The canary has been screaming its lungs out since Bill Clinton introduced his racist anti-immigrant bill in 1997, but both Republicans and Democrats have not only ignored its cries, but hastened its situation. Both parties have created this. Don’t think this won’t affect us all.
Way back in the 90s, there was a big to-do about “Profiling” as a police strategy. We had all these police statistics indicating how minorities were far more frequently stopped and harassed by patrolling officers. As a result, they got hit with an outsized proportion of petty infractions and you get the “crime statistics” that fuel right-wing bigotry. Crime became an excuse for entrenched poverty and joblessness and homelessness. Crime became an excuse for the anti-drug hysteria. Crime justified keeping minority groups out of college and forcing them into the informal economy and profiteering off their diminished status through wage theft.
Civil Rights Activists rightly identified profiling as a means of reinstating Jim Crow and other apartheidist segregation strategies. But their fight to end profiling fell apart after 9/11, at which point “Don’t trust that guy he looks like a terrorist” became the reflexive accepted wisdom of much of the American public.
Now we’re living in the aftermath of a failed civil rights movement. The '90s protests over Rodney King, the '00s anti-Muslim surveillance state, the '10s Blue Lives Matter response to YouTube’d police brutality videos, and now the '20s full blown fascist anti-immigration state. Its all part of the same machinery, used to divide and conquer the American working class.