When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many people wanted to believe America had crossed some great racial threshold. A Black man had won the presidency of a country whose history included slavery, segregation and generations of organized white supremacy. Maybe America was finally becoming post-racial. It wasn’t.

Obama’s presidency instead exposed how deeply race remained embedded in American politics. Political scientists have since documented the racialization of the Obama years and the role racial resentment, xenophobia and anti-immigrant attitudes subsequently played in Donald Trump’s coalition. Research into the 2016 election found racial resentment and anti-immigrant sentiment were significant predictors of voting for Trump even after accounting for more conventional political factors.

Trumpism understood that racial politics did not require “explicitly” racist language anymore. You could talk about immigrants, borders, crime and people taking your jobs. People overwhelming your public services. You could tell people their country was disappearing and promise to give it back to them. The language changed. The political strategy did not.

I worry we are seeing significant elements of this strategy imported into Alberta.

There are always legitimate debates about immigration. How many newcomers can our housing market accommodate? How quickly can schools and hospitals expand? What skills does our economy require? What responsibilities should different orders of government carry? Those are public-policy questions that demand planning. Asking them is in bounds.

But something different happens when political leaders take legitimate pressures and deliberately organize public frustration around one group of people.

Premier Danielle Smith’s televised address to Albertans last February didn’t simply argue that Canada’s immigration system requires reform. She said Ottawa had “flooded our borders with new arrivals” who then received unfair access to Alberta social programs. She imported the “open borders” hysteria. Five of the government’s referendum questions are consequently about immigration, immigration status or citizenship.

In an extraordinary provincewide referendum, Albertans are repeatedly being asked to consider what people with different immigration statuses should receive: Who gets services, who waits for them, who pays additional premiums, who gets priority for jobs, and to support the false assertion that newcomers are voting illegally. The cumulative message matters more than any individual question.

That is precisely why we should pay attention to what is happening immediately adjacent to the government’s agenda in Alberta’s independence movement.

The Alberta Prosperity Project goes considerably further. Its published material proposes an immigration system for an independent Alberta that would retroactively screen some people already legally admitted to Canada. Those failing its criteria could face deportation. Their leaders have repeatedly spread the absurd, racist “great replacement theory” suggesting government policy is trying to purge our country of white people.

This reminds us not to be naive about American history. Racial politics has evolved there.

Politicians once appealed to racial prejudice explicitly. As those appeals became socially unacceptable, the language became more sophisticated. Race could become immigration. Racial hierarchy could become cultural compatibility. Exclusion could become border security. Anxiety about demographic change could become a debate about who is consuming public services.

America provides a warning. Scholarship now describes Obama’s presidency as a catalyst for making racial attitudes more politically salient, with that backlash spilling into the 2016 election and far beyond, where Trump’s racial and anti-immigrant appeals resonated with significant numbers of white voters.

Albertans are capable of recognizing a political pattern without waiting for its ugliest possible manifestation. Alberta has real problems: housing affordability, strained emergency rooms, crowded classrooms, addiction, homelessness, stagnant productivity and a complicated relationship with Ottawa. Immigrants did not create any of these problems.

Blaming the newest and least politically powerful people among us is not a solution. Once any government begins separating the population into people who truly belong and people responsible for its decline, history tells us to pay close attention.

The target can change while the political strategy remains remarkably similar: Identify a minority population as the source of economic and social decline; distinguish “them” from people who truly belong; attribute scarce resources, housing and public services to their presence; promise restoration through exclusion; and gradually make increasingly unequal treatment seem reasonable.

This is a question about the kind of politics we are willing to normalize. Politics of racial division must be rejected. That is why we need to show up in record numbers this October to remain in Canada and say no to the other nine questions, especially the five divisive immigration ones. Alberta is better than this.

Michael Walters is a former Edmonton city councillor.