The US committed a horrible policy of internment of the Japanese during WWII, rejected Jewish refugee boats, banned Chinese immigrants for quite some time, prioritized White immigrants, but at no point did the human rights for citizens take a major step back

You keep using this word “civilized”. To the extent that it means anything then being oppressive towards foreigners is inherently less civilized, perhaps even the very opposite of what “civilization” could mean…

@JonathanReez That's (1) not true and (2) entirely circular. The sharp distinction you make between citizens and non-citizens is completely arbitrary, doubly so in the US when you consider what happened to former slaves and natives. “Let's not count anybody who undermines the argument” is not very convincing.

Not that your spite is limited to “foreigners”, you seem to argue that if anything happens to people several generations down, the problem is still somehow related to where their great-grand-parents came from…

The Jordanian example is very odd, hard to see any link with what we were discussing and, honestly, outside of people with a deep interest in the Middle-East not even that prominent.

Ultimately, “human rights for citizens” means nothing, it's just privilege by another name. One of the most notable features of the US legal and political systems from my point of view is indeed that it has no concept of human rights, which goes hand in hand with cascading hierarchies that have also had a huge impact even on poor white citizens.