We Have Been Here Before

12 episodes across 480 years when governments facing real crises — lost wars, depressions, fiscal deficits — told their citizens the problem was the newcomers. Every time, the real cause was elsewhere. Every time, ordinary people paid.

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480 years at a glance — each dot is an episode

14921972

GenocideMass expulsionExclusionForced internmentNativist violence

Notice the clustering at the right. The first two episodes cover 40% of this timespan; the other ten happened in its final 25%. Mass politics, total war, and bureaucratic states made scapegoating more frequent and more devastating — not less.

The pattern

Different centuries. Different continents. Same four moves. Read across each row — and ask what fills the last cell on October 19.

When / where

The crisis

The enemy

The action

The result

2026

Alberta

You are here ↓

$9.4B provincial deficit. Structural — oil is at $94, above the $74 break-even price the province's own budget sets.

International students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers — people on temporary permits who already pay provincial taxes.

October 19 referendum — cut services, charge "premiums," require 12-month waits for anyone on a temporary permit.

Asian-Ugandans — a four-generation community that ran much of the country's commerce.

90 days to leave. All assets seized and "redistributed" to regime loyalists under Africanisation.

Economy contracted within a year. Did not recover under Amin's rule.

2026

Alberta

You are here

The crisis: $9.4B provincial deficit. Structural — oil is at $94, above the $74 break-even price the province's own budget sets.
The enemy: International students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers — people on temporary permits who already pay provincial taxes.
The action: October 19 referendum — cut services, charge "premiums," require 12-month waits for anyone on a temporary permit.
The result: ???
Oct 19, 2026

1885–1947

Canada

The crisis: The Canadian Pacific Railway was finished. BC labour pressure and anti-Asian politics had to be fed something.
The enemy: Chinese railway workers — recruited 15 years earlier, when they were wanted.
The action: $50 head tax, raised to $500 (two years' wages). When that didn't stop migration, the 1923 Act banned it outright.
The result: Families split for 24 years. Chronic BC labour shortages. National apology and $20,000 per survivor in 2006.

1929–1936

United States

The crisis: The Great Depression. Unemployment above 25%. No amount of removal could address that — and none did.
The enemy: Mexicans and Mexican-Americans — roughly 60% of those removed were US-born citizens, legally entitled to stay.
The action: Mass "voluntary" deportations of between 400,000 and 2 million people over seven years.
The result: Unemployment did not fall. California issued a formal apology in 2005.

1972

Uganda

The crisis: Idi Amin's 18-month-old military government was losing support. He needed a spectacle.
The enemy: Asian-Ugandans — a four-generation community that ran much of the country's commerce.
The action: 90 days to leave. All assets seized and "redistributed" to regime loyalists under Africanisation.
The result: Economy contracted within a year. Did not recover under Amin's rule.

Three of the result cells are already filled in. Ours is blank. On October 19, 2026, Alberta voters fill it in.

