On July 2, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after a visit to migrant detention facilities run by Customs and Border Protection in Texas, claimed that the United States is “headed toward fascism.” Much of the response that followed was expected, but little or none of it examined the statement closely or detailed to what degree the United States’ immigration policy justifies such comparisons. So how apt is this analogy between the current situation and early years of fascist regimes?

Liberal democracy organizes society around respect for the dignity, equality and freedom of all human beings. Fascism, by contrast, organizes society around the vilification of outsiders. In this administration’s rhetoric toward undocumented immigrants from Central America and religious minorities, we have been subject to classic fascist tropes for some time. The obsessive focus on immigration and the representation of immigrants as invaders is particularly indicative of this ideology. In the 1930s, Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, ran on a platform of ending immigration entirely. “Britain for the British” was its motto.

Comparisons to the Nazi regime, one of which Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made last month when she called American detention facilities “concentration camps,” are also routinely met with outrage. But Hitler, too, was obsessed with immigration. In “Mein Kampf” he praised the “national State,” and he saw foreign immigration as the obstacle. He wrote of America’s anti-immigration policies as a model for a nationalistic Germany:

I know that this is unwelcome to hear; but anything crazier and less thought-out than our present laws of State citizenship is hardly possible to conceive. But there is at least one State in which feeble attempts to achieve a better arrangement are apparent … the United States of America, where they … refuse to allow immigration of elements which are bad from the health point of view, and absolutely forbid naturalization of certain defined races, and thus are making a modest start in the direction of something not unlike a national State.

The current American administration clearly does not share the toxic and murderous ideology of Nazism, nor its anti-Semitism, but when the president of the United States derides immigrants from “shithole countries” while pleading for more immigrants from Northern Europe, he echoes the very aspects of American history that Hitler praised.

When we consider the character of a ruling government, we should think about the ideology that motivates it, as well as the institutions and tactics it employs to transform society. It is clear that this administration draws on fascist ideology in its rhetoric. But what about its institutions and tactics?