TEN YEARS ago, the Great Recession shook the world financial system, setting off a panic in corporate boardrooms and ravaging the household finances of millions of working-class families.
Today, America’s corporate executives are rejoicing in the new Trumpian era of deregulation and corporate pillaging — but ordinary people are still struggling to get by from week to week, and living in fear of a disaster that will plunge them into destitution.....

Meanwhile, on Main Street, more than four in 10 American households struggle on a monthly basis to afford housing, child care, food, transportation and health care without going into debt, according to a recent report.....

But it is also a time of record debt for both consumers and corporations, and despite the steady increase in official employment levels since the Great Recession, wage growth has remained stagnant, meaning continuing hardship for workers and the poor.

The Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person,” drastically restricted the ability of Muslims to become citizens. The requirement meant that immigrants seeking lawful residence and citizenship were compelled to convince authorities that they fit within the statutory definition of whiteness. Arabs, along with Italians, Jews and others, were forced to litigate their identities in line with prevailing conceptions of whiteness — which fluctuated according to geographic origin, physical appearance and religion. Courts unwaveringly framed Islam as hostile to American ideals and society, casting Muslim immigrants as outside the bounds of whiteness and a threat to the identity and national security of the United States.

Indeed, the first court ruling to grant naturalization to an Arab-born Muslim was for a Saudi man, in Ex Parte Mohriez, in 1944 — and, even then, based only on the finding that Arabs should be considered part of “the white race.”
Despite the Mohriez decision, the Naturalization Act remained the law of the land until 1952, and restrictive immigration quotas stayed on the books.

In the run-up to, and since his election as President of the United States, Donald Trump’s words have attracted a lot of attention. Many commentators and activists have charged that Trump’s rhetoric has fueled hate crimes in the United States against minorities. Until recently, many individuals voicing such concerns pointed to high-profile individual cases, rather than systematic data. Now that’s changing as new research is emerging.