1492·Spain
The Alhambra Decree
Mass expulsion
The slogan:
“the great harm suffered by Christians from the contact, intercourse and communication which they have with the Jews”
— Ferdinand II and Isabella I, in the text of the Alhambra Decree itself
Who was blamed
Spanish Jews — a community that had lived on the Iberian peninsula for over a thousand years — were accused of corrupting Christian society and of secretly undermining the faith of converts (conversos).
What was actually happening
The monarchy had just completed the Reconquista of Granada and needed a unifying national project. Expelling Jews allowed the Crown to seize their wealth to fund further expansion and to consolidate royal authority over a newly unified Spain.
What happened
Between 40,000 and 100,000 Sephardic Jews were forced to convert or leave within four months. Those who left were banned from taking gold or silver with them and lost virtually all property. Spain's financial and craft sectors — which had depended heavily on Jewish networks — suffered for generations. The Decree was not formally revoked until 1968.
The echo today
Blame a minority for "corrupting the nation" while quietly using the expulsion to paper over a fiscal problem.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Alhambra Decree
- Wikipedia — Expulsion of Jews from Spain
1685·France
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
Mass expulsion
The slogan:
“the better part of our subjects of the said R.P.R. [Reformed Religion] have embraced the Catholic faith”
— Louis XIV, Edict of Fontainebleau — the pretext he used to outlaw Protestantism
Who was blamed
Huguenots — French Protestants who had been granted tolerance in 1598 — were recast as a fifth column loyal to foreign Protestant powers and as a threat to "one faith, one king, one law."
What was actually happening
Louis XIV's drive toward absolutism. The Huguenot minority included many of France's most skilled lawyers, merchants, silk weavers, clockmakers and naval officers. They were thriving, and that visibility made them a useful target for a king who wanted uniformity.
What happened
Between 150,000 and 200,000 Huguenots fled to England, the Dutch Republic, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland and the American colonies, taking skills and capital with them. French silk, paper and precision-instrument industries suffered for generations; Prussia and England got an economic windfall that historians credit with accelerating industrialisation in their host countries.
The echo today
Expelling a skilled minority to enforce a national identity — and watching your rivals collect the talent.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Edict of Fontainebleau
- Wikipedia — Huguenots
1850s·United States
The Know-Nothings
Nativist violence
The slogan:
“Americans must rule America”
— Campaign slogan of the American Party (the Know-Nothings)
Who was blamed
Irish Catholic immigrants fleeing the Famine were accused of bringing disease, crime, drunkenness, and — above all — loyalty to the Pope rather than to the United States.
What was actually happening
Rapid industrialisation was scrambling Northeastern labour markets, and the failed European revolutions of 1848 had sent waves of political refugees across the Atlantic. Nativism gave anxious Protestant workers a visible target for structural economic anxiety.
What happened
Anti-Catholic riots: Philadelphia 1844 left at least 13 dead and two Catholic churches burned; Louisville's "Bloody Monday" in 1855 killed at least 22. The American Party won 51 House seats and five state governorships in the mid-1850s. It collapsed within five years over internal splits on slavery — but the nativist template survived, and resurfaces in every later US immigration panic.
The echo today
"They don't share our values." The phrasing travels.
Sources:
1882–1943·United States
The Chinese Exclusion Act
Exclusion
The slogan:
“The Chinese must go!”
— Denis Kearney, Workingmen's Party of California (1877) — the rallying cry that drove passage of the 1882 Act
Who was blamed
Chinese labourers — many of whom had been recruited to build the Transcontinental Railroad — were accused of driving down wages, refusing to assimilate, and posing a racial and moral threat dubbed the 'Yellow Peril.'
What was actually happening
The Long Depression (1873–1879) crushed US wages and employment. Unions and politicians displaced anger at railroad monopolists and speculators onto the roughly 100,000 Chinese workers in the country.
What happened
The first US federal law ever to target a specific nationality. A 10-year ban on Chinese labourers, renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902. The US Chinese population dropped from about 105,000 in 1880 to 62,000 by 1920. The Act stayed in force for 61 years, repealed only in 1943 when China became a WWII ally. Congress issued a formal statement of regret in 2011–2012.
The echo today
Blame the immigrants for a wage collapse that was actually caused by industrial consolidation and a market crash.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Chinese Exclusion Act
- Wikipedia — Long Depression
1885–1947·Canada
The Head Tax and the Chinese Immigration Act
Exclusion
The slogan:
“to keep Canada a white man's country”
— MP W.G. McQuarrie, during the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act debate in the House of Commons
Who was blamed
Chinese workers — recruited in the 1880s specifically to build the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Rockies — were accused after 1885 of wage undercutting and "not assimilating."
What was actually happening
The CPR was finished. The workers were no longer economically needed, and a combination of existing racial policy and BC political pressure filled the vacuum.
