Natalia Molina’s How Race Is Made in America (2014) provides the theoretical bridge: her concept of “racial scripts” — paradigms of policymaking that link racialized groups “across time and space” — explains precisely how the 1920s eugenics framework reactivates in contemporary coded language (“illegal alien,” “invasion”) and then, under Trump, returns to naked explicitness. The scripts were never discredited; they went underground.

Lipshultz identified a structural oscillation across the 1920s–1950s: restriction surges during economic downturns, subsides when labor is needed, then resurges when workers become “surplus.” The Gallup longitudinal data reveals the identical cycle in real time:

The pattern is Lipshultz’s 1924–1952 periodization compressed into four years: restrictionism surging during perceived crisis (2021–2024), then moderating sharply when conditions change (2025). Republican support for decreasing immigration collapsed from 88% to 48% in a single year. As in the dissertation era, the attitudes are structurally responsive to economic and media conditions — not fixed convictions about race, though race provides the organizing grammar.

The most significant difference between eras is the existence of organized, institutionally embedded counter-narratives. In Lipshultz’s period, defenders of Mexican immigrants were isolated voices — Protestant missionaries like Vernon McCombs, sympathetic journalists like Robert McLean, a handful of academics. The Mexican-American political voice was nascent at best.

Today: 18 state attorneys general challenged Trump’s birthright citizenship order on day one. Immigrant rights organizations mount coordinated legal challenges. Scholars like Natalia Molina (MacArthur Fellow, USC), Francisco Balderrama (Cal State LA), and Sylvia Zamora (LMU) provide real-time historical context. Spanish-language media warns communities — as La Opinión did in the 1930s. And the Mexican-American electorate is a decisive political force in multiple swing states.

Molina’s framework also provides something the earlier era lacked: a theoretical vocabulary for naming the mechanisms. Her argument that racial scripts are “easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups” explains both the persistence of anti-Mexican attitudes and their portability across eras. The script — disease vector, job thief, unassimilable alien, political threat — resurfaces because the underlying structure of racialized labor exploitation has not been dismantled.

Lipshultz’s dissertation concludes that the 1924–1952 period saw Americans torn between “an effervescent social welcome and a resounding economic disdain.” The rise of sociology and growing social toleration “clashed with a simultaneously expanding mechanization in industry and a new militant labor movement.”

Donald Kerwin of the Center for Migration Studies wrote in 2018 that “there are many similarities between the nativism of the 1870–1930 period and today, particularly the focus on the purported inability of specific immigrant groups to assimilate” and that “Mexican migrants in particular have been consistent targets of nativism, immigration restrictions, and deportations.” Tamara Shamir’s 2025 Northwestern Law Review essay traces Trump’s “invasion” theory directly to mid-19th-century nativist responses, arguing it is constitutionally “born of bigotry.”