And by immigrants I really mean immigrants: you don’t have the nationality and live in the country = you’re an immigrant.
I keep reading about the plans of parties to kick out all immigrants, stop letting in any, and some parties even advocate to revoke dual-nationalities and kick those people out too. I’ve never really understood what the point of it is and have trouble imagining what the effects of such actions would be within the country.
Fascism needs an enemy to put the blame on. After the immigrants it will be someone else.
Who do you think it would be? My guess: not the rich.
Critics of the system, members of other political parties, people following the wrong religion, homosexuals, the mentally disabled… the list is long.
They’ve already announced it with their aspiration to deport 100 million people. (That is, there are about 100 million non-white people in the United States.)
@atro_city @Menschlicher_Fehler well, the next ones will be trans people, then gays, then they just devolve into everyone non-white is evil, and then they start putting limits on whiteness as well.
There is no second step or “and then”. It’s just cheap rhetoric that gets people agitated, which yields votes. It’s called populism, among other things. The psychological dynamics behind it are similar to how the privileged never face their colonial history, either in formal education or in public discourse, since it’s awkward, unrelatable, but first and foremost unthinkable, that any culpability or responsibility for the state of society that the privileged deem inconvenient could lie with them.
Also it allows the government to be openly hostile to an out group to desensitize them to future violence against domestic groups that oppose fascism.
Definitely! A means of otherization/alienation/demonization.
You expect racist pieces of shit to think their actions through?
Underestimating racists is a serious mistake. Of course they have another agenda, but what they say and what they do are different things. Discussing what their messaging is and what they will ultimately do is informative to me. I don’t frequent racists and they aren’t united in their messaging, so reading what others have heard/read can give another aspect and paint a fuller picture. With that information, responses can be prepared or other actions taken.
I’m not suggesting anyone underestimate them. I’m just saying they’re going for the populist “they’re eating the pets” bullshit and probably don’t have an actual plan, like we’ve seen with the orange pedophile’s administration. It’s all theater to gain power.
I really do think you’re under-estimating them. It’s the same thing the Christian democrats did in Germany when they gave Hitler the position of prime minister: “give him enough rope to hang himself”.
They thought he was an idiot. Saying “racists don’t think their actions through” is under-estimating in my book. There were scientists, doctors, and other intellectuals that spear-headed the third reich. They though their actions through pretty well and were humungous racists and enemies of humanity.
Have they demonstrated that they do have a plan beyond “deport them all”?
“Bring back real families” aka outlaw queers and any “non-traditional” relationships, change what is taught at school, exit the EU, ban burkhas in public buildings (then public spaces), and so on. So yeah, shift the blame of why things aren’t going well to a new group.
That’s pretty much what I mean. They’re going for the low-hanging fruit. As far as dealing with actual problems? Nothing.
I’ve seen this happen in my home country. The xenophobes were voted in and they showed that they had no plan. This is the most incompetent government in the history of my country. They have no capability of dealing with real issues, all they can do is yell about “the great replacement” and demonize people who aren’t as white as the driven snow.
People with money think that the natural born working class will actually do all the jobs the immigrants did for the same low wages.
Natural born working people think there are reasonably paying jobs they would actually want to do being taken up by immigrants that will suddenly become available to them.
They are both laughably mistaken.
BTW I am talking about voters here. Cynically manipulative politicians don’t need to believe anything, they say what is useful to them.
People with money think that the natural born working class will actually do all the jobs the immigrants did for the same low wages.
…
Who do you think are paying the immigrants? Especially the ones not legally allowed to work?
They absolutely know that this is cheap exploitable labor, and that someone not legally allowed to work are almost guaranteed not to report employers who break other laws.
They want outrage against migrant laborers (regardless of visa status) because that makes migrant laborers want to keep their heads down and tolerate abuses.
The wealthy absolutely know that domestic labor would be more expensive, it’s just hate against immigrants make migrant labor even more expensive.
