Restoring the ‘Soul of the Nation’ Means Taking in Refugees
One of the Trump administration’s early priorities was engineering a whiter America through immigration restrictions. We know this because it told us so.
“U.S. demographics have been changing rapidly—and undesirably in the eyes of top Trump aides, including his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and domestic policy advisor Stephen Miller,” the Los Angeles Times reported in February 2017. The travel ban targeting Muslim nations was the first step in an agenda “to reshape American demographics for the long term and keep out people who Trump and senior aides believe will not assimilate.”
The key phrase there is . Nothing is inherently wrong with nations adopting immigration policies best adapted to their economic needs. But Miller, Bannon, and Trump used as code for . Miller privately praised targeting Eastern and Southern Europeans, Jews, Africans, and Asians that the United States adopted in the early 20th century. Bannon the presence of South Asian tech workers in Silicon Valley. And Trump himself complained about African, Latin American, and Caribbean immigrants as “,” an assessment rooted in the racial backgrounds of these immigrants, rather than their individual capabilities.
