voidptr654

The law and order type will always find something to increase their powers. You're just trying to fix their current attack vector, which means they'll just use a different scare tomorrow. To have lasting improvements the security apparatus needs to be scaled down.

Xenophobia != surveillance state or totalitarianism

For example japan or poland are fairly xenophobic and isolationist, but they don't practice a surveillance state or ask for your social media accounts at the border. Foreigners are free to enter as long as they don't overstay their welcome.

I would say that xenophobia is the natural state of homogeneous populations. Everything different is treated with suspicioun, but not necessarily overt opposition or hatred. Xenophobia only gets used as leverage by politicians to amplify and deflect other issues (such as income inequality) onto other groups. Fix those issues and some latent xenophobia isn't going to turn into problems.