6 ms·

> The strength of the anti-migrant, If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti m

> The strength of the anti-migrant, If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants...

RealStickman_ 1y ago
These right wing sentiments have never been about facts and logic
- armada651 1y ago
  Being pro-immigration used to be a right-wing sentiment, because it was a good way to get labor costs down. And it used to be the left-wing labor parties that were against immigration for that very reason. True left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders are still against immigration because it lowers the wages of working class people.
  - Sam6late 1y ago
    Politics is a messy business.Angela Merkel’s 2015 open-door policy faced harsh criticism, but the refugees it welcomed have proven their value. Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. Beyond jobs, some have become entrepreneurs—founding startups that create new employment and bring innovation. One Syrian-founded tech company alone employs 15 people. With over 83,000 granted citizenship last year, these contributions anchor refugees as vital to Germany’s future, turning initial fears into success stories. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-immigrants-are-boosting-germany-s-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-im...
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      > Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed Is the 33% unemployment rate of these Syrians above or below the national unemployment rate average?
    - weweersdfsd 1y ago
      >> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.
    - armada651 1y ago
      That's missing the point. This is not a value judgement about whether the refugees contribute to society. By being employed they are in fact helping to keep wages lower than they would be if there was a lower supply of labor. The point is that the main benefactors of immigration are corporations, not working-class families. Thus traditionally left-wing labor parties have been against immigration. We should be using immigration to shorten the workday for everyone, thus counter-acting its effects of wage suppression and giving people more time to dedicate to relationships, thus recovering the birth rate and reducing the need for immigration. Of course this will never happen, because economic growth is more important than people's well being.
  - gdwatson 1y ago
    This is one of those cases where the left–right spectrum just doesn’t capture the interplay of various economic, social, and cultural positions.
  - jibe 1y ago
    Sanders has shifted from his old view quite a bit, and is pro immigration specifically for filling low wage jobs, and holding wages down. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020-immigration-plan-067204 https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020...
- mhh__ 1y ago
  "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" is a completely self-consistent position, it's just axiomatically taken as wrongthink by people who seem to think everything can be broken down into a logical deduction from high modernist axioms (so-called facts and logic are opinionated, everything requires a numeraire)
  - kelnos 1y ago
    > "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way. To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      The Europeans I know who would be considered right wing, are completely concerned about culture and care not about race. That said, culture and race are highly correlated. Want to come in and assimilate? No problem. Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? No thank you.
      - bruce511 1y ago
        >> Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? So basically right wing Americans?
        dotancohen 1y ago
        I have no idea, I'm in neither Europe nor the Americas.
    - mhh__ 1y ago
      Many are racist but the deeper reason to be skeptical is that the current/dominant model assumes everyone in the world is basically fungible and can seamlessly integrate into the west without any particular guidance. That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't). We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all. Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists. Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book). Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness. If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table? I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother. And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  How a person feels is also a fact. I wonder if you are being selective in facts, as I'm not sure it's a politic (ie left/right matter). We could also look at facts on crime, tax contributions/burdens, etc and see a different yet factual perspective. I think the way forward is not increasing factuality (if that's even a word) but increasing people being heard and then reconciling those different perspectives. Looking for facts to entrench ones own opinions thus seems a step backwards to me. Correction: spelling
BurningFrog 1y ago
Depends a lot on how law-abiding and civic minded the specific immigrants are.
- tzmudzin 1y ago
  As a law-abiding civic-minded migrant I also feel unwelcome.
- m3adow 1y ago
  In these regions of Germany it has very little to do with that, as there's hardly any immigrants in Eastern Germany, except Berlin of course. It's about prejudice and xenophobia due to the unknown.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  It really doesn't though. If a society enforces laws (and civic-minded laws are possible, such as fines for littering etc), it shouldn't matter at all. Every group of people has criminals, hard workers, productive members of society, etc.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    Exactly. Enforcing the law costs money and these cities have been saving on that for decades now. So: exactly.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    Every group of people has violent criminals, but it makes a big difference if it's 5% or 50%. It also matters if raping unguarded women is considered a crime or a fun hobby in your culture. Law enforcement is important, but it can never catch close to all criminals, especially if it's politically sensitive to punish disproportionate numbers of ethnic groups. The most famous example is the the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain, where authorities has mostly ignored the industrial scale raping for decades: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o
    - 1y ago
Dig1t 1y ago
