Okay, this story dates me a bit, which is weird because I'm only 30, but in the last 10 years or so things have changed so much.
When I was in high school around 1990, there was no such thing as "rice" (yeah, I know that term has been around a lot longer and had slightly different meanings, but you know what I mean here). You were cool if you drove a 60's or 70's muscle car or a 4x4 truck of pretty much any kind. Yeah I grew up in a slightly redneck area, but this seemed to be a pretty consistent trend. There were Hondas and other little imports of course (remember back when pretty much every import car was little, even Accords and Camrys?), but those were just considered basic practical transportation, they were cheaper and more reliable (remember back when Hondas and Toyotas were cheaper than a same year domestic, new or used?). There were no mods for these or any domestic compact cars or sedans for that matter. The only "mods" were things like bored out big block engines, headers, lift blocks, etc for your muscle car or a 6 inch lift and 36" tires for your '85 Chevy truck.
So now that you have the background, around that time period my buddies and I would go down to the city on Saturday nights in the summer and hang around where all these cruisers would meet. It was a pretty tight group of souped up muscle car owners who would get together to check out cars, share advice, and then do drag race challenges. The two racers would leave the lot and head out to the strip on the freeway that would pass by near the lot, down a hill. There was a pedistrian overpass right by the lot where spectators could go stand above the drag strip as it were. In all the times we went there we never actually saw a race, we would just hear reports about which car beat which what week, etc. They kept it pretty low key obviously to keep the cops from busting up the parking lot meets. Anyway, their hard and fast rule for being accepted into the parking lot was "muscle cars and pickups only, and definitely NO IMPORTS". Remember, this is back in a time when no one had ever thought of modding a Civic to be any where near the performance of one of these cars, so it wasn't like a import driver could come in and school them or anything. For that matter there weren't even any production imports with decent performance yet. Maybe a good ol' 280Z or RX7 could have beat a couple of them, but there weren't really any import clubs or followings back then and the drivers wouldn't really be interested in hanging with the Detroit muscle boys anyway. We were always cool to park there because we either had my '79 Trans Am or my buddy's '81 Toyota 4x4 (yeah, it was an import, but import trucks were cool and his was lifted with big tires. And as Nick will atest, you just don't mess with a Toyota truck).
So what was my point? Other than reminiscing on a simpler time not so long ago, I guess it was that the import bias has been around for a while, and now it can only be worse with the attitude of the "ricers" giving all other imports a bad name.