"Here's one reason Donald Trump seems perennially in a bad mood: he has probably figured out that the America he fantasizes about is out of his reach. However many immigrants he manages to deport or prevent from entering the country, the white paradise he is promising his Maga base, free of Somalis, Mexican rapists and generally people from shithole countries closer in hue to the America where he was born is not his to offer. He can, however, do a lot of damage."
"By doing his best to make the US unbearable both to foreigners and, more generally, people from ethnicities that do not mesh with his picture of the American family, Trump is not Making America Great Again. He is ensuring America will be smaller, older, weaker and easier to push around. Even zeroing-out immigration altogether will be insufficient to restore the bygone America that Trump yearns for."
"Whatever he does to get rid of immigrants will not stop the non-Hispanic white footprint from shrinking. Trump is not the first politician to try to protect their conviction about the whiteness of America's racial stock from foreign contamination. The national-origin immigration quotas in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were quite successful at doing this. In 1960, 75% of immigrants to the US came from Europe. But the levee broke."
Donald Trump envisions a predominantly white America but cannot achieve that outcome through immigration restrictions. Deportations and exclusionary policies may harm immigrants and people of nonwhite ethnicities and will make the United States smaller, older, weaker, and easier to push around. Historical U.S. immigration law shifted from the national-origin quotas of the Johnson-Reed Act (1924) to the family-based Hart-Celler Act (1965), producing a steep decline in European-origin migration. The non-Hispanic white share of the population fell from roughly 90% in Trump's childhood to 57.5% by 2024, and the Census projects significant future declines regardless of immigration policy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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