COMMENT CIVIL WRONGS

Sixty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed two pieces of legislation that are, to a remarkable degree, animating forces in the most volatile aspects of the current political moment.

- —Jelani Cobb

In August, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil-rights movement which paved the way for the election of thousands of African Americans to political office in states where, previously, they were not even allowed to vote. Two months later, he signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, overturning the Immigration Act of 1924, which, by way of eugenics, had sought to curate an immigrant stock of white Europeans. Taken together, the laws democratized the idea of who could be an American, and also which Americans could freely exercise their rights at the ballot box. The Trump Administration and its Republican allies are now engaged in a concerted effort to return the United States to the landscape that preceded them.

The G.O.P. under Donald Trump, like many reactionary nationalist movements, is disproportionately concerned with demographics. Trump's anti-immigrant crusade has reached a point where masked federal troops are snatching people from their homes—including an instantly infamous ICE raid on Chicago's South Side that involved a Black Hawk helicopter—their cars, their workplaces, courthouses, and public streets. Further demonstrating the nature of the President's exclusionary vision, on Thursday the Administration announced that it will slash the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. next year to seventy-five hundred, with priority given to white Afrikaners. In addition, the Administration is insisting that universities accept fewer international students, recognizing that admission to such institutions is often the first step toward citizenship.