The most read article of The Irish Times last year was ‘Trial runs for fascism are in full flow’ by Fintan O’Toole. This article existed in a sort of tandem with another piece by O’Toole, which declared that the Trump administration was “test-marketing barbarism.”

It should not need stated the context from which these pieces arose, as the pictures of children, interned in ICE facilities, kept in cages, circled the globe and tugged at the liberal heart strings of everyone who has ever listened to ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ and hummed along.

Yet as our outrage, rightly, boils to the surface at such demonstrations of the worst of human cruelty, we should remember the quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde which holds that the United States is the only country “that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” The test-marketing that O’Toole alludes to was carried out, completed, FDA-approved, and hit the proverbial shop shelves over a century ago.

It has been pointed out by defenders of the Trump administration that Obama, during his time in office, was dubbed the ‘deporter-in-chief ’ for the numbers of people he ejected from the US. But the Obama policy was to turn people around soon after their arrival, rather than removing people who had lived in the US for years, had a family, and a life established. Trump, on the other hand, seems to want something that looks more like an exodus. There is a strong precedent for Trump’s policy, and it goes further back than 2009.

During a lecture at Queen’s a few years ago Paul Bew, Emeritus Professor of Politics and crossbench peer, described the British state as a sort of snake in reverse. Whereas a snake sheds its outer layer, while its internal structure remains intact, the British state has maintained the outward appearance of pomp and feudalism whilst its internal politics are ever shifting to the changing times.

To apply this analogy on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the United States operates in the same manner as a snake. Whilst its façade is a battle cry for freedom, and a declaration of welcome and fortune for the hungry, huddled masses, when one peers behind the mask one will find a racial hierarchy that is embedded in its political structure as apple pie is embedded in its cuisine. This should put the ‘Don’t tread on me’ flag into a new perspective.

Hostility towards difference is obviously not a uniquely American concept, and is found to varying degrees in all quarters of the world. Jingoism and hostility have a tendency to rise after financial crashes and subsequent hardship, which create the need for someone to blame. For reasons best explained by David Hume’s ‘limitations of sympathy’ those to blame will more often be those who are as different from you as your eye can see.

In Britain, it is well established that the Irish community have occupied the role of scapegoat and been on the receiving end of discrimination at both state and communal level. The case between the United States and Mexico is rather similar, as both are within close proximity of each other, and both have a fraught and storied history of war and conquest that has stitched them together, for better or worse.

The Mexican Cession of 1848 saw much of the northern part of Mexico ingratiated into the US as either states or territories. The people living within those territories, stretching from California in the west to New Mexico in the east, would henceforth be American citizens.

Much as today, the Wall Street crash in 1929, and the ensuing Depression, led to the cries for borders as closed as minds that one will witness at any Trump rally. What was termed ‘Mexican repatriation’ ran from 1929 until 1936, and up to two million people were deported south of the border. The irony is that many of the people displaced were third or fourth generation US citizens, by virtue of the 1848 Cession.

At a very base, primal and emotional level, such simple logic is easy to understand. Anyone who is struggling to feed a family of five will recognise that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to invite a cousin round to stay. However, the difference between a household budget and a government budget is somewhere akin to driving to the shops and flying to Mars.

All too often to we simplify governance and diplomacy, encouraged by big characters with little words, as much as we amplify the problems of such too. A federal state of 300 million people is more complicated that a household with a family of five.

It has also been established that deportation, and tighter immigration controls, do not have any positive affect on unemployment. In fact, the opposite is true. The reason is that success is not a zero sum game and there is no finite number of jobs. As a business, much more an economy grows, the need for new labour will grow along with it.

James Q. Whitman, a Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale, published a book in 2017 entitled Hitler’s American Model which examined the extent to which the Jim Crow laws of the American south served as the basis of the Nuremberg Laws. Many radical Nazis, including Hitler, expressed their admiration for the US as system they would like to emulate in the Fatherland: a robust economic powerhouse, conducive to the creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit, with a system of racial hierarchy embedded in its laws. For most of that period Northern liberals lived in an uneasy but comfortably separated partnership with Southern racists, known as the ‘New Deal coalition’, for its role in supporting the FDR administration.

Owing to this long-standing context, this issue should provoke uncomfortable questions for Americans, regardless of party – especially as the country enters into an election year and Democrats seek to position themselves firmly on the moral high ground.