> Japanese Americans were thrown into camps for the same reason, but we're not talking about jailing anyone here.
Yet.
At the risk of a slippery slope fallacy, institutional xenophobia ain't controlled by an on/off switch. Dehumanization is a gradual process, and establishing an attitude that people associated with an enemy are aligned with that enemy is part of that process. At first those associations might seem reasonable, going for officials and other important figures, and then perhaps their family, and so might the actions against them, like added scrutiny and surveillance of their communications and travels. The problem is that both ends of that are prone to scope creep - the target set broadens ever so slowly (citizens, ex-citizens, descendants of (ex-)citizens, their descendants, and so on, almost always excused with "well we need to be sure that $CURRENT_TARGET is not part of $PREVIOUS_TARGET"), while the actions worsen ever so slowly (surveillance, profiling, travel restrictions, property confiscation, imprisonment, sterilization, execution) as the rhetoric heats up from "we just want to make sure these people aren't the enemy" to "these people are the enemy and shall be treated as such".
Personally, I'd prefer to nip that in the bud rather than watch 1800's-era sinophobia reenact itself at the expense of my Chinese-American friends and colleagues. I also have enough self-awareness to know that if I would be upset by people writing me off as "will probably help oppress minorities and political dissidents if his government tells him to do so" simply because I happen to be a citizen of a country with a track record for oppressing minorities and political dissidents, then I should refrain from doing so to a citizen (let alone ex-citizen) of a different country with those same tendencies, even if those tendencies are, in my opinion, much stronger.