5 ms·

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

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