In Alex Grass’ article for The Federalist he laments his frustration with white liberal upper and upper middle class American’s support of refugee resettlement in the United States. He argues that these affluent people are unjustified in their support of refugees because their communities will be virtually untouched by the resettled refugees, rather less affluent neighborhoods will bear the brunt of the transition. He complains about the “European crime wave” that will soon be plaguing America. This is such a popular anti-Refugee argument even though study after study after study continue to disprove this claim.
Since the 2016 presidential election much attention has been redirected towards Middle America in an attempt to understand this dramatic shift occurred in a country that elected Barack Obama for two terms. 
Under the Obama administration the United States saw a shift towards policies of universal healthcare, prisoner rehabilitation programs, and increasingly open immigration policies like DACA. It all felt like America was on track to join the rest of the forward thinking developing world. So how did this silent majority hijack the political machine?
In Samuel Huntington’s 2004 manifesto Who Are We? he analyzes the tumultuous future of the American identity. He predicted that the growth of non-white minority groups would provoke backlash from white Americans sooner or later.
The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.
The Trump election is the manifestation of this fear. The Atlantic’s article Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America addresses how the grievances of white middle class men and their nostalgia for the the 1950’s is not entirely unwarranted.
The high tariff wall allowed American manufacturing to introduce all available innovations into U.S.-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of the income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Thus the closing of the American economy through restrictive immigration legislation and high tariffs may indirectly have contributed to the rise of real wages … and the general reduction of inequality from the 1920s to the 1950s.
For white American middle-class men, especially those without a college degree, it was the best of times. But here are three significant turns: the 1968 election; the 1979 peak in manufacturing employment, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Together, these episodes made economic anxiety and promoted racial resentment.
For these middle class Americans, who feel forgotten by the system and robbed of their rights, even the bare minimum of refugees accepted into the United States is a personal insult and a threat to their livelihood. While it’s so easy to dismiss these middle class Americans as bigoted racists, we have to make an effort to understand their fears so that we can appropriately address them.
Refugee Rhetoric 