Well some people don’t feel like all humans are perfectly identical interchangeable units. If you magically swapped the population of Ireland with the population Japan, do you think that the Japanese would suddenly behave like Irish people just because they were now living in Ireland? Culture and identity are tied to nations, and just dropping millions of people from Africa into Europe doesn’t make them European. If your answer is that they just assimilate, they often do not. Example: many churches are being replaced with mosques in London. That is not assimilation, that is simply replacing one population with another. It is okay for a people who have existed for thousands of years to want their own country and culture to survive in its same state, even if the population shrinks for a while. These labor shortages and shrinking populations are not eternal, eventually the population will bounce back.
- willvarfar 1y ago
  do you have any sources for the church for mosque replacement theory?
  - Dig1t 1y ago
    There is no officially published number by the government, but 3 signs you can look at: 1. anecdotal evidence, I have been to several in the UK myself. You can find converted mosques by using Google Maps as well. 2. You can find videos from UK Muslims celebrating their cultural victories talking about the churches they have converted. Here are two such examples: > 500 CHURCHES TURNED INTO MOSQUES IN A CITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY >How 100's of Churches are transforming into Mosques! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY 3. You can find videos from UK Christians lamenting the conversion of their churches. One such example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY You can also just go and look up the number of mosques in the UK increasing over time: https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php The most popular baby name in the UK has been Mohamed for the last two years. That's also a pretty good sign.
rayiner 1y ago
> If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants... Do you prefer a slow death of your culture, or a catastrophic end to it?
- jacquesm 1y ago
  False dichotomy.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Nope. See, e.g., Hamtramck. In contrast, at least rural Japan is still Japan.
mlinhares 1y ago
Being anti immigrant isn’t about being sensible, it’s about having a bogeyman to blame for all problems people face. It’s much easier to say “brown people took your life away” than to face reality many small and large decisions made by the government and the people have led to the current outcome. For instance: > A palpable sense of decline has spurred support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which won nearly 40% of local votes in the February general election. People that don’t look “right” should seriously consider if this is the right place to live given the circumstances, which is going to make those with many options to never consider a place like this. What will be left? Not much, the rust belt in the US is a good example of towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders. A friend, that’s a neurologist, moved to a small town in the Midwest, him and another dude were the two only neurologists in many and many miles, the supermarket cashier asked for his ID and if he was in the country legally and isn’t even brown, just cos of his accent. Couple of months later he moved to a large city that had no shortage of neurologists and will never come back to the countryside. These people will destroy whatever is left before they accept others, so that’s what what will be.
- noduerme 1y ago
  There are several very different types of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US. They differ by region and they also differ from the feelings in Europe. 1. Basic, racist, "this person is a different skin color". 2. "We're not racist, but they're willing to work cheaper and take our jobs". 3. "They want to keep their own culture and not integrate with ours." The third one is far less prevalent in the US than it is in Europe. I think this is for several reasons, but chief among them is that immigrants to the US do actually want to integrate into their new society, whereas immigrants to Europe generally do not. Unlike Europe, the US offers the possibility for immigrants to become as "American" as anyone else, regardless of their race or religion. Whereas immigrants to France, for example, can never become "French". This is mutually reinforcing - the French won't let them become "French", and the immigrants naturally react by not wanting to. Even if they do support liberal French cultural values without excessive judgment, which many do not, that is rarely their main reason to move there except in some political cases. The aim of immigrants to the US is not just economic prosperity, but to join the society and to be American (speaking for my own mixed Latin, Arabic and Jewish immigrant family). This leaves a situation in the US where only (1) and (2) are arguments that have any traction, and those only have traction with a backwards and racist part of the population, aka MAGA. (3) is a much more difficult question, and it would have more traction here if it were true that immigrants to the US were similar to immigrants to Europe, in only seeking economic gains and choosing to remain separate from the societal mainstream. You seem to be conflating (3) with the previous two. And maybe for some right-wing European nationalists it is. But I'm not a European white man, and myself and my Filipina partner have heard from some of those right-wing Europeans that as long as we want to learn their culture, they have no problem with us. When JD Vance goes to Europe and scorns their immigration policy, he is using #3 to their faces, but he is appealing to racist voters who claim #1 and #2 at home. Conversely, when a European tells Americans that all anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe falls into the 1 and 2 categories, you are not honestly telling them about #3. It's the same in Saudi Arabia, isn't it? You can't go get a job in an oil field and go around waving a bible and drinking bourbon. The fact that the West tolerates a lot of different beliefs and ways of life is a good thing, it adds to our diversity and that is our strength. But that tolerance for others has to also be a foundational understanding for newer arrivals who come here. And if it's not, and if they enter into open hostilities with the country that received them, then I don't think all of that can be laid at the feet of ignorant skin-color-based racism.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
laughing_man 1y ago
What if you live in a town with a shrinking population with a jobs shortage?
anovikov 1y ago
Almost as if in America, people vote rationally! One town where 66% of population is on medicaid and life expectancy is 10 years under the national average, just voted 88% for Trump. Sure enough, in Germany the highest anti-migrant vote is in areas where there are no migrants at all.

