When the rich figured out that our innate tribalism could be weaponized to distract us from their abuse, lawlessness, and greed.
Sigmund Freud’s work, and those who built upon it after his death, 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.”
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.
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.
I mean they blare “brown man make your life bad” 24/7 on state tv
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 what 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 dissonance 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 or connections 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 menace, 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.
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.
This. I recommend reading Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Or, you could watch the movie
For sure, great book and movie!
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
Because their 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.
People hated immigrants DURING the time period you’re thinking of. And it wasn’t always a skin color thing either, the Irish were one of the big targets for a long time.
Italians were also targeted. Being from a Catholic country was sometimes enough to get targeted. Always found it funny (Woody Allen marriage funny, not Woody Allen film funny) that the Protestants who came to what is now Massachusetts seeking “religious freedom” meant it only for themselves and drove out anyone who didn’t subscribe to their views.
You need to put it in context, many if not most of the denominations that came to America seeking religious freedom did so because continental Christians considered them extremists. So yes, they were seeking it only for themselves.
The concept of the white “race” was created by the acceptance of new nationalities into the fold in America and then dividing “us vs them” in a new way.
It bears some similarity to “Judeo-Christianity” so that we can draw the line between white people religion and everyone else.
And it wasn’t always a skin color thing either, the Irish were one of the big targets for a long time.
Irish, Slavs and Italians were not considered white, so … it’s still a “where is the migration from” kinda thing
There was a reason businesses would put a sign out front that said “NINA”. No Irish Need Apply.
It was always racism at it’s core.
European immigrants accepted immigrants as long as they were other European immigrants. At the same time they were encouraging immigrants, they were systematically eliminating the original inhabitants or forcing them to assimilate to European culture.
It’s always been a variation of white nationalism … they don’t mind the world becoming more open and inclusive … as long as it only includes other white European people and cultures.
European immigrants accepted immigrants as long as they were other European immigrants.
This is just not the case. Read again
So it turns out that the Statue of Liberty never represented the opinions of all Americans to begin with
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.
Whenever 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, even if it protects ethically gained wealth.
Oh we’ve been fighting about this for centuries
Everything can be summarized in one Chinese idiom (成语):
过河拆桥Aka: Crossing the river, then dismantle the bridge.
You’re already crossed it, why care about the bridge, you wont be using it anymore.The Chinese have sort of lost their credibility on Politics and History, this last century.
I’m actually less inclined to listen to anything associated with them.
The only proverb I wanna hear out of China is “of the 36 stratagems, fleeing is best.”
Maybe you wanna hear this:
“上有政策，下有对策”
“When above has policy, below has countermeasures/resistance”;“above” meaning the government from the north, aka Beijing, and “below” means the people in the south, far away from the reaches of Beijing and therefore its policies are harder to be enacted upon. (But the “above” and “below” could also be reference to social status, because the emperor is “above” and us “peasants” are “below”)
One of the best examples of this is the one child policy, anecdodally, my existence is from the direct violation of this policy. I don’t know the whole story my mother and I aren’t really on speaking terms these days, but she told me that she was supposed to get mandatory birth control (aka: sterilization) after giving birth to my older brother, but she lied to the authorities about it then she had another pregnancy (which was me), her hukou was in the village where she was born in, so she went into the city, and PRC isn’t actually that centralized btw, they delegated a lot of law enforcement to the local government and I think because either jurisdictional issues or because the city has too many people and its easier to blend in, and therefore harder to find people, the government never found her and so I was born. (My mom said they weren’t allowed to “terminate” me after my birth already happened) In the end, my parents only had to pay a fine, so I get to live. So that’s one example of people just disobeying the government. (Honestly, I’m not entirely sure if I enjoy being alive, my parents are kind shitty and abusive, I much rather be reincarnated in Norway or something, but… oh well… life doesn’t let you choose 🤷♂️)
Or you know, the “great firewall” policy and VPNs as countermeasures against censorship. (I’m living in the US right now, so their firewall doesn’t affect me lolz)
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They pull up the ladder behind them
The US as a country does it to the rest of the world too, not just the immigrants.
So like burning your bridges in English? Although I guess that’s more for people. Maybe more like pulling up the ladder behind you.
I think how “burning bridges” is generally used refers to not leaving yourself a way out. However in this case we’re talking about not leaving others a way in.
Yeah, burning bridges refers to, like, telling all your coworkers to go fuck themselves when you leave a job.
I love Chinese four letter aphorisms and I’m glad you shared this one but i dont think this really answers the when or the why 😛
Perhaps along with de-industrialization; as more labour is outsourced, less labourers are needed.
What and the conservative states trying to prosecute people in the Democrat states is 合久必分？
What?
Nah, that phrase more accurately applies to US Civil War.
I mean, we certainly seem to be headed in that direction
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.
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.
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 if 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 especially because they tend to believe any old bollocks from the “chiefs” of their tribe.
That’s quite insightful.
