In May 2025, the Asian American Foundation published its fifth annual Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the U.S., or STAATUS, Index. The index, which was launched by the foundation in 2021 in the wake of spiking anti-Asian hate crimes during the Covid-19 pandemic and the Atlanta massacre, compiles surveys on stereotypes and attitudes of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders as reflected in the media and public opinion.

While the data in each report highlights different forms of ongoing discrimination facing Asian Americans, this year’s report included two startling discoveries. Based on a survey of 4,909 U.S. adults ages 16 and above, this year’s report announced that “40 percent of Americans believe that Asian Americans are more loyal to their countries of origin than to the U.S., doubling since 2021.” Within the same survey, 27 percent of respondents stated that Chinese Americans are a threat to U.S. national security.

The report touched on the growing rise of xenophobia within the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose policies—most notably  his mass deportation schemes and his second trade war with China—have polarized Americans and other nations alike.

Among the policies that have divided the U.S. and the world is Trump’s tariff policy. Tariffs, along with Trump’s push to deport immigrants from the United States, serve as part of an ultranationalist agenda to attack anything “foreign.” Even though international trade or immigrant workers remain an integral part of the American economy, Trump has transformed them into targets for launching his xenophobic campaigns and blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, for whatever ongoing economic turmoil erupts as a result.

While tariffs may not be intuitively xenophobic—Joe Biden levied tariffs on Chinese imports in September 2024—under the Trump administration, they factor into an overt campaign of xenophobia along with his mass deportation policies.

Historically, discussions of tariffs have not always been directly tied to xenophobia, but the debates surrounding each have grown intertwined over the course of the past century. In the history of American economic policy, the tariff has served a variety of uses. In the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century—before the existence of the income tax—the majority of federal revenue was gathered through tariffs and excise taxes on goods such as alcohol and tobacco.

Yet since the early twentieth century, tariffs have more often coincided with xenophobic policies such as immigration policies that have been implemented under the guise of protecting American citizens from unfair competition. When I asked Douglas Irwin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College and an expert on the history of U.S. tariff policy, whether trade protectionism has often coincided with xenophobia, he noted an important moment in the early twentieth century: “If we look back at history, the trade protectionism of the 1920s and 1930s was co-joined with a policy of isolationism and nativism. So protectionism and nativism are subspecies of xenophobia, and both seem to be making a reappearance today.”

Protectionism has also led Americans to police themselves into demonstrating their loyalty by “buying American.” Historian Dana Frank, the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism and more recently What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? notes that “buy American” campaigns can be traced as far as the colonial period, when patriot groups like the Sons of Liberty dumped tea in Boston Harbor in December 1773 in defiance of the British Crown. During the twentieth century, Frank notes, protectionist tariffs during economic downturns, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the economic turmoil of the late 1970s and early ’80s, often corresponded with intense nationalism and xenophobia. 

For example, in June 1930, Congress passed the........

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