Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
Passengers arrive on international flights at Miami International Airport, June 9, 2025.
In her early nineties, my mother had emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder, which had somehow managed to flip over and begun to rot. The physician who performed the surgery—from which she recovered completely—was an Iranian immigrant.
I was reminded of this by a story in The New York Times last week about the effect that President Trump’s order to deny entry to the United States to citizens of 12 nations, including Iran, was having on hospitals. In many hospitals, the story reported, physicians complete their residencies in June, and a number of those hospitals are awaiting the arrivals of a new crop of residents, some of whom can no longer get visas due to Trump’s ban.
In theory, the bans could be lifted if those nations’ screening practices for travelers to the U.S. were tightened. In practice, though, these bans certainly appear to be a way that Trump can stop the flow of visitors, most especially aspiring immigrants, from what he’s termed “shithole countries.” Given the racial and religious composition of these nations—not just the 12 on the list unveiled on June 9, but the 36 on the subsequent list of nations that could also see their travelers denied entry—Trump’s policy could become the 21st-century version of the Johnson-Reed Act, the 1924 ban on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe to stop the flow of Catholics and Jews into an America where a substantial share of Protestants had succumbed to xenophobic and religious bigotry. (That ban—absent which far fewer Jews would have fled to Palestine, and far fewer would have died in the Holocaust—wasn’t lifted until 1965.)
Eleven of the 12 nations to which Trump’s ban on visas has been applied— Afghanistan, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen—have populations that are either overwhelmingly Muslim or overwhelmingly Black. (The exception is civil war–torn Myanmar.) The same is true for 32 of the 36 nations listed as possibly subject to travel bans: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Ethiopia, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The exceptions are Cambodia and the South Sea nations of Tonga and Tuvalu, which are majority Polynesian, and Vanuatu, which is majority Melanesian.
Not one of the 48 nations on those lists is substantially white and Christian. If Trump’s goal is to Make America White Again, these current and projected travel bans, along with his policies to welcome South African white “refugees” and deport Latino immigrants, show his population-bleaching project is well on its way.
Unlike the 1920s, Trump has been able to close our borders to those with the wrong race or religion without the consent of Congress. In 2025, as in 1924, a xenophobic tide has been surging—the Klan reached its peak in the ’20s, then arrayed as much against Catholics and Jews as it was against Blacks—but today’s, I’d argue, is at least more nuanced. Polls show strong support for deporting immigrants convicted of violent crimes, but not for deporting long-standing undocumented residents who’ve held down jobs, raised a family, and never committed a crime, much less those brought here as children.
When both the far-right archbishop of Los Angeles (a member of the Opus Dei cult) and the L.A. Dodgers express concern about the fear that the ICE sweeps have brought to their parishioners and fans (respectively), you know that public zeal for Trump’s deportations has very clear limits. And when ICE agents arrest 84 undocumented workers at a Louisiana racetrack and then say that they’d identified two (2!) who allegedly had prior criminal records, that only highlights an actual policy that might not withstand prolonged congressional debate. Running so counter to the administration’s claims about pervasive immigrant criminality, the case of the Louisiana racehorse grooms is not the kind of story that the administration wants dissected—or even glanced at.
So, don’t look for a replay of anything quite as overt as Johnson-Reed moving through Congress. The omnibus Big Beautiful Bill that is currently zigging and zagging its way around Capitol Hill will devote more funding to ICE and the border police, but it won’t be as explicit as its century-old forebear in its white Christian nationalism. (Actually, Johnson-Reed’s was a white Protestant nationalism.) The current whitening project only becomes glaringly explicit when you look at Trump’s travel bans—and the South African Boer exception. Trump and MAGA-world don’t subsist solely on racial and religious bigotry, but their deportations and visa denials make clear that that bigotry is a huge part of their collective DNA.
