an “epic moment.”
Trump’s homeland security adviser Stephen Miller says holding most immigrants blameless for the acts of a few is “the great lie of mass migration.”
“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders,” Miller recently wrote on X. “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
To students of U.S. history, Trump’s contention that people from some countries — Norway, for instance — are desirable, while others are not, is nothing new.
Language such as that used by the president and those around him harks back more than a century ago to the passage of a series of laws, capped by one in 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act. The statute put in place a quota system in which visas would be allocated by nationality, according to the proportion that each country’s immigrants and their descendants had in the 1890 census.
Its explicit goal was to turn back the calendar to a time when America’s racial and ethnic mix was dominated by people from Northern and Western Europe. The law sharply limited the number allowed in from southern and eastern parts of the continent and almost entirely excluded people from Asia and Africa. One intended effect was to effectively close the door to Catholics and Jews.
“AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO END,” a New York Times headline declared on April 27, 1924. Underneath it: “Effects of New Immigration Legislation Described by Senate Sponsor of Bill — Chief Aim, He States, Is to Preserve Racial Type as It Exists Here Today.”
The quotas stood, largely unchanged, for another four decades, until Lyndon B. Johnson ended them by signing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which he said would “repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation.”
Among the tragic consequences of the 1924 act: The United States allowed in only an estimated 250,000 Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1944, a modest number compared to the estimated 6 million who were killed in the Holocaust.
Historians regard the 1920s, which also saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force, to be the zenith of nativist paranoia in American history.
While it is possible to discern echoes of that kind of sentiment today, “the big difference is that the xenophobes of that period disguised it. They didn’t come right out and say ‘shithole countries’ or even such a thing in more polite language,” said Daniel Okrent, author of “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.”
Okrent’s 2019 book traces how politicians, academics and leading intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries wrapped racist policies in the fashionable pseudoscience of eugenics. Charles Davenport, one of that era’s most influential eugenicists, portrayed Italians as genetically prone to violent crime and Jews as holding “ideals of gain at the cost of any interest.”
Then as now, immigrants were scapegoated broadly as a national security threat. “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life,” President Woodrow Wilson claimed in his 1915 State of the Union address to Congress.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Trump broad leeway to ban travelers from eight countries, six with Muslim majorities, as a measure that he deemed necessary to protect the United States. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announcedit has paused immigration applications from 19 countries in the wake of the shooting of the two National Guard members, one of whom died and the other of whom was critically injured, allegedly by an Afghan national who was given asylum in the United States.
Such measures are reasonable, argued Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization that advocates for more restrictionist policies, because the chaotic conditions in many of those countries make meaningful vetting of potential immigrants almost impossible. The president, Mehlman said, “should err on the side of protecting the safety and security of the American public.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has put in place more frequent vetting of asylum seekers applying for work permits, changing the renewal period from five years to 18 months.
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow cited the shooting of the National Guard members as a reason for the change, and said: “Reducing the maximum validity period for employment authorization will ensure that those seeking to work in the United States do not threaten public safety or promote harmful anti-American ideologies.” The investigation thus far has yet to reveal, at least publicly, any motivation for the attack.
Doris Meissner, who headed the country’s immigration agency during the Clinton administration and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said one effect of more frequent vetting for work authorizations is that “it will take resources that are now adjudicating cases that are coming in the door.” Those include processing applications to admit family members of legal residents, some of which have been pending for years, she said.
“This is how you reduce legal immigration without changing the law,” Meissner added.
As for more drastic measures that Trump has said he is considering — including stripping U.S. citizenship from naturalized Americans “who undermine domestic tranquility” — it is not clear whether or how he intends to pursue them.
“We’ve all seen Donald Trump over the past 10 or 12 years. I don’t know what’s blowing off steam and what is serious policy,” said FAIR’s Mehlman.
Yet there is one paradox of Trump’s inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric: He may actually be making it harder to have a reasoned discussion of real concerns and questions raised by both the fraud case in Minnesota and the shooting of the National Guard members.
Meanwhile, few would deny that the nation’s immigration laws are overdue for an update. But going backward to the bigotry of a century ago is not where most would want to start the conversation.
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