During the Bush administration people used to justify xenophobia with claims that Muslims were ideologically alien, plotting terrorist attacks, bringing sharia law etc. These claims were insane but they were based on a paranoid vision of what Muslims were going to *do*.
Since Trump and the alt-right takeover of the GOP xenophobia is now based on the claim that immigrants are trying to “replace” us. There’s no longer even a claim that they plan to do something; their presence itself is the offense. Immigrants are now intrinsically bad because of who they are.
I remain slightly surprised that we have devolved back to this extraordinarily stupid form of nativism, which has no theory of morality, history or the world apart from “my tribe good, your tribe bad”.
(Which, by the way, is language that the Nazis used. Their term „Umvolkung“ meant the fear of Germans being replaced by immigrants. I fear that the US is not far from where Germany was in the 1930s, and that didn‘t end pretty…)
