In 2017, The New York Times reported on a meeting between Trump and several members of his cabinet in which he raged against foreign visitors to the United States. Citing a memo from Stephen Miller, the president’s chief immigration hard-liner, Trump complained about the pending arrival of thousands of people from Muslim and predominantly African nations. What matters is that they’re black and African and, for Trump, at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. I’ve written before about the 1924 Immigration Act, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which codified a decade’s worth of nativist hysteria into law. Meant to reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, it also defined the American nation in explicitly racial terms.

Source: New York Times February 04, 2020 09:56 UTC