Submitted 6 months ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
They have always been anti-immigrant. Gor the longest time they simply tolerated it, but no more.
As for the the statue of liberty, a, it was built by the French not Americans, b, I can also happily say that I pride myself on being a great person, while in truth being a terrible peraon.
When the rich figured out that our innate tribalism could be weaponized to distract us from their abuse, lawlessness, and greed.
So it turns out that the Statue of Liberty never represented the opinions of all Americans to begin with
Sigmund Freud’s work proved humans are very very very very easy on a large sample size to mislead.
Theres even a phrase “you are not immune to propaganda.”
When hate can be used to divide the masses. We must be divided lest we decide that a system that protects unethically gained wealth is unethical regardless if it protects ethically gained wealth.
Once we stopped needing cheap labor to build the railroads and mine ore and occupy native lands and farm crops and roof houses and paint walls and run the cash register at the gas station. Actually we still need immigrants for some of that in order to sustain the level of growth required to fund our retirement plans and do the jobs that we would rather not do for wages that we would rather not work for. It looks like Republicans are hoping to fuel that growth internally through reproduction among existing citizens (under the theory that kids will work for lower wages), while the democrats want to rely on immigrants. That’s my theory anyway.
The interesting thing is that the US economy (in fact, even the economy worldwide) is probably gonna face a steep decline in demand of human labor in the next few decades.
The reasons include the limits to growth (i.e. the economy can’t grow anymore due to natural constraints, but growth is what causes the majority of demand for human labor) and automation and AI.
Having a higher number of people in the country when there’s a low demand for human labor (a.k.a. few jobs) means higher unemployment numbers, and that in turn is more expensive for the country, because the people still need resources so the country has to pay out unemployment money if it wants to avoid revolts. Now, companies face higher taxation, and everyone is worse off. If people make fewer children today and there’s less immigration, both companies and citizens will be better off in 20 years from now, because they face lower unemployment rates. This insight is relatively new (because until now, supply of human labor was the constraining factor for economic growth), but interesting.
I mean they blare “brown man make your life bad” 24/7 on state tv
Oh we’ve been fighting about this for centuries
The US has always had an anti-immigrant streak. Whoever the last group are they are unhappy with the next group. The Irish were not welcome, except by Tammany Hall, then the Italians were suspect. The Chinese have always been seen as suspicious and we all know what happened to the Japanese in WW2. Interestingly those of German descent haven’t been suspect, probably because they formed a large chunk of the US (PA, OH) and Eisenhower had German ancestry.
I doubt any country has never had an issue with someone seen as outsiders.
DOJ did denaturalize many members of the German American Bund due to their ties with the Nazi party.
Source: You Are Not American by Amanda Frost, great book.
It’s just super wrong all around.
ohiomemory.ohiohistory.org/archives/3673
Because Google sucks now that’s the best source you’re getting but people should at least be aware that the point of calling them “Huns” was like excluding Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Spaniards from “whiteness,” a racial slur ultimately accusing them of having non-white ancestors.
Because racists are very stupid, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon conquests happened after the Hunnic conquests of what would become Germany and most of Europe for that matter never seemed to be worth thinking about.
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.
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.
The vast majority of people who lean right are not individually as hateful as youtube and social media and most of the content algorithmically fed to us would have us believe.
Do they say horrible things around each other? Yes, they ramp up the rhetoric and make it seem like they’re absolute super-villains at times… but we really miss in all this is how shallow their values are. They are not complicated people. They go with the popular sentiment but are so comfortable living in a state of cognitive disonance that they will work all day with a team of black and hispanic coworkers, get along great, consider them true, best friends… then go home and upvote the most racist shit you’ve ever seen on facebook because it makes them laugh. They simply cannot make comparisons the way the other ~66% of the population does, so they don’t see things like hypocrisy or inconsistency. They don’t see larger pictures. They don’t understand the concept of punching down.
As a group, they are our country’s biggest problem, a menage, a scourge upon the Earth who are enabling the worst, most malicious people to engage in plans of oppression we haven’t seen in a century.
