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Comment on The USA prided itself on a nation of immigrant, heck even the Statue of Liberty says it. When did immigrants (US citizens from the old world) become anti immigrant and why?

blarghly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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.

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0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That’s quite insightful.

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