What happened
The 1885 Chinese Immigration Act imposed a $50 head tax, raised to $100 in 1900 and $500 in 1903 — roughly two years' wages. When the tax still didn't stop migration, the 1923 Act banned Chinese immigration almost entirely. Families were separated for a generation. The ban lasted 24 years, ending in 1947. Canada formally apologised in 2006 and paid $20,000 in redress to surviving head-tax payers and their spouses.
The echo today
"A fee on newcomers" framed as reasonable policy. In practice: a wall by another name.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Chinese head tax in Canada
- Wikipedia — Chinese Immigration Act, 1923
1914–1920·Canada (Alberta)
Enemy Aliens in the Rockies
Forced internment
The slogan:
“a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat”
— Clifford Sifton, federal Minister of the Interior 1896–1905 — the architect of prairie settlement — describing the Ukrainian and Eastern European peasants his department recruited to break prairie soil. Published in Maclean's, "The Immigrants Canada Wants," 1 April 1922.
Who was blamed
Ukrainian immigrants — invited to settle Alberta and Saskatchewan in the 1890s and 1900s and handed homesteads expressly to anchor Canadian sovereignty on the prairies — were reclassified as "enemy aliens" in 1914 because they had arrived on Austro-Hungarian passports from Galicia and Bukovyna.
What was actually happening
Canada went to war with Austria-Hungary in August 1914, and Ukrainian immigrants from its territories still carried imperial passports — even though most had fled precisely to escape that empire's rule. The War Measures Act gave the Borden government sweeping power to detain without charge, and the destitute immigrant labourers left unemployed by the pre-war downturn were the people most easily swept up.
What happened
Some 8,579 men, 81 women and 156 children were interned across 24 camps. Three were in Alberta: Castle Mountain (Banff), open July 1915 to July 1917 and considered exceptionally harsh; Jasper; and Lethbridge. Internee labour cleared trails, blasted roads and built much of the infrastructure that now forms Banff National Park. $329,000 in cash was seized on arrival at the camps — $31,000 of it never returned. A further 80,000 people were registered as enemy aliens and required to report to police, in some cases for years. The camps stayed open until June 1920 — twenty months after the war ended. Parliament formally acknowledged the injustice in 2005 (Bill C-331); a $10 million commemoration endowment followed in 2008.
The echo today
Canada recruited Ukrainian settlers in the 1890s, then interned them in the Rockies in 1914. Alberta launched "Alberta is Calling" in 2022 to recruit workers from across the country; in 2026 the referendum asks whether the newcomers it invited — who already pay provincial taxes — should be redefined as a fiscal threat. The slogans change. The move — invite, then blame — does not.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Internment of Ukrainian Canadians
1915–1923·Ottoman Empire
The Armenian Genocide
Genocide
The slogan:
“internal tumours”
— Language used by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) leadership to describe Armenian civilians during WWI
Who was blamed
After catastrophic Ottoman losses to Russia at the Battle of Sarikamish (January 1915), the CUP leadership publicly blamed Armenian 'fifth columnists' for supposedly siding with the enemy.
What was actually happening
The Ottoman Empire was disintegrating under the combined pressure of WWI, Balkan losses, and decades of failed reform. The CUP needed a scapegoat for a military catastrophe they themselves had caused.
What happened
Mass deportations of Armenians into the Syrian desert began 24 April 1915. Between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed through executions, forced marches and concentration camps. 34 countries — including Canada in 2004 and the United States in 2019 — formally recognise the killings as genocide. Turkey still disputes the term.
The echo today
Calling a minority "the enemy within" when the actual enemy is the government's own lost war.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Armenian genocide
- Wikipedia — Recognition of the Armenian genocide
1929–1936·United States
Mexican Repatriation
Mass expulsion
The slogan:
“American jobs for real Americans”
— Slogan circulated by President Hoover's Secretary of Labor William N. Doak during the 1930–1931 deportation drives
Who was blamed
During the Great Depression, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were accused of taking jobs from "real Americans" and of overwhelming local relief rolls.
What was actually happening
The 1929 Wall Street crash and the global Depression that followed. US unemployment peaked above 25%. No amount of immigrant removal could fix that — and removal did not, in fact, lower unemployment anywhere it was tried.
What happened
Federal, state and local authorities deported or coerced into "voluntary" departure somewhere between 400,000 and 2 million people — scholars' estimates vary widely. Approximately 60% of those removed were US-born citizens, legally entitled to stay. California passed a formal apology in 2005. Unemployment did not decline as a result of the removals.
The echo today
Mass removal of a visible minority does not create jobs. It did not in 1931; it does not now.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Mexican Repatriation
1933–1945·Germany
"The Jews Are Our Misfortune"
Genocide
The slogan:
“Die Juden sind unser Unglück (The Jews are our misfortune)”
— Slogan printed on the masthead of every issue of the Nazi weekly Der Stürmer from 1927 onward; originally coined by historian Heinrich von Treitschke in 1879
Who was blamed
