The administration’s focus is not random. Nor is it illogical, if one’s goal is to maximize the influence of white people. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the chromatic composition of the country’s population has undergone a fundamental transformation. People of color used to make up 12 percent of the United States population in 1965, and that percentage has more than tripled over the past several decades to the point where nonwhite people are nearly 39 percent of the residents of the United States (it is no accident that the country’s first African-American president was elected when he was elected). Mr. Trump’s team understands that the specific laws it seeks to eliminate have played a significant role in that demographic revolution.

As distasteful as many people find unapologetic advocacy for public policies that favor white people, the truth of the matter is that immigration laws have been among the longest-standing and most strongly defended cornerstones of our government. The very first immigration law passed, the Naturalization Act of 1790, declared that to become a citizen, one had to be a “free white person.” That demarcation was the explicit law of the land for the next 162 years, until 1952. There are 20th-century Supreme Court cases explicitly holding that Asian immigrants could not become United States citizens because they were not white. Even after 1952, the practical effect of immigration policy continued to promote white people above others through mechanisms such as the Asia Pacific Triangle, which restricted immigration from Asian countries.

Most people would probably like to believe that the era of widespread public support for white supremacist policies is over, but you wouldn’t know it from the timidity and rhetorical reticence of progressive and Democratic leaders. When they had the leverage to demand a vote on protections for the Dreamers, Democrats surrendered that influence because they feared the electoral consequences of being seen as fighting for the rights of immigrants. The assessment was that white voters in swing states would retaliate against Democratic candidates, imperiling the prospects for taking back Congress.

Setting aside the morality of the matter, these Democratic electoral calculations are flawed in two fundamental respects. First, they underestimate the capacity of white people to rise above racism and stand for justice and equality. Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign was a very thinly veiled appeal to racial anxiety and grievances of white people in America. Study after study has confirmed that racial anxiety, sometimes described as cultural discomfort, was the motivating factor among many of Mr. Trump’s supporters. And yet the fact that Mr. Trump still needed to speak mostly in code shows that there are limits to the effect of explicit racial appeals. In the 2017 elections in Virginia and Alabama, the increase in support among white voters for Ralph Northam for governor and Doug Jones’s Senate candidacy affirmed that racial pandering also alienates whites.