Putting citizens over non-citizens is called being a government.
Xenophobia is the irrational fear of foreign. And fear in this context usually shows up in the form of hate.
Putting citizens first does not mean hating the rest. Being a citizen of a country means that your government should represent you and your interests. It’s only natural that it develops into benefits for citizens.
Xenophobia on a person level is when you see a person that you think is not part of your same origin, do you cross the street, or attack him or whatever. Of course this is not even close to being an exhaustive list.
Xenophobia on a country level is when you punish foreigners irrationally. Not letting foreigners into your country because you have a housing crisis is not irrational, it is a valid reason.
I find it hard to find examples of country-level xenophobia. Even if the act itself may seem xenophobic, the government may want to gain popular support of their xenophobic population, which would be a reason and thus non-xenophonic.
Of course, not being xenophobic does not mean it is good. For example Israel genociding Palestinians is horrible. But their reason is that having a neighbor that claims the same land as you do is problematic, and they figured if they just kill everyone the world will forget in 100-200 years (or less) while the land will be theirs for longer than that with no revels, since they genocided them. Of course, having a reason does not mean that it’s not many other bad things (in this case, genocidal, which is worse than xenophobic).
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
You would fit in nicely in israel
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
No I won’t. Just like arguing a murder is not illegal grafitti, doesn’t make you pro-murder. Arguing that a specific genocide is not xenophobia does not make me pro-genocide. I absolutely hate what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and I believe that someone should assassinate Netanyahu and all of his pro-genocide people on power of the Israeli government. Or imprison them for life.
But you can miss my point all you want.