Xenophobia is fear or hatred of people seen as foreign, including immigrants, refugees and people assumed to be from elsewhere. In the US, it has often been tied to race, with laws aimed at limiting immigration from countries that were not white or Protestant.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers. The Immigration Act of 1924 set national-origins quotas designed to sharply limit immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and banned most immigration from Asia. Those quotas lasted until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. During the Great Depression, local and federal officials pushed hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent to leave the country, including many US citizens. In 1954, the government's Operation Wetback deported large numbers of Mexican nationals and some citizens.
Xenophobic rhetoric continues to shape policy and violence. Words like "invasion" and "infestation" frame migrants as threats rather than people. In 2019, a gunman who echoed that "invasion" language killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, targeting Latinos. Xenophobia also reaches people born in the US, such as Asian and Latino Americans treated as perpetual foreigners. Anti-immigrant fear often rises during economic or public health crises.