Thread by @EddieDu5

The first American immigration laws were written in order to keep the country white, a goal that was explicit in their text for more than 150 years. 
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Harry Laughlin, whose work would provide a model for Nazi Germany’s sterilization laws, served as the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization’s “expert eugenics agent.”

Beginning during World War II, geopolitical and economic interests became important factors in the development of new immigration laws, but protecting the nation’s whiteness remained a priority.

In the 1920s, the earliest Border Patrol agents were instructed to act with civility toward white immigrants only.

Latinos were more likely to be questioned and arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, whereas European immigrants were typically picked up only if they came onto the agency’s radar because of a serious criminal conviction.

Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in.

Since 1882, it has deported more than 57 million people, most of them Latino.

Nazism was a movement drawn in some ways on the American model — a prodigal son of the land of liberty and equality, without the remorse.
time.com/4703586/nazis-…

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America led the world in race-based lawmaking, as a broad political consensus favored safeguarding the historically white character of the country.

Law made second-class citizens of blacks, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Asians and Native Americans.

Most especially, it deprived these non-white Americans of any meaningful right to vote.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler called America the “one state” making progress toward the creation of the kind of order he wanted for Germany.

In 1928, Hitler praised the Americans for having “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand” in the course of founding their continental empire.

Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. 
newyorker.com/magazine/2018/…

In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents.

Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans.

In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristian-like it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.”

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

Hitler made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion.

The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said.

Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families.

American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. 
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Heinrich Krieger, “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” spent the 1933–34 academic year in Fayetteville as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law.

The US stood alone in the world for the harshness of its anti-miscegenation laws, which not only prohibited racially mixed marriages, but also threatened mixed-race couples with severe criminal punishment.

American forms of second-class citizenship were of great interest to Nazi policymakers as they set out to craft their own forms of second-class citizenship for the German Jewry.

Not least, the US was the greatest economic and cultural power in the world after 1918 – dynamic, modern, wealthy. Hitler and other Nazis envied the US, and wanted to learn how the Americans did it.

During the 1933–45 period of the Third Reich, roughly half of the Democratic Party’s members in Congress represented Jim Crow states, and neither major party sought to curtail the race laws so admired by German lawyers and judges.

Related,
google.com/amp/s/www.ther…

The chants of ‘Blood and Soil’ in Charlottesville, Virginia were an explicit reference to the Nazi ideal of ‘Blut und Boden’, and those gathered there are united by their fascination with fascist ideology and rhetoric. 
blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017…

The Charlottesville protests were sparked by the decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate General in the Civil War: proponents of the removal argued that it served as a monument to white supremacy.