All ICE has to do if they want to get people working illegally, is hit up red state agriculture work, but they won’t because those employers are wealthy(ish) Republican voters.
Oh yeah. If we made it so the immigrants faced 0 direct consequences but hiring them illegally had ruinous fines AND jail time, wages for natural born citizens would increase dramatically. A huge amount of “illegal immigration” is just diet human trafficking. Even the legal ones are sketchy sometimes, I meet so many international nurses who get hired into my specialty with 0 preparation for how dangerous American psych patients can get + how bad the working and living conditions are gonna be for them and the patients, but they can’t get out of their contracts.
In addition to what everyone else said about it being an easy scapegoat to rile up voters, I don’t think those in power actually care about getting rid of immigrants. What they really want is to make conditions even harder for immigrants, making them more desperate and thus easier to exploit. They want to make immigrants into an extreme underclass that will have no choice but to accept even worse working conditions with even worse under-the-table pay, knowing any complaint will lead to immediate deportation.
To put in the words of my favorite 4chan post
they think he can reopen the gypsum factory where daddy used to make $20 an hour, as if Bumfuck, USA could even work through their meth withdrawals long enough to fucking perform the job adequately.
Basically they claim that think that if immigrants go then lower class workers will be compensated better. But this is a lie. They don’t actually believe this because they don’t want labor to ever be compensated better. The goal is just to get everyone’s consent in oppressing a minority because that gets people to overlook their own exploitation.
I have heard quite recently from a podcast called “weird little guys” about the theory of the “outsider”. For political reasons, it is easy to frame a problem has being an “outsider” force doing said bad behaviour, since it is easy to blame solely on “outsiders” instead of addressing the problem. Since there are people that are still quite tribalistic on the way of thinking, this works for them. Since anything different = bad. And on this spectrum you find from racism to xenophobism (and no, don’t correct me to xenophobia, people are not afraid of outsiders, they hate them. Big difference)
Yea, In-Groups and Out-Groups. Also it is very important for the In-Group to openly show that the rules don’t apply to them, only to the Out-Groups. ICE killing without any repercussion is an example.
The next step is to target and remove the next group. Rinse and repeat.
And keep the rural poor and uneducated from realizing that they’re one of the groups.
Exactly. Everyone’s on the inside of the group, right up until they’re not.
you need someone to explain racism to you?
There’s no need to be condescending.
are you a pussyfart? mister moist.catsweat
The result is having an outgroup you can rile against. That’s also the reason that the second there aren’t enough immigrants left to paint as an problem, the in-group targets the next minority. This game can be played for a very long time.
Fuck those Nazis - stop them at the first step.
I’ve been told (verbatim):
The lower classes are struggling because immigrants have lowered the accepted pay below minimum wage. They accept any job and are willing to accept worse working conditions because it’s better than what they know. The local population thus cannot compete. Once the immigrants are kicked out, low paying jobs will be forced to increase their wages and working conditions to make it palatable to the locals.
It kind of makes sense, until you start asking questions like:
- why would the wages go up?
- why do you assume working conditions would get better?
- if the wages went up, wouldn’t the prices go up and the lower classes still struggle?
Then I just get “we’ll see, but first we have to get them out” at which point the discussion ends, because there’s no discussing when somebody’s changed their mind. I am curious though, maybe studies have been done on this? Maybe there are serious projects on the effects of banning immigration?
The actual response to that should be ‘okay, then let’s force those companies to pay better and improve working solutions for everyone including immigrants’.
But yeah you’re not gonna convince racists.
And magically they’ll argue against their first point right away.
“No, no, no, you can’t raise the minimum wage or everything will get more expensive! We need a class of people to be exploited so I can get my cheap cheeseburger!!”
Local companies cannot compete because of globalism, we must ban imports from China and then local companies can compete.
That’s the furthest I’ve gotten with these people. It’s why I’m interested in what kind of other ideas they have about how the world works.
