The Western Strategy.

It was one that Trump cannily wielded for his inaugural run in 2015: The real-estate mogul had been fairly pro-immigrant until 2014, when his political advisors identified what would become a central campaign message after listening to what one described as "thousands of hours of talk radio" and finding that the Republican base was rabid about "illegal" immigration Armed with this insight, Trump tapped into what the political scientist Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University has called a "reservoir" of relatively stable anti-immigrant sentiment that can be dormant or activated depending on the messaging. Chinese miners paid the bulk of a "foreign miners" tax, a major source of state revenue, which carved out exceptions for white immigrants; Chinese children were segregated in the public schools; and "inferior" Chinese, along with Indigenous and Black Americans, were barred from testifying in court cases involving white people by a statute that California adapted from the Southern slave codes. Five months before Hing Kee was hacked to death in Port Madison, white workers waged a three-day pogrom in San Francisco's Chinatown, beating Chinese immigrants, murdering four, and burning down 20 laundromats. Like Trump and so many other politicians keyed in on frothing anti-immigrant white voters, Roosevelt made a political calculation: He refused to release the Japanese Americans until after the presidential election that November. [Extracted from the article]