President Donald Trump issued an executive order on January 27 banning all residents of  Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from entering the United States. This decision, as abrupt and unprecedented as it may see, makes up a long American tradition of xenophobic and bigoted border restrictions. Rulers justified each law on outright racism, and eugenics, the debunked racist pseudo-science of breeding “undesirable” traits out of the human population.

Under racist immigration laws not repealed until 1965, all eight of my great-grandparents entered the United States illegally, or in a few of their cases, as part of the slim margin of  the “acceptable underclass.” Under all of these discriminatory and bigoted law systems, legislators justified themselves through nativist appeals, calling for an “America First” policy, stressing, as President Calvin Coolidge phrased it, that “America must be kept American.”

Ironically though, each successive generation of immigrants banned by this racist legislation, from the Germans to the Irish to the Chinese, has situated itself fully into American culture and then turned around, ignoring their own origins, and making the same nativist appeals which plagued the lives of their ancestors. Today Americans can see only the latest iteration of this great historical cycle, with Hispanics and Arab Muslims banned for vague, politically-charged, oxymoronic “crimes” like “stealing jobs” and for untrue claims of terrorism. As Jean-Baptiste Karr said, “The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

These racist and nativist appeals often take the form of fear-mongering, proto-fascist arguments about the “dangers” of foreign immigrants. Nowhere can Americans see this more than in President Trump’s new executive order, and, in fact, his entire campaign. Under the guise of security, President Trump has played into a recurring pattern in American history, which can lead to the United States passively enabling, and even encouraging, terror and genocide.

The most infamous and horrible example of this surely comes from World War Two, when America turned away thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust for fear of them spying for the Nazi regime, coming to destroy America. Sound familiar? Using the same rhetoric seen today, President Franklin Roosevelt aided the Nazis in slaughtering thousands upon thousands of Jews in what the world would come to see as the greatest crime of human against human in all of history.

The saddest fact of these accusations, against the Japanese, the Jews, and now the Syrains, remains that none of them have even a grain of truth. In reality, Syrian refugees will more likely to help fight an ISIS agent than to fight as one. Americans fear terrorism entirely too much as things stand, to a level that lies completely disproportionate to its actual threat level. Zero immigrants from the seven countries Trump banned have carried out terroristic attacks on the United States, but more importantly, even if the number of Syrian refugee terrorists in the United States numbered in the dozens, it would not matter.

The word “terrorism” coming from “terror” may seem an obvious fact. However, in this obvious fact one can see a truth so blatant most Americans overlook it for its fine details. In 2014, only 18 people died in terroristic attacks on U.S. soil. Vending machines have killed twice as many.

The United States turned away Jewish refugees during the Holocaust for similar reasons used to turn away victims of ISIS genocide now. Even if only Syrian refugees committed foreign terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, which, as I said before remains patently false, the actual number of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil would mean the aid provided would vastly outweigh the costs. In fact, a non-Muslim domestic terrorist, one born and bred in the United States, would more likely kill me than any Muslim or foreign-born terrorist.

The climate of, aptly, terror in the United States does not come from a vast, outside enemy that seeks to infiltrate our borders, but instead from the creation of a climate of terror by the media. To quote a clever phrase I saw in this political cartoon: “the easiest way to stop terrorism’s grip on America is to turn off the TV”.

America has a media engine fully focused on creating paper-selling fear and terror, all at the expense of victims of actual genocide. The vast majority of ISIS’s victims are Muslims, despite the hype of ISIS as an evil organization bent on the destruction of America. So then, President Trump, if by some strange accident of fate you end up reading this, please tell me how the victims of an actual genocide, an actual holocaust happening in the modern day, come second to the unfounded, racist interests of a few misinformed TV commentators and those that eat their words.