> The strength of the anti-migrant, If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants...

RealStickman_ 1y ago

These right wing sentiments have never been about facts and logic

armada651 1y ago
Being pro-immigration used to be a right-wing sentiment, because it was a good way to get labor costs down. And it used to be the left-wing labor parties that were against immigration for that very reason. True left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders are still against immigration because it lowers the wages of working class people.
- Sam6late 1y ago
  Politics is a messy business.Angela Merkel’s 2015 open-door policy faced harsh criticism, but the refugees it welcomed have proven their value. Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. Beyond jobs, some have become entrepreneurs—founding startups that create new employment and bring innovation. One Syrian-founded tech company alone employs 15 people. With over 83,000 granted citizenship last year, these contributions anchor refugees as vital to Germany’s future, turning initial fears into success stories. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-immigrants-are-boosting-germany-s-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/syrian-im...
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    > Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed Is the 33% unemployment rate of these Syrians above or below the national unemployment rate average?
  - weweersdfsd 1y ago
    >> Two-thirds of Syrian refugees are now employed, many reducing public reliance and boosting the economy. I don't think legitimate Syrian refugees were the biggest problem. Rather, the open-door policy was abused by lots of young men from other MENA-countries, with no eligibility for asylum. Deporting them proved pretty hard, and crime stats prove that some of them had a very bad attitude towards their new host.
  - armada651 1y ago
    That's missing the point. This is not a value judgement about whether the refugees contribute to society. By being employed they are in fact helping to keep wages lower than they would be if there was a lower supply of labor. The point is that the main benefactors of immigration are corporations, not working-class families. Thus traditionally left-wing labor parties have been against immigration. We should be using immigration to shorten the workday for everyone, thus counter-acting its effects of wage suppression and giving people more time to dedicate to relationships, thus recovering the birth rate and reducing the need for immigration. Of course this will never happen, because economic growth is more important than people's well being.
- gdwatson 1y ago
  This is one of those cases where the left–right spectrum just doesn’t capture the interplay of various economic, social, and cultural positions.
- jibe 1y ago
  Sanders has shifted from his old view quite a bit, and is pro immigration specifically for filling low wage jobs, and holding wages down. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020-immigration-plan-067204 https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020...
mhh__ 1y ago
"I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" is a completely self-consistent position, it's just axiomatically taken as wrongthink by people who seem to think everything can be broken down into a logical deduction from high modernist axioms (so-called facts and logic are opinionated, everything requires a numeraire)
- kelnos 1y ago
  > "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way. To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    The Europeans I know who would be considered right wing, are completely concerned about culture and care not about race. That said, culture and race are highly correlated. Want to come in and assimilate? No problem. Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? No thank you.
    - bruce511 1y ago
      >> Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? So basically right wing Americans?
      - dotancohen 1y ago
        I have no idea, I'm in neither Europe nor the Americas.
  - mhh__ 1y ago
    Many are racist but the deeper reason to be skeptical is that the current/dominant model assumes everyone in the world is basically fungible and can seamlessly integrate into the west without any particular guidance. That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't). We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all. Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists. Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book). Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness. If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table? I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother. And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
How a person feels is also a fact. I wonder if you are being selective in facts, as I'm not sure it's a politic (ie left/right matter). We could also look at facts on crime, tax contributions/burdens, etc and see a different yet factual perspective. I think the way forward is not increasing factuality (if that's even a word) but increasing people being heard and then reconciling those different perspectives. Looking for facts to entrench ones own opinions thus seems a step backwards to me. Correction: spelling

