It's alarming how comfortable people have become on HN to announce their xenophobia so openly lately. Besides its ideological ugliness, it also seems to take a fairly narrow view of history. If this is "because" of anything, surely it's because of the authoritarian belief that populations must be protected from themselves to ensure their comfort, that liberty is a small price to pay for safety. Civil unrest is just a convenient excuse and you play right into their hands by othering your fellow person, regardless of where their parents were born.
I'm tired of hearing the term "xenophobia" used to describe this; because it makes it an all-or-nothing.
Most people aren't like that. Most people are OK with immigrants; the disagreement comes in for how many we should have, what ages they should be, where they should be from, when they affect the local economy, etc. Calling them "xenophobic" for disagreeing with a particular policy just breeds resentment, which manifests in, surprise, political action from the only people who seem interested in listening.
Your appeal to soothing political divides is wasted because I'm just a guy on the internet, not a politician or any other type of person interested in building coalitions with anyone who would lay blame at the feet of immigration. Whether it stokes someone's resentment or not is a displeasure they'll have to live with, I suppose. My point was that it's an irrelevant and unnecessarily divisive take that fits into a recent pattern of derailing comment threads with ideological bait. It sucks to come into so many threads lately to see crowing about illusory boogeymen like immigration or an alleged nefarious trans agenda or some other deluded neo-con conspiracy. It's lazy and a distraction. And if you sincerely oppose policies like the one in the OP, you can't look away from how one serves the other.
>It's alarming how comfortable people have become on HN to announce their xenophobia so openly lately
Since when is it xenophobic to not be ok with uncontrolled mass migration?
Do you also leave your house the door unlocked and open for anyone to come in as they please? If you don't, and you lock it, you're xenophobic.
People are ok with immigrants, they don't care what skin color you have, they just don't want uncontrolled illegal immigrants who don't care about integration and adapting to the local culture and value system.
Regardless of my personal feelings about immigration, the issue I was delineating is that it's a huge logical leap at best, wildly off-topic and incendiary at worst. Given your propensity for sharing conspiracy theories both in this thread and elsewhere on HN, I don't believe we're going to have a productive conversation about this either way, so let's just not.
I agree with you, and so does huge swathes of the West. This person has The Correct Opinions, but those opinions are driving the working class into the arms of Le Pen, Meloni etc.
