Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), one of the party’s most hard-line voices on immigration, argued that Trump should be focusing more on culture in devising and articulating his policies.

“I don’t hear this president speaking much about race, [but] for me, there are cultural distinctions that matter,” King said. “Whenever you import large numbers of people from singular cultures, you import the culture, too. That’s why a movement towards assimilation in the broader American civilization is so important. That’s been pushed on the back burner and it should be on the front burner.”

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This is a fear of "the other" pure and simple.  The fear of assimilation has infested our country since before the Civil War, amplified by Jim Crow laws and the violent push back to the Civil Rights movement, and carried into the rampant gerrymandering of districts to disenfranchise non-whites. It's why FDR approved internment camps filled with Americans who were of Japanese dissent. It's why we, as a country, took Indian children from their families to assimilate them to White culture. To wrap it all up in a "nice bow", it's why people are so afraid of people of color.  They're not afraid of European immigrants because, well, they look like us***, but they're afraid of brown people. Whites are a diminishing population worldwide, but it's only just hit America over the last decade.  California, the state I live in, became the first where whites are the minority beginning in 2015 and that scares the shit out of many people.  Where California goes, so eventually goes the rest of the country.  And there are those that are fighting hard against it.  

So I'm sorry if I don't accept that the last couple of months has nothing to do with race considering how Trump and his administration has decided to frame the immigration conversation as, at varying points, "The best Taco Bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!" to then claiming that most Hispanics are rapists, murderers and the worst they send across the border (although "some" are "good people"...equivocation at its finest!), and then shifting to shouts of MS-13 (a gang created in America, FYI) and "infestations" as if Mexicans and South Americans are nothing more than cockroaches.  

It's shameful how Trump frames those that don't look like him and it's appalling the lengths to which he'll deny them the American Dream. 

***Wasn't always the case. Americans were equally afraid of Italians, Jews, Catholics and Germans who were all predominantly White, but who we, as Americans, didn't consider "White enough".