BurningFrog 1y ago

Depends a lot on how law-abiding and civic minded the specific immigrants are.

tzmudzin 1y ago
As a law-abiding civic-minded migrant I also feel unwelcome.
m3adow 1y ago
In these regions of Germany it has very little to do with that, as there's hardly any immigrants in Eastern Germany, except Berlin of course. It's about prejudice and xenophobia due to the unknown.
aprilthird2021 1y ago
It really doesn't though. If a society enforces laws (and civic-minded laws are possible, such as fines for littering etc), it shouldn't matter at all. Every group of people has criminals, hard workers, productive members of society, etc.
- spwa4 1y ago
  Exactly. Enforcing the law costs money and these cities have been saving on that for decades now. So: exactly.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  Every group of people has violent criminals, but it makes a big difference if it's 5% or 50%. It also matters if raping unguarded women is considered a crime or a fun hobby in your culture. Law enforcement is important, but it can never catch close to all criminals, especially if it's politically sensitive to punish disproportionate numbers of ethnic groups. The most famous example is the the Pakistani rape gangs in Britain, where authorities has mostly ignored the industrial scale raping for decades: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n72mj113o
  - 1y ago

Dig1t 1y ago

Well some people don’t feel like all humans are perfectly identical interchangeable units. If you magically swapped the population of Ireland with the population Japan, do you think that the Japanese would suddenly behave like Irish people just because they were now living in Ireland? Culture and identity are tied to nations, and just dropping millions of people from Africa into Europe doesn’t make them European. If your answer is that they just assimilate, they often do not. Example: many churches are being replaced with mosques in London. That is not assimilation, that is simply replacing one population with another. It is okay for a people who have existed for thousands of years to want their own country and culture to survive in its same state, even if the population shrinks for a while. These labor shortages and shrinking populations are not eternal, eventually the population will bounce back.

willvarfar 1y ago
do you have any sources for the church for mosque replacement theory?
- Dig1t 1y ago
  There is no officially published number by the government, but 3 signs you can look at: 1. anecdotal evidence, I have been to several in the UK myself. You can find converted mosques by using Google Maps as well. 2. You can find videos from UK Muslims celebrating their cultural victories talking about the churches they have converted. Here are two such examples: > 500 CHURCHES TURNED INTO MOSQUES IN A CITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62h_Im5cqxY >How 100's of Churches are transforming into Mosques! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBV4y42kXY 3. You can find videos from UK Christians lamenting the conversion of their churches. One such example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YGA54WadgY You can also just go and look up the number of mosques in the UK increasing over time: https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/statistics/statistics01.php The most popular baby name in the UK has been Mohamed for the last two years. That's also a pretty good sign.

