When said immigration switched from primarily being Europeans emigrating from a post WW2 Europe, and instead became primarily brown folk coming from all the countries that the U.S. itself bombed to shit.
It’s not immigration that they hate. It’s brown immigration.
Never forget that.
The US didn’t welcome Irish and Italian
The Irish would like to have a word with you
People hated immigrants DURING the time period you’re thinking of. And it wasn’t always a skin color thing either, the Irish were one of the big targets for a long time.
There was a reason businesses would put a sign out front that said “NINA”. No Irish Need Apply.
It was always racism at it’s core.
European immigrants accepted immigrants as long as they were other European immigrants. At the same time they were encouraging immigrants, they were systematically eliminating the original inhabitants or forcing them to assimilate to European culture.
It’s always been a variation of white nationalism … they don’t mind the world becoming more open and inclusive … as long as it only includes other white European people and cultures.
European immigrants accepted immigrants as long as they were other European immigrants.
This is just not the case. Read again
And it wasn’t always a skin color thing either, the Irish were one of the big targets for a long time.
Irish, Slavs and Italians were not considered white, so … it’s still a “where is the migration from” kinda thing
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That’s a term? What’s it mean, besides identifying someone as black and Irish? O.o
That isn’t what it means at all. It has nothing to do with the Irish skin color.
Blacks were hated for being black for so long that when new people came to America and got the same hate and racism. They were just “black”.
Black is being used here as just a catch all term for “not real white people”. Irish weren’t considered white for decades.
The concept of the white “race” was created by the acceptance of new nationalities into the fold in America and then dividing “us vs them” in a new way.
It bears some similarity to “Judeo-Christianity” so that we can draw the line between white people religion and everyone else.
Italians were also targeted. Being from a Catholic country was sometimes enough to get targeted. Always found it funny (Woody Allen marriage funny, not Woody Allen film funny) that the Protestants who came to what is now Massachusetts seeking “religious freedom” meant it only for themselves and drove out anyone who didn’t subscribe to their views.
You need to put it in context, many if not most of the denominations that came to America seeking religious freedom did so because continental Christians considered them extremists. So yes, they were seeking it only for themselves.
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Once we took everything from the natives fully to the west coast we stopped being keen on it.
General population was always anti immigrant but the ruling class was smart enough to understand they needed immigration to sustain the growth. What changed is that everyone got so dumb they don’t know what’s in their best interest anymore.
I mean they blare “brown man make your life bad” 24/7 on state tv
A large majority of ‘anti-immigrant’ people wouldn’t care if say, a French person immigrated into their country. When these people say immigrants, most of the time they mean people of color.
Yes. It’s a polite way of being racist with most. And if they are asked, they say “I can’t be racist [so and so] is my friend and they are black” or some dumb shit.
Easier communication. Thousands of people each living far apart had no way to amplify each other. Immigrants were mostly centered around cities, thus the rural divide.
I have a take no one else has talked about. I think much of the recent hate is down to there being too many damned people, and suddenly it seems a lot of them are brown.
Young me honestly wasn’t quite sure what Hispanic meant because there weren’t any around. LOL, imagine my culture shock when I moved to Chicago! Then I came down to Florida, and once again, no Hispanics. They were so rare it was kinda freaky. Then Hurricane Ivan flattened us, loads of immigrants showed up to build and never left.
Now people are looking around and seeing America on the first downward trajectory since the Great Depression. They’re casting about to lay blame. Know what’s different? Well lookee here, millions of new brown people that weren’t here before!
I don’t think liberals understand just how many immigrants came across the southern border in the last 20 years. When I brought up that there was indeed a crisis at the border during the Biden admin, I got beat up here and on reddit. Y’all can stick your fingers in your collective ear, but shitloads of people were piling up to get it. It was a humanitarian crisis.
Not saying the hate is logical, but I can at least understand where it’s coming from. It’s a little more nuanced that screaming RACIST at everyone.
Distraction is the point.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is nearly universal across human cultures. It’s a form of tribalism/fear of “the other”. Just look at the backlash against arab refugees in Germany and Sweden, or the relatively recent tightening of Canada’s immigration policy which used to be one of the most liberal in the world, for modern examples. Historic examples are even easier to find.
In general, we see more anti-immigrant sentiment in a country due to (a) the general population feeling insecure for some reason, (b) the perception that immigrants are immigrating faster than they are integrating.
When times are good and people feel secure, they look back at the past and say to themselves “look at how great our society is - we welcome people from all over the world, and now we have korean-mexican fusion. Yay, us!” But then when times get harder and people feel less secure, they say “these goddamned Nigerians keep coming here and taking all our video-editing and corporate accounting jobs! And they chew with their mouths open and have annoying laughs. And on top of that, their food isn’t even that good. They’re the worst, stop letting them in!”
Immigration is part of the mythologizing of the United States, but that doesn’t except it from the great overarching trends of humanity.
There it is again. West does next level horrible shit in a scale never seen before.
“But everyone does the same thing”
-Some guy trying to minimize their atrocities.
There’s a difference between few people being racist to a group of immigrants and a systematic racism being the norm through the generations lasting a century shifting through a different target each time.
Have some humility. Geez.
“But everyone does the same thing”
Literally everyone does the same thing. Even if you look at the other side of the world, China, Japan and Korea are some of the most anti-immigrant places on the entire world. It’s not just a “western” thing.
More broadly, it’s all Tribalism.
You’ll see it at many levels, not only towards the “outsiders” in nation terms (and examples are not only the anti-immigrant discourse but also in the discourse mainly blaming a country’s problems on some “foreign power” or other, in both cases as if insiders didn’t have vastly more power than such outsiders) but also at various other tribal levels (race, political party, region, city and even town in so-called “small town” environments).
The human tendency from Tribalism will turn even otherwise “good people” (but not very competent when it comes to introspection or having a strong keen sense of what is Just) into mindless “us vs them” drones who are easy to manipulate into blaming outsiders for the outcomes of the actions of insiders especially because they tend to believe any old bollocks from the “chiefs” of their tribe.
That’s quite insightful.
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The “fuck you, I got mine” mindset aka FYIGM or getting first dibs.
That is, kicking out the ladder or destroying bridges or cutting off reach so that no one else is getting what one has achieved. Like, “I got first, you’re getting nothing!”
America was never accommodating. The only thing immigrants had in common was hating black people.
And the Irish.
And how do you think the Irish became accepted?
The US is not anti immigrant.
There’s a few greedy white people with lots of money who bought the media and the elections who are anti-immigrant.
Don’t confuse policy with popular sentiment.
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I get what you’re going for, but it’s hard to believe that when said billionaires’ propaganda campaign was so easily and eagerly adopted by the majority of one of our political party bases. Including some of our own family members who had never openly expressed such sentiments before.
Propaganda is powerful, but can it make you suddenly, deeply believe something you weren’t already secretly feeling?
Maybe. Fictional stories can make you feel things, even though these stories aren’t real. Just look at (fiction) movies, tv shows, books. If people can watch scary movies and get scared of fiction, maybe people can be made to be scared of other, real life people. Or worried, or whatever. Especially if maybe one doesn’t know or doesn’t have experience enough on the matter at hand.
That is pretty much the point of propaganda. It takes advantage of people’s psychology to manipulate them.
This. I recommend reading Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Or, you could watch the movie
For sure, great book and movie!
There are a few greedy people who figure out that no one will notice them picking folks pockets if they distract them with racism.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Lyndon B. Johnson