Germany's defeat in WWI, the punishing Versailles reparations, the hyperinflation of 1923, the Great Depression, Bolshevism, and cultural decline — all simultaneously. All attributed to Jews.
What was actually happening
A lost war, a punitive peace treaty, and a global depression that the Weimar Republic's fractured political system could not contain. Structural problems far too big for any minority to have caused.
What happened
The Nuremberg Laws (1935) stripped German Jews of citizenship. Kristallnacht (November 1938) destroyed 267 synagogues and more than 7,000 businesses. The Holocaust murdered approximately 6 million Jews, alongside 5 million Roma, disabled people, Poles, Soviet POWs, queer people and political prisoners.
The echo today
The template. Later waves of scapegoating borrow from it — the fifth-column trope, the deportation paperwork, the language of "contamination." The trick is simple: assign every structural problem to a minority, then act.
Sources:
1939·Canada / US / Cuba
MS St. Louis and "None Is Too Many"
Exclusion
The slogan:
“None is too many”
— Reply by a senior Canadian immigration official, asked in 1945 how many Jews should be admitted to Canada after the war; became the title of Irving Abella and Harold Troper's landmark 1982 history
Who was blamed
Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were accused of being communist sympathisers, unassimilable, and an economic burden Canada could not afford in a still-fragile post-Depression economy.
What was actually happening
Deep antisemitism in the Canadian civil service and cabinet — especially in the Immigration Branch under Director Frederick Blair — and a political consensus that there were no votes in admitting Jewish refugees.
What happened
The MS St. Louis carried 937 German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Cuba, the United States and Canada all refused entry. The ship returned to Europe. Of its passengers, 254 were later murdered in the Holocaust. Over the entire 1933–1945 period, Canada took in fewer than 5,000 Jewish refugees — fewer per capita than any other Western democracy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologised in the House of Commons in 2018.
The echo today
Refusing refugees during a "fiscal crisis." The fiscal case for refusing them was never sound. The moral one never existed.
Sources:
1942–1949·Canada
Internment of Japanese Canadians
Forced internment
The slogan:
“A Jap's a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.”
— Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, US Western Defense Command (1942). Canadian policy followed the same logic, justified under the War Measures Act.
Who was blamed
After Pearl Harbor, Japanese Canadians — 75% of whom were Canadian-born citizens — were accused of being a potential fifth column, despite no evidence and despite RCMP and military assessments that rejected the security case.
What was actually happening
Wartime panic layered on top of 50 years of pre-existing anti-Asian policy on the BC coast, plus opportunistic seizure of homes, businesses and fishing boats by the Custodian of Enemy Property — the very office that was supposed to hold their assets in trust.
What happened
Approximately 22,000 Japanese Canadians were forcibly relocated from a 100-mile-wide coastal zone to internment camps and work sites in the BC interior, the prairies, and Ontario. Their property was sold without consent to fund their own detention. Restrictions on movement were not lifted until 1949 — four years after the war ended. Canada formally apologised and paid $300 million in redress to survivors in 1988.
The echo today
Citizens treated as foreigners because of ancestry. A line the current Alberta referendum flirts with when it asks whether services should be restricted to "Alberta-approved" immigration statuses.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Internment of Japanese Canadians
- Wikipedia — Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement
1972·Uganda
Idi Amin's Expulsion of Asians
Mass expulsion
The slogan:
“bloodsuckers”
— President Idi Amin, describing Uganda's Asian minority before issuing the 90-day expulsion order on 4 August 1972
Who was blamed
Asian-Ugandans — a community that had lived in Uganda for four generations and ran much of its commerce — were blamed for the country's poverty and accused of "sabotaging the economy."
What was actually happening
Amin had seized power in a military coup 18 months earlier and was losing support. He needed a dramatic, visible enemy, and a populist expropriation project to reward loyalists.
What happened
About 50,000 Asian-Ugandans were forced to leave within 90 days. The United Kingdom admitted roughly 27,000 under a special programme; Canada accepted about 6,000 as refugees. Businesses seized under Amin's 'Africanisation' policy were handed to regime loyalists with no management experience and collapsed within a year. Uganda's economy contracted through the 1970s and did not recover during Amin's rule.
The echo today
Expelling a productive minority to distract from a regime's own failures — with economic collapse as the immediate, predictable result.
Sources:
- Wikipedia — Expulsion of Asians from Uganda

So why does it keep working?

Because scapegoating a visible minority is always easier than explaining a commodity-price collapse, a debt crisis, or a mismanaged fiscal framework.

The Alberta referendum asks voters whether to cut services and impose fees on people who live here on temporary permits. The province's own budget shows the $9.4B deficit is structural — driven by commodity prices, not newcomers. Neighbours have been in this room before. It didn't end well any of those times.

See the Alberta numbers →

We Have Been Here Before

The pattern

So why does it keep working?

Further reading