rayiner 1y ago

> If you live in a town with a shrinking population with a labour shortage, it doesn't really seem to make sense to be anti migrants... Do you prefer a slow death of your culture, or a catastrophic end to it?

jacquesm 1y ago
False dichotomy.
- rayiner 1y ago
  Nope. See, e.g., Hamtramck. In contrast, at least rural Japan is still Japan.

mlinhares 1y ago

Being anti immigrant isn’t about being sensible, it’s about having a bogeyman to blame for all problems people face. It’s much easier to say “brown people took your life away” than to face reality many small and large decisions made by the government and the people have led to the current outcome. For instance: > A palpable sense of decline has spurred support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which won nearly 40% of local votes in the February general election. People that don’t look “right” should seriously consider if this is the right place to live given the circumstances, which is going to make those with many options to never consider a place like this. What will be left? Not much, the rust belt in the US is a good example of towns dying because the population can’t accept outsiders. A friend, that’s a neurologist, moved to a small town in the Midwest, him and another dude were the two only neurologists in many and many miles, the supermarket cashier asked for his ID and if he was in the country legally and isn’t even brown, just cos of his accent. Couple of months later he moved to a large city that had no shortage of neurologists and will never come back to the countryside. These people will destroy whatever is left before they accept others, so that’s what what will be.

noduerme 1y ago
There are several very different types of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US. They differ by region and they also differ from the feelings in Europe. 1. Basic, racist, "this person is a different skin color". 2. "We're not racist, but they're willing to work cheaper and take our jobs". 3. "They want to keep their own culture and not integrate with ours." The third one is far less prevalent in the US than it is in Europe. I think this is for several reasons, but chief among them is that immigrants to the US do actually want to integrate into their new society, whereas immigrants to Europe generally do not. Unlike Europe, the US offers the possibility for immigrants to become as "American" as anyone else, regardless of their race or religion. Whereas immigrants to France, for example, can never become "French". This is mutually reinforcing - the French won't let them become "French", and the immigrants naturally react by not wanting to. Even if they do support liberal French cultural values without excessive judgment, which many do not, that is rarely their main reason to move there except in some political cases. The aim of immigrants to the US is not just economic prosperity, but to join the society and to be American (speaking for my own mixed Latin, Arabic and Jewish immigrant family). This leaves a situation in the US where only (1) and (2) are arguments that have any traction, and those only have traction with a backwards and racist part of the population, aka MAGA. (3) is a much more difficult question, and it would have more traction here if it were true that immigrants to the US were similar to immigrants to Europe, in only seeking economic gains and choosing to remain separate from the societal mainstream. You seem to be conflating (3) with the previous two. And maybe for some right-wing European nationalists it is. But I'm not a European white man, and myself and my Filipina partner have heard from some of those right-wing Europeans that as long as we want to learn their culture, they have no problem with us. When JD Vance goes to Europe and scorns their immigration policy, he is using #3 to their faces, but he is appealing to racist voters who claim #1 and #2 at home. Conversely, when a European tells Americans that all anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe falls into the 1 and 2 categories, you are not honestly telling them about #3. It's the same in Saudi Arabia, isn't it? You can't go get a job in an oil field and go around waving a bible and drinking bourbon. The fact that the West tolerates a lot of different beliefs and ways of life is a good thing, it adds to our diversity and that is our strength. But that tolerance for others has to also be a foundational understanding for newer arrivals who come here. And if it's not, and if they enter into open hostilities with the country that received them, then I don't think all of that can be laid at the feet of ignorant skin-color-based racism.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

laughing_man 1y ago

What if you live in a town with a shrinking population with a jobs shortage?

anovikov 1y ago

Almost as if in America, people vote rationally! One town where 66% of population is on medicaid and life expectancy is 10 years under the national average, just voted 88% for Trump. Sure enough, in Germany the highest anti-migrant vote is in areas where there are no migrants at all.