Targeted import taxes to compensate for companies getting subsidies from their government fosters competition. Blanket banning all imports removes competition and results in poor quality expensive products. Good for the local companies but bad for consumers.
But “targeted” is too complicated for many people. A ban is easier to understand, and gets a lot more vibe support.
They don’t mean it. They just want someone for the working class to blame. They need immigrants to work for cheap and to only be here during their “productive” years and they need someone to blame for low wages and lack of local jobs.
Who is paying them under the table? Doesn’t that mean they are not paying their share of payroll taxes, wsib etc? Why not crack down on this?
Who let them into the country? Was it because they couldn’t find local people willing to take low paying jobs? This takes both the company and the government to make happen.
Will off shoring end? Not likely…
Will foreign companies be discouraged from investing in the country? Absolutely not.
If there is no one for the poorest and most exploited working class american to feel superior to, will he continue to buy into the ‘american dream’?
Supposedly, they are taking government funds for help (like refugees) and polluting the pureness of the culture.
In reality they are making locals even richer by taking shit jobs at low salary, and enriching the culture (like food!)
localsa very few alreadyrich localsFTFY
Disclaimer: I disagree with all of the following, this is vehemently not my opinion.
Immigrants come “here” and take our stuff: jobs and social services. There are just so many jobs going around, so having immigrants means there are less jobs for the locals. There is just so much for social services in the budget, so having immigrants drains more of those resources. Removing immigrants would on one hand free up entry-level jobs, on the other lighten the load on social services such as hospitals, doctors, schools, pensions and benefits of many types.
That’s similar to what I’ve heard. I don’t think they understand just how many jobs are being done by immigrants and that immigrants aren’t all poor. An Italian in Finland is also an immigrant.
There are just so many holes in the discourse!
First, immigrants usually take unwanted jobs, jobs that are either low pay, high risk, low job security, or many other downsides. Then, obviously, they pay taxes “here”, so they contribute to the social net. Further, they on average use less of the social welfare programs. So none of their talking points is correct.
As an immigrant that “doesn’t look like an immigrant”: anti-immigration policies are almost all rooted in racism. Because somehow they never talk about me when they talk about banning all immigrants. Not the highly educated European. It’s “the others” that are the problem… [rage]
And about “immigrants stealing jobs”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_for_Britain
The know they can’t eject all immigrants, but the terror, chaos and disenfranchisement will create a caste of second class “citizens” with no rights.
So they want new slaves. That tracks.
There are three parts to this answer.
- What the average supporter thinks.
The Average supporter for this kind of rhetoric has built their whole life around believing that they are special just for being who they are. In America you have the south, where white people are special, they are the “salt of the earth” they have the “common sense answers” and if everybody would just listen to them, they would rule everything justly etc…
And then that doesnt pan out, and they figure out that just being white and from the south doesnt make them the destined king of everything, and they need somebody to blame. Obviously its not their fault, they are perfect. Obviously its not the politicians who are telling them how special they are, those guys cant be wrong. It must be because X group is conspiring against them.
So they want to punish X group for conspiring against them, and opressing them, for stopping them from taking their obviously deserved place of privilege and power.
- What the average supporter wants to believe they think
The average supporter desperately wants to believe that they are so smart that they could never fall for populist propaganda. And they are such good people (good Christians), obviously its logical that x group is causing all these problems (remember, it cant possibly be the politicians telling them how special they are, those guys cant possibly be wrong).
So it must be logical that the problem is that “those demonrats are wasting millions of my hard earned tax dollars to give medical care to illegals” and therefore they need to get rid of those “illegals” who are stealing all their hard earned money, and everything will be right with the world.
They dont want to think they want to hurt anybody, they just think that if all those illegals who are taking all the jobs and all the money went somewhere else, everything would be better.
- What the average politician pushing this rhetoric thinks
“I cant believe that I just have to pretend to be as racist as those rubes, and tell them how special they are and they will let me do anything”
There isnt an end game, getting the power/money is the end game.