But as individuals, we could reach almost each of them. They’re stupid enough to believe whatever we tell them and we’re afraid of them. The math is broken.
We have to get more social, we have to get more confrontational, we have to get less isolated.
I will get some rando lefties screaming at me that they don’t want to “compromise with their oppressors” and that’s fine. Don’t. I’m not making you personally, and if you get that insinuation that I’m telling you personally to do something traumatic, you’re part of the problem. For everyone else, I’ve changed the hearts of people with apparently “set in” bigotry simply by listening and talking to them. It’s not jedi mind magic, it’s just a skill that comes from engaging with people in real life.
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
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?
That is pretty much the point of propaganda. It takes advantage of people’s psychology to manipulate them.
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.
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.
Because they’re lives are shit and they need somebody to blame.
The right will accept a boot on their face as long as they’ve got a face on which to rest their own boot.
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.
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.
And the Irish.
And how do you think the Irish became accepted?
This was done to keep our Catholic roots in check. I’m no longer a Catholic-aligned guy as a result. My producer was Catholic-aligned and Jesuit-associated for his entire life until he started making changes he felt was right with his higher power.
When stupid and hateful took over all three branches of government and runs unopposed…
Distraction is the point.
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.
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 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.
That’s quite insightful.
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
They became anti-immigrant once they had kids and saw other people arriving to the boat. My sister in law’s family are refugees from El Salvador. Now they are all raging Trumpers, despite half of them not being naturalized yet.
One way the wealthy and powerful stay that way is by constantly promoting the narrative that it’s those poorer than you who are your enemy, not the bosses who starve you both.
There are two ways to deal with one’s position in the Social Ladder: one can either concentrate one’s efforts in climbing up or one can concentrate one’s efforts into keeping the ones below down.
IMHO, the US used to have mainly the former, but not anymore, whilst the UK (at least by the time I got there, in the 00s) has mostly the latter (and judging by this traditional idea that “people should know their place”, it has been so for a long time).
Yeah, sorry OP.
Racism has always and will always be a part of America’s identity. I’d go so far as to say I think it’s part of human nature, given how pervasive and common it’s been throughout all of human history.
Its called “ladder pulling”.
Lead and propaganda.
The us has always been anti illegal immigration and accepting of legal immigration. Its incredibly harmful that the 2 concepts are being combined and treated the same now.
The us has always been anti illegal immigration
The US actually made it almost the first hundred years of its history without many meaningful immigration laws
I’m sure someone will argue otherwise, but one thing commonly cited as the first US immigration law was the steerage act of 1819, which was pretty much just “you can’t overcrowd your ships, you have to have enough food and water for everyone, you have to have a list of your passengers and account for anyone who died on the way”
So not really limiting immigration, more making sure that the ships bringing immigrants here were providing at least basic livable conditions for the trip.
Immigration overland was totally unregulated.
And with some minor alterations here and there, that was pretty much the state of things until the 1870s and 80s with the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act. Until then there really wasn’t such a thing as “illegal immigration” and borders were pretty much wide-open.
To be thorough, between 1776 and the Page Act, we did have the Alien Friends and Alien Enemies acts to allow the US to deport non-citizen immigrants under certain circumstances, and we took a few steps forwards and backwards at times regarding the naturalization process, but we also had the 14th amendment and “An Act to Encourage Immigration” in there as well.
And of course after that, shit went downhill pretty damn quickly.
So it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but again for almost half of US history there really wasn’t any such thing as “illegal” immigration for anyone to be against (general anti-immigrant sentiments are another story)
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
Historically, I’m quite certain that the “small” people (e.g. peasants, and such) had always had incredibly right-wing views, including tribalism (we’re better than anyone else, for no reason, we just are), “hard-work” ethics, who doesn’t work doesn’t deserve to eat, and such.
The landlords couldn’t care less about immigration. As long as the immigrants pay their taxes, the landlord is happy. Why would they bother?
It’s the peasants who see their land occupied (sothat their own land’s relative share decreases) who get furious at the foreigners who take their jobs and eat their food, while also possibly bringing infectious diseases and an inferior way of life.