Blaming an innocent minority

When a society approaches collapse the ruling elite becomes irresponsible and self-serving. The leadership uses the decadence of the social order for its own ends. Demagoguery begins to replace moderate and sagacious leadership. The political atmosphere turns intemperate. 

In such a social and political climate it becomes too easy and thus too tempting to blame a foreign minority for the unpleasant realities of the society. Especially when the minority has a history of collaborating with the decadent past leadership it becomes almost irresistible not to cast the foreign minority as a whipping boy for the explanation of the impending disaster. 

A society that has been trained in desert, in contrast, would have a more difficult time wrongly blaming an innocent minority for the situation of collapse that was of their own doing.