Reports of the forcible separation of parents and children at the border by US immigration authorities tell only part of the story of the violence now being directed against hard-won norms of civil society.

To continue doing harm to children once the risk of long-term damage has been spelled out requires something worse than callous indifference. It verges on the deliberate use of cruelty as a deterrent. But suppose you manage to take as sincere the expressions of concern dragged out of Jeff Sessions by an interviewer. It is important nonetheless to consider everything the US attorney general says and does concerning immigration the in light of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which he has called “good for America.”

The act established quotas favoring immigrants of northern European origin while sharply restricting everyone else (or in the case of Asians, excluding them entirely). It was created in response to what Clarence Darrow called, in sarcastic but accurate terms, American “cries in the night of ‘race suicide,’ ‘the rising tide of color,’ ‘the race is dying out at the top,’ and ‘torrents of degenerate and defective protoplasm.'”