History repeating

I watched the recent PBS show about the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it's really chilling how long that law was in place. It wasn't just a ban on immigration; it also said that Chinese people already here could never become citizens, denying them the right to vote. The show talked about many fascinating things like "paper sons" invented after the San Francisco earthquake destroyed all the records about which immigrants were born here. America only started to repeal the law when it looked bad during WWII after Japan invaded China, and we called China our ally. (Of course that in turn led to Japanese internment camps and racism against Japanese Americans as potential enemy spies.) It's so fucked up, how America will turn on immigrants, making them constantly prove their right to be here. The Supreme Court ruling in US vs Wong Kim Ark finally established that everyone born in America is a citizen by birth, yet the Exclusion Act still continued, favoring immigrants from white European backgrounds.

But nowadays we have Trump trying to ban immigration based purely on nationality, and ICE deporting people, and splitting up families at the border, trying so hard to kick out the people they consider undesirable. It's so disgusting and scary. What would my family have done if the US didn't accept refugees from Vietnam? Why are we shutting out refugees now and equating them with terrorists, as if they haven't been vetted thoroughly?

Now Trump is petulantly complaining about the G7 and attacking Canada. And he thinks he's going to somehow "win" the summit with North Korea when he's done diddly squat to prepare for negotiations? What an awful world this is.