The 1996 anti-immigrant legislation followed the Oklahoma City bombing

Evidence

The family stayed in the New York area until 1996, still without having adjusted their immigration status. The asylum claim had been unsuccessful, but Rasha’s father had hired a lawyer and was appealing the decision and looking for other legal ways to remain in the country. Meanwhile, her mother had given birth to two more little brothers. Since they were born in Brooklyn, the two infant boys were, unlike the rest of the family, citizens of the United States. But the pace of progress in the immigration proceedings was like washing your hair from a leaking faucet. Nothing was moving except for Congress, which in 1996 legislated even more draconian anti-immigrant legislation in the wake of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Rasha’s father gave up and moved them all back to Syria that year. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 73

Categorization

• XREF: The attribution of anti-immigrant sentiment to McVeigh’s bombing — itself the act of a white native — is a strong echo of the scapegoating dynamics in the broader surveillance narrative; connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ framing of panics as misdirected.
• DEFINE: Illustrates how a high-profile domestic attack triggered punitive immigration law — useful for understanding the post-9/11 legislative climate the rest of the book describes.
• SEED: The irony that a native white supremacist’s bombing triggered the tightening of immigration law against immigrants is a strong essay angle about scapegoating and who counts as a threat.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 73