"The New York Times recently reported that the Trump administration is “considering a radical overhaul” of the refugee system in the US that would, in the publication’s estimation, “favor White people” by restricting immigration to English speakers, Europeans and White South Africans.

At first glance, this may seem like just another provocation on par with President Donald Trump’s profane rant against Haiti and African countries; his stated preference for immigrants from Norway, Denmark and Switzerland; his bizarre comments about immigrants carrying “bad genes” and other invective.

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Significant opposition to these groups came from the nation’s self-described White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite. Members of this ruling class feared that the immigrants would soon displace them, particularly because their birthrates trailed the new arrivals. They spoke nervously of “race suicide” — forerunner of the “Great Replacement Theory” now peddled by anti-Semites and racists.

These fears got their most thorough and consequential airing in Madison Grant’s polemic, The Passing of the Great Race, first published in 1916. (Grant‘s family arrived in America in the 1620s.) A prominent eugenicist, he would later attract the admiration of Adolf Hitler, who described the book as his “Bible.”