Anti immigration and racism

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Can a person be anti immigration and not a racist

Simple question really I suppose but I just wanted to get other people's opinions on this

Would hope so.. the Woke thing, really was not what it appeared to be , from my interaction at a City Council meeting one day....You do not have to even explain yourself about anti immigration.. Everybody is entitled to their opinion..I think. With the exception of many government employees in my experiences around City governments. They have much sneakier ways of expressing opinions.

In theory, maybe. In practice, I have yet to see it.

I’ve never seen it, either, although I suppose it’s possible.

Yeah it's a difficult one to get my head around but I know of people who claim to not be racist but are very open about being anti immigration

It feels like one of those things people say that follows well, I'm not racist but and usually that phrase is just a lead-in to some pretty seriously racist s**t.

I think that the vast majority of people who are racist don’t think they are, but that’s at least somewhat due to how the word “racist” is viewed.

1. Racist = bad person
2. “I’m not a bad person.”

Therefore:

3. “I’m not racist.”

It’s a shame in a way because it serves as an impediment to working on one’s own prejudices and biases.

It feels like I've spent almost my entire life surrounded by people who come out with phrases like this

Yeah I like your thinking there TP

Seconded.

In principle immigration is not tied to race, but people who tout these beliefs
usually mean they don't like the (indians/chinese/portuguese/bolivian...) people who look different
and take lower paid jobs because that's the only jobs people leave for them.

I think that being anti-immigration is a fundamentally stupid ultra-nationalist stance, which you can
easily prove as stupid by looking at the current state of Europe, where every single country,
even *parts* of countries find reasons to hate newcomers based on where they originated,
which totally f***s up the obvious economic advantage to broad trans-continental collaboration.

If you are italian from another village, they hate you, if you are spanish in germany, they hate you,
if you even leave your country for a tiny amount of time to get an accent, and come back, someone will hate you...

This is not really "up to anyone's opinion" it is obviously dumb. It is like believing the earth is flat. No-one wins (except arms dealers and clever businessmen), because there is no good definition of pure blood or nation.

Well said.

It's ironic that one of the biggest impediments to fighting racism (and other forms of bigotry) is the stigma over being identified as racist. This had lead us to a point where a lot of people treat racist as one of the most offensive slurs one can be labelled with and care more about the feelings of the person who's been identified as such more than why they were identified in such a manner.

I almost started a thread like this but I didn't want to start a bun fight. I get really frustrated that modern political discourse just doesn't allow for much actual discourse. We're encouraged to pick one of two positions off the shelf and stick to them til the bitter end.

The question I was going to ask was this: Is cultural erosion a valid concern?

I reckon if you asked most of those racist/not racist people what they're really bothered about, it is the feeling that the culture they grew up in has been changed, negatively, by immigration.

Personally I'm not sure that does make a person racist.

I think it's undeniable that the cultural make-up of where I live has changed during my lifetime. That varies wildly across the UK of course but I think that's true of most places.

That's not the same as saying it's a bad thing. But I would say that it's a thing. And if it's a thing then maybe we should be considering the impacts of that on a county's culture without resorting to calling people racists or wokies or any reductive name.

I genuinely don't know if cultural erosion is something to worry about or not. Or even if it's measurably happening.

What I do know is that people feel it is happening, and that's causing a resentment that leads people to racist viewpoints.

And if we just dismiss those feelings as invalid because racism, we're falling to make the case for immigration, if there is one, and just storing up problems for later.

If people feel like their “culture has been changed, negatively, by immigration,” perhaps in some cases the issue would be more about ethnocentrism than outright racism. Cultures change and evolve over time. They aren’t a static thing, so wanting to preserve them is not viable anyway, not that everyone is fully aware of that.

Immigration hasn’t drastically changed broad American culture in recent decades. I would see such changes positively, though. They don’t take away but add more colors to the tapestry.

Anti-immigration stances are especially problematic in the US given that culturally we are primarily a product of immigration. It would be pretty rare here for racism not to play some role although people do come up with clever justifications for their bigotry. That’s not to say that there aren’t exceptions, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

Just my two cents.

I enjoy living in a multicultural society, particularly due to food, but I wish I was better at understanding accents.

Would you have a problem with immigrants if they were all white and spoke perfect English?

If people want to preserve their culture (or some particular traditions thereof), they can do so voluntarily, by socializing in groups of likeminded people. No need to exclude immigrants from the entire country or neighborhood.