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The west is being destroyed, not by migrants, but by the fear of migrants. In country after country, the ghosts of the fascists have rematerialised and are sitting in parliaments in Germany, in Austria, in Italy.
They have successfully convinced their populations that the greatest threat to their nations isn’t government tyranny or inequality or climate change, but immigration.
All these rode to power or intensified their grip on it by stoking fear of migrants, promising to ban new immigrants, to take away the rights of immigrants already in the country. Once in power they energetically set about depriving everyone else of their rights, citizens too
Tabloids with headlines such as “Migrants Rob Young Britons of Jobs” & “Britain’s 40% Surge in Ethnic Numbers” stoked fear of outsiders, day after day. From 2010-2016, the Daily Express ran 179 front-page anti-immigration stories & the Daily Mail 122 similar front-page jeremiads.
Only a year into his presidency, Trump had succeeded in making the country I call home the most polarised I have ever seen it. Democrat vs Republican, Anglo vs Latino, urban vs rural, rich vs poor, men vs women: people are at each other’s throats as never before.
A populist is, above all, a gifted storyteller, and the recent elections across the world illustrate the power of populism: a false narrative, a horror story about the other, well told.
The fear of migrants is magnified by lies about their numbers; politicians & racists train minds to think of them as a horde...A recent study found that Americans, as an overall average, think the foreign-born make up around 37% of the population; in reality, they are only 13.7%.
But there are also countertrends and counterexamples. Multiple studies have found that people who have direct contact with immigrants have much more positive views about their work ethic and reliance on welfare, and are much more open to increased immigration.
This shows that when countries safeguard the rights of their minorities, they also safeguard, as a happy side effect, the rights and economic wellbeing of their majorities, or other minorities within the majority.
🚨When you go after Muslims and Mexicans in America, the Jews and gays are next. The early targets are easy to hit, under the cover of nationalism. But hate, once fed, grows ever more ravenous. It is never satisfied.🚨
Ehrlich advocated for restricting immigration to the US. He predicted that 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would die because the planet was incapable of feeding them. “Sometime in the next 15 years,” Ehrlich predicted, “the end will come.” This was in 1970.
Fear of migrants earns politicians votes. Fear of migrants sells. Fox News ratings have never been higher. The Springer newspapers in Germany, the Berlusconi papers in Italy and the Sun and Daily Mail in the UK are flourishing, feeding their readers a daily diet of xenophobia.
Researchers at the University of Warwick recently studied every anti-refugee attack – 3,335, over two years – in Germany. They found that among the strongest predictors of the attacks was whether the attackers are on Facebook.
Between 2008 and 2017, white supremacists accounted for 71% of deaths in terror attacks in the US.
Researcher Lyman Stone calculated the ancestries of all the people charged w/ terrorism in America since 2001. More than half – 227 – have “no foreign citizenship, parentage, or identifiable ancestry of any kind”. That is, they’re Americans,. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
