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.
I am not saying xenophobia inevitably leads to searching phones. But in the US, right now, the justification for the surveillance state is in a big part due to xenophobia and race relations. It is a major factor in the current pathology and we ignore it at our peril.
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.
You are projecting your theoretical model of government-public relations onto the world, and ignoring the fact that race has been a major motivating factor in American politics for the last few centuries. I disagree with your claim that this is just strategic opportunism.
I think you are talking about two different groups. As in: will three letter agency type people have the incentive and the desire to expand their capabilities, independent of xenophobia and racism? Yes, absolutely. Do xenophobia and racism play a significant part on why large swats of the population are going along with this? Also, yes. A U.S. where most Americans don't fear foreigners from any part of the world is one where justifying scanners, pat downs at the airport and massive data collection becomes a lot harder for the kind of people whose core objective is to justify scanners, pat downs and massive data collection.
But this is also ignoring that there are very real reasons this is happening. Within the last couple of years we had the Bataclan, Nice, Orlando, etc, all directly from Islamic terror.
Does that mean Muslims should be discriminated against? Obviously not. However, this is a very blunt way of people trying to protect themselves (even if it's not effective or overreaching).
We also had significantly more deaths from things like school shootings and other violence not related to terrorism from Islamist groups, and yet we are pulling out funds for counter-extremism from all causes not related to Islamic terrorism (say, white-supremacist terrorism). By the numbers, the current counter-terrorism policies are an over-reaction, poorly thought out and unfairly target an enormous population that doesn't seem to pose in expectation a more significant risk than others:
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/27/14412420/terrorism-muslim... : "The study found that only 46 Muslim Americans (defined as “Muslims who lived in the US for an extended period”) were linked to violent extremism at home or abroad in 2016. The total Muslim American population is 3.3 million."
So, to prevent 46 or so crimes, affecting 54 or so people (say 300 if you think there are large numbers of wounded), we are de facto abrogating the rights of 3.3 million people, plus visitors. Nevermind that terrorism represents only 0.05% of violent crime, that violent crime itself is at its lowest in decades and that we never felt the need to become a surveillance state over said amount of crime. The only reason why people think it reasonable to do so now is that they associate Muslim with terrorist at a visceral irrational level, not because it makes sound logical sense. Hence, racism and xenophobia is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Also keep in mind that, over time, treating any group better both at home and abroad reduces incidence of terrorism from that group. But the point is that the current incidence itself is not anywhere near the point where putting millions under surveillance is worth it.
Wikipedia: "Mateen was born Omar Mir Seddique[6] on November 16, 1986,[7] in New Hyde Park, New York, to Afghan parents"
(Similarly, the Bataclan attack was carried out by French/Belgian nationals)
So he was a US-born US national. Not an immigrant or green card holder.
> Does that mean Muslims should be discriminated against? Obviously not.
Yes! Exactly!
> To wave that off as "racism" isn't really fair
.. what? It's discrimination against a group of people by religion-inferred-from-ethnic-origin-or-skin-colour. That's exactly what racism is. It's not "waving it